New building developments are happening all the time these days and no-one alive now remembers when Wimbledon’s long hillside sloping down from the Ridgway to the railway line into London consisted entirely of market gardens and pasture for livestock.

The fields had names such as Little Ladies Close and Cater Gutters. Yet the change to today’s residential slopes was made within a very short space of time.

At the top of the hill, the Ridgway stretches from Wimbledon Village to Copse Hill while at the bottom, the railway line beside Worple Road links the town centre and Raynes Park.

In the 1820s a few cottages were built in South Place behind today’s Thornton Hill and by 1855 a beer shop stood on the present site of The Swan pub in the Ridgway.

But these apart, the entire hillside consisted largely of fields in 1858 when the first houses appeared at the top end of Ridgway Place and Hillside.

Within a year or so houses were built in Thornton Road, named after the wealthiest man in Britain and local landowner, Richard Thornton. By 1860 model cottages and other houses had arisen in South Road – later renamed Denmark Road - with more in what became St John’s Road. The Ridgway’s other shops then appeared too.

It was the wedding of Edward, Prince of Wales, to Princess Alexandra of Denmark in 1863 that brought that country’s name to Wimbledon, remembered today by the Princess Alexandra pub in the town centre. Building began at that time on the lower part of the hill.

It would give rise to Denmark Avenue and at the same time Thornton Road was extended to become Thornton Hill. St John’s Church was built in 1873-5 and its road widened. The first houses in Spencer Hill were built in 1879, as was Berkeley Place on land owned by one Edward Berkeley Phipps.

In just a few years the rural atmosphere had gone. Not long afterwards virtually the entire hillside had been transformed into a suburban area but there were still a few patches of greenery left.

Gertrude Murray of Wimbledon Lodge, beside the Common, owned a nearby field which was developed into Murray Road South immediately after her death in 1904. As late as the 1920s the lower part of Ridgway Place was still a wildflower meadow but it eventually went under the bulldozer too.

Finally, a century after it all started, Savona Close and Thackeray Close went up in the late 1960s, the latter named after the famous novelist whose daughter had lived in Berkeley Place.

The Wimbledon Society is working with the Wimbledon Guardian to ensure that you, the readers, can share the fascinating discoveries that continue to emerge about our local heritage.

For more information, visit wimbledonsociety.org.uk and www.wimbledonmuseum.org.uk.

Click here for more fascinating articles about Wimbledon's heritage