From the LRB diary section:

I’ve never warmed to Clapham Common much: the area immediately beside Clapham Old Town is a gloomy scrag-end of grass, pinioned by Charles Barry’s impressively ugly Woman of Samaria, a statue-cum-fountain that features a pious looking Late Victorian nudie menacing a crippled crone with a ewer. I’ve never actually seen so much as a piddle of water emerge from Barry’s fountain, which, as statuary commissions go, must have been a bit of a busman’s holiday for the designer of the Houses of Parliament, since he lived at a house called The Elms on the north side of the common.

Looming up from behind a screen of dank trees you can see the neoclassical bulk of Holy Trinity (1776), which, although it postdates the establishment of the Clapham Sect, nonetheless always speaks to me of a certain stolid fusion of Anglican piety and good works. I suppose a more programmatic urban walker than me would be inclined to traverse the common following a sectarian ley-line, the one that connects – for example – Pepys’s house in the Old Town with the site of William Wilberforce’s on Broomwood Road on the west side. But while Clapham – like any other inner London suburb – has enough density of cultural associations to warrant an In Our Time of its own, it’s an axiom of city life that wherever you actually live tends to become purged of anything much save dog walks and school runs, paint shopping and child-exercising.