The village of Lewisham consisted of little more than the High
Street and its immediate offshoots from the present railway
station to George Lane, plus Lewisham Road and Loampit Vale
and Hill to the north. King James I, impressed with the length
of the High Street, remarked “On my soul, I will be king of
Lusen". The name derives from Old English ‘ham’, a village,
and the name of a person, probably Leof or Leofsa - Leofsa’s
village.
In the Middle Ages the manor of Lewisham belonged to the Abbey
of Ghent. At the time of the Domesday Book (1086) there were
eleven mills along the River Ravensbourne, half of them probably
in Lewisham Village. Before the Industrial Revolution these
mills were used for grinding steel for weapons, for tanning
leather, and for other industrial purposes, as well as for grinding
corn.
Like other villages at this radius from London, Lewisham became
a popular place of residence for rich City men from the seventeenth
century, and increasingly in the eighteenth.
The first railway through Lewisham, the North Kent line to
Dartford, opened in 1849. The present station opened in 1857,
when the Mid Kent line was added. These railways encouraged
the building of new houses for commuters. Although there were
a few working-class areas, Lewisham consisted mainly of large
houses with extensive gardens until the 1870s. From this time
the wealthier inhabitants moved out, and streets of houses for
lower-middle class and artisan commuters had largely replaced
the big houses by the end of the century.
Trams as well as trains and buses brought shoppers into Lewisham,
and by 1900 there were a number of large shops in the town centre.
In that year the Clock Tower was completed, to celebrate the
Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897.
The town centre was devastated by a flying bomb in 1944, but
had recovered by the late 1950s. In 1977 the shopping precinct
was built, and in 1994 the High Street in the town centre was
pedestrianised to create a traffic-free street market and an
open space.
The Docklands Light Railway extension from the Isle of Dogs
opened in 1999.
