My Dad’s maternal grandmother Phoebe Caroline Gibson was born in Hornsey, a North London suburb, in 1877, the daughter of a Looking Glass Frame Maker. The few records from her childhood give little insight into what life was like. Can I find out more about the areas and houses she lived in?

From Hornsey to Tottenham

Phoebe’s birth was registered by her mother, formerly Phoebe Virginia Wakefield, on 15 January 1878. The copy certificate from the General Register Office (extract below) is very hard to read, but shows that she had been born just over a month earlier, on 10 December 1877 at her parents’ home at 17 Shakespeare Road, South Hornsey, London. Her father is named as William Joseph James Gibson, a Looking Glass Frame Maker.

Extract from GRO birth certificate for Phoebe Caroline Gibson

My paternal Stocking-Hill great grandparents were firmly rooted in South London as was I growing up. Their childhoods played out in areas of poor or slum housing, over-crowding and industrialisation. I’m not very familiar with places north of the Thames. South Hornsey (now known as Stoke Newington) was in the County of Middlesex, north of Camden Town, not far from Highgate. The area saw extensive growth in the mid-19^th century, with new streets and railway stations built amidst parklands and green spaces; find out more at Hornsey, including Highgate: Growth from the mid 19th century | British History Online (british-history.ac.uk)

Shakespeare Road is now known as Shakespeare Walk. Sadly, nothing seems to remain of the Victorian housing, now replaced with blocks of modern flats on estates either side of the road. There are, however, still some ‘green spaces’.

The family were at the same address when Phoebe was baptised just round the corner at St Matthias Church, Stoke Newington, on 10 October 1878.

Extract from St Matthias Parish Register, baptisms 1878 (Ancestry.co.uk)

Her father’s occupation is simplified to ‘Carver’ as is that of another William Gibson of the same address. He and his wife Caroline also had two daughters baptised on the same day: Sarah Minnie and Rosa Phoebe.

The 1881 census finds the two families still living together at 17 Shakespeare Road. Phoebe now has a brother, nine month old William Ernest Gibson. It turns out that the other William Gibson was the father of William Joseph James Gibson, and therefore my great great grandfather. The house would have been fairly full, as William and Caroline’s six children, aged 1-22, lived there too, the eldest son Henry Gibson also working as an ornamental carver.

Another brother, Charles Gibson, was born there in December 1882. Sadly, this baby died aged six weeks, on 2 January 1883, of an obstructed hernia. His sister Phoebe would have been five years old, old enough to be upset at the loss of her baby brother and, no doubt, the distress of their parents and grandparents.

A year after baby Charles Gibson died, another daughter – Louise Eugenie Gibson – was born. She was baptised at St Matthias, but by then, the family address is recorded as 60 Milton Road, and their father is described as a Framemaker. Milton Road runs parallel to Shakepseare Walk, so they have not moved far. Luckily, the housing here appears to be contemporary to the time Phoebe and her family were living here, as can be seen on Google Street View. No.60 is an elegant brick built terraced property of three storeys (including basement), with sash windows and a small front ‘area’. A decade later, Charles Booth’s Poverty Map (below) colour-coded both streets as ‘Mixed, some comfortable, some poor’. St Matthias Church can be seen bottom right of the image.

Extract from Charles Booth’s Poverty Map of London (LSE)

At the time of the 1881 census, a couple of years before the Gibsons moved in, the house at 60 Milton Road was occupied by Charles Baronius, a Professor of Music hailing from Hamburg in Germany, his wife and eight children.

By the 1891 census, Phoebe Caroline Gibson was 13 years old, and was living at 1 Summerhill Terrace, Tottenham, with her family – including another sister, Caroline Phoebe Gibson born in 1886, and a brother, Sidney Gibson, born in 1888. Another brother, the seventh and last child, George Henry Frederick Gibson, was born in February 1896 at the then family home of 93 Summerhill Road, Tottenham. By then, Phoebe was 19 and about to be married.

There is a website dedicated to the history of Summerhill Road (also previously known as Shakespeare Terrace and Summerhill Terrace), which suggests that the area was developed from meadow land in the mid-1850s, so the housing would have been relatively new in 1891.

“When studying the 1864 map, it is noticeable today that, apart from Summerhill Road, very few of the original properties have survived. The houses on the western side of Summerhill Road that survive to this day exist between numbers 5 to 51. However, numbers 1, 3, 13, 23a, 25 had not been built in 1864. We also know that numbers 39 and 41 have been pulled down and rebuilt about 1980. Also, from the original development, numbers 53 to 93 (Eliza Terrace and Summerhill Terrace) have been demolished to form the sheltered housing units and new homes which we know today as ‘Summerhill Village’.

The origins of Summerhill Road website. Visited 14 July 2024.

The map below shows Summerhill Road from an OS map of 1896. The street still has fields and nurseries at one end and nearby, so although there are many terraced houses, it would still have been a fairly leafy place to live.

Extract Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland (see original)

Had Phoebe already left home by then? This might explain why her address four months later, when she married, was at Ivy Street.

I have not found any education records for Phoebe, so do not know where she went to school – although there is clearly one shown on the map above, she may have been beyond school age by the time the family moved to Summerhill Road. I also have no idea what if any work she did, but she does seem to have spent most if not all of her early years with her parents and brothers and sisters; the family totalled six surviving children. I wonder how she came to meet her future husband, a dairy worker?