Battersea

Battersea is mentioned in the few surviving Anglo-Saxon geographical accounts as and later . As with many former parishes beside tidal flood plains the lowest land was reclaimed for agriculture by draining marshland and building culverts for streams. By the side of this was the Heathwall tide mill in the north-east with a very long mill pond regularly draining and filling to the south. Battersea () appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 in Surrey within the hundred of Brixton () as a vast manor held by St Peter's Abbey, Westminster. Its Domesday assets were: 18 hides and 17 ploughlands of cultivated land; 7 mills worth £42 9s 8d per year, 82 acre of meadow, woodland worth 50 hogs. It rendered…

Battersea features in the books of Michael de Larrabeiti, who was born and brought up in the area: A Rose Beyond the Thames recounts the working-class Battersea of the 1940s and 1950s; The Borrible Trilogy presents a fictional Battersea, home to fantasy creatures known as the Borribles. The station makes a brief appearance in The Beatles' second film, Help!, in 1965. It also appears in the 1969 film Battle of Britain, in the movie as in real life used as a navigational landmark by the attacking Luftwaffe bombers. The Optimists of Nine Elms, a 1973 film starring Peter Sellers, is set in Battersea. Battersea is also the setting for Penelope Fitzgerald's 1979 Booker Prize–winning novel,…