page_title: Fulham
section_title: 20th century
hierarchical_section_title: Fulham / History / 20th century
caption_attribution_description: English: Mid-Victorian cul-de-sac, designed by John Young (1797-1877) in Fulham
context_page_description: Fulham is an area of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham in southwest London, England, 3.6 miles southwest of Charing Cross. It lies on the north bank of the River Thames, between Hammersmith and Kensington and Chelsea, facing Wandsworth, Putney and Barn Elms, with the London Wetland Centre in Barnes.
  Fulham has a history of industry and enterprise dating back to the 15th century, with pottery, tapestry-weaving, paper-making and brewing in the 17th and 18th centuries in present-day Fulham High Street, and later involvement in the automotive industry, early aviation, food production, and laundries. In the 19th-century there was glass-blowing and this resurged in the 21st century with the Aronson-Noon studio and Zest gallery in Rickett Street that fell victim to the so-called "Earl's Court Regeneration" scheme in 2012.
  Lillie Bridge Depot, a railway engineering depot opened in 1872, is associated with the building and extension of the London Underground, the electrification of Tube lines from the nearby Lots Road Power Station, and for well over a century has been the maintenance hub for rolling stock and track.
  Two football clubs, Fulham and Chelsea, play in Fulham.
context_section_description: In 1926 the Church of England established the office of Bishop of Fulham as a  suffragan to the Bishop of London.
  Fulham remained a predominantly working-class area for the first half of the 20th century, with genteel pockets at North End, along the top of Lillie and New King's roads, especially around Parsons Green, Eel Brook Common, South Park and the area surrounding the Hurlingham Club. Essentially, the area had attracted waves of immigrants from the countryside to service industrialisation and the more privileged parts of the capital. 
  With rapid demographic changes there was poverty, as noted by Charles Dickens (1812-1870) and Charles Booth (1840-1916). Fulham had its Poorhouses, and attracted several benefactors, including: the Samuel Lewis (financier) Housing Trust, the Peabody Trust and the Sir Oswald Stoll Foundation to provide low-cost housing.
  The Metropolitan Asylums Board acquired in 1876 a 13-acre site at the bottom of Seagrave Road to build a fever hospital, The Western Hospital, that later became an NHS centre of excellence for treating polio until its closure in 1979. Bar one ward block remaining in private occupation, it was replaced by a gated-flats development and a small public space, Brompton Park.
  Aside from the centuries-old brewing industry, exemplified by the Swan Brewery on the Thames, the main industrial activities involved motoring and early aviation - Rolls Royce,  Shell-Mex, Rover, the London Omnibus Co. - and rail engineering (Lillie Bridge Depot), laundries - the Palace Laundry is still extant - and the building trades. Later there developed distilling, Sir Robert Burnett's White Satin Gin, food processing, e.g. Telfer's Pies, Encafood and Spaghetti House, and Kodak's photographic processing. This encouraged the southern stretch of North End Road to become Fulham's unofficial  "High street", almost a mile from the actual Fulham High Street, with its own department store, F.H. Barbers, along with Woolworth's, Marks & Spencer and Sainsbury's outlets, all long gone. The second ever Tesco shop opened in the North End Road. The UK's reputedly oldest independent health-food shop, opened in 1966 by the Aetherius Society, still trades in the Fulham Road.
  Allied to these developments, the postwar period saw the extensive demolition of Fulham's early 19th-century architectural stock, replaced by some Brutalist architecture - the current Ibis hotel - and the Empress State Building in Lillie Road that in 1962 replaced the declining Empress Hall. The LCC and local council continued with much-needed council-housing development between the Second World War and up to the 1980s.
caption: Empress Place (1865), with the former Piccadilly Line HQ, last block on the left of street
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