The London district holding Lord's and Abbey Road owes its name to medieval knights
St John's Wood, home to Lord's Cricket Ground and the Abbey Road crossing pictured on a Beatles album cover, takes its name from the Knights of St John. They received the manor in 1312 after the Knights Templar were suppressed, and a wood on the estate carried their name ever after.
The land sat within the old Forest of Middlesex and formed the Manor of Lileston, one of two manors served by the parish of Marylebone. The Knights of St John, headquartered at Clerkenwell Priory, rented it to farm tenants. It later belonged to the Crown until Charles II granted it to Charles Henry Wotton in 1675, and in 1732 the city merchant Henry Samuel Eyre bought about 500 acres from the fourth Earl of Chesterfield. A development plan followed in 1794, but building began only in 1804, when Henry Samuel Eyre II and Walpole Eyre held their first auction. The knights' farmhouse site became St John's Wood Barracks, home to the King's Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, until 2012.
It became one of London's first suburbs of spacious villas along wide avenues, and that pattern has made it among the most expensive places in the city. Avenue Road led the UK for costly home sales in 2020, and early in 2021 properties there averaged more than £30.5 million.
Lord's, home of Marylebone Cricket Club and Middlesex, is nicknamed the Home of Cricket because it was the sport's original headquarters, and it still hosts Test matches. Music runs deep here too. Besides Abbey Road Studios, RAK Studios, founded by the producer Mickie Most, is where Kim Wilde cut Kids in America and Big Country made In a Big Country, and Arctic Monkeys shot a video there.
The grounds of St John's Wood Church hold Westminster's sole nature reserve, and the district also includes the Wellington Hospital, the largest independent hospital in Britain. The American School in London, founded in 1951, teaches about 1,350 pupils. Sculptors Barbara Hepworth and John Skeaping once lived at St Ann's Terrace, and the disused Marlborough Road tube station now serves as a power substation.
Source: St John's Wood
