London’s Last Toll Road
In the desirable south London suburb of Dulwich, a 1.5 km stretch of College Road (so named because, unsurprisingly, it is where the impressive Dulwich College can be found) is the only place in the capital that still has an operative tollgate, charging £1.20 for a single journey.
The origins of the tollgate date back to 1787, when the Lord of the Manor of Penge, John Morgan, was renting fields near Dulwich College , and obtained permission to construct a road through Dulwich Woods to link the fields to Penge Common (now Crystal Palace Park) and give better access for his cattle and carts. The road quickly became a popular route to get between Dulwich and Sydenham Hill, so in an effort to control the number of road users, John Morgan decided to construct a tollgate cottage and hire a toll-keeper to collect payments. When his lease of the land ended in 1809, Dulwich College retained the services of the gatekeeper and continued collecting the toll.
The toll road would seem to have been relatively lucrative for some years in the mid-19th Century - the opening of the Crystal Palace brought a lot more traffic to the road, though by the 1890s the construction of more direct (and free) routes and the waning popularity of the Palace reduced this traffic considerably. Around this time, London County Council attempted to abolish the tollgate, but were unsuccessful as the compensation to the landowners and costs for making up the road were too high.
Thus, the toll road remained in operation for most of the 20th Century. In 1991, however, health and safety concerns were raised about the collection of the tolls, which were still seemingly being carried out by the gatekeeper just standing in the road. After two years of suspensions, tolls were once again collected from 1993 following the construction of the current gatekeeper’s kiosk (the tollgate cottage became a private residence). The toll taking is now performed by machines (the gatekeeper only on hand to deal with problems), with cash, card, or other contactless payment methods all being accepted, and with passes available for frequent users – which seem to make up the majority of those cars passing through on a Sunday morning in December!