Friends of Wandsworth Common — Heritage Talk
Lost Houses of Wandsworth Common
What a turnout — an absolute record — and you're all extremely welcome. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Julia Bott, co-chair of the Friends, with my husband Richard Fox, who has been operating the beam for you this evening. Without further ado, it gives me enormous pleasure to introduce Stephen Midlane, who I think many of you know and admire greatly. Stephen chairs our Heritage Subgroup and has been corralling all these fantastic Heritage Group people to do tonight's talk. I'll hand over to Stephen to explain it all.
I hope you're in for a treat, because you've got six speakers this evening. As the slide suggests, what we are presenting are our interim reports on six properties — very much a work in progress. We still have a long way to go to uncover all the histories and stories behind these houses.
A little background on the Lost Houses group. At the beginning of this year we put out an appeal to the Friends, asking whether anyone would like to volunteer to adopt a lost house and research its history, its garden, and the people who lived there. Philip Boys and I initially looked at the old 1868 map and found 32 houses that we believed had once stood around the Common and since disappeared. We compiled a list and did a rough mapping of these houses, then called a meeting in February, where 22 volunteers came forward.
At that February meeting we allocated the houses among the volunteers, and in March we all went to the Heritage Library, where Emma Anthony, the wonderful archivist in Wandsworth, ran workshops on all the resources the Heritage Library could offer to set us on our way. Inspired by that, we went off and diligently worked through lots of research, then came back together in September to compare progress — some people had made fantastic headway; others had got absolutely nowhere, simply because they were too busy. We also began at that point to post information onto a website, currently private to the group, but which we hope will eventually be publicly accessible.
At the September meeting we also agreed to produce an interim report and present it to the Friends, so they could see what we had been doing. Here, very quickly, is the list of the 32 houses and the rough mapping we did.
Tonight we are looking at just six properties, going clockwise round the Common:
I chose Burntwood House partly because of its location — it stands on Lyford Road, which is my regular walk onto the Common — and also because it had a few incredibly interesting residents and owners who really captured my imagination.
On one of the oldest maps we have, the Corris map, Burntwood Cottage — as it was originally known — appears as a cluster of buildings on the south-west side of Wandsworth Common, on the All Farthing Manor Estate. The index to the map refers not to a house but to "buildings, grounds, yards, but gardens as well," which suggests there was some kind of house or cottage there. It stood on the present corner of Lyford Road and Loxley Road, the site now occupied by the Old Vicarage.
The first of the very interesting residents, and probably the person who developed the house, was a man called Piers Walsh Porter. He inherited the property through his mother, Eleanor [?] Porter, who was married to an Irishman named Piers Walsh. Once he inherited it, he immediately changed his name and adopted the name Porter, becoming known thereafter as Walsh Porter. He married an heiress and they were a very wealthy, fashionable couple who kept a fine house in town and gave lots of parties. They moved in the Carlton House set — Carlton House being the home of the then Prince of Wales, who went on to become the Prince Regent. It was terribly fashionable late-Georgian society.
Walsh Porter was a remarkable polymath: a playwright who had a piece staged at Drury Lane Theatre, a musician, and an art dealer who became an adviser to his friend the Prince of Wales on what was to become the beginning of the Royal Collection. I haven't yet been able to find a portrait of him — I'm still working on it, and the Royal Collection sadly has nothing — but he died in 1809.
He also acquired Craven Cottage, which many of you will know as the Fulham football ground. It was, I think, a very similar property to Burntwood Cottage: thatched roof, in the style known as cottage orné. At its simplest, that term just means a decorated cottage — rustic in style, often with a thatched roof and a veranda, characterised by creepers and ivy, very much embedded in the local landscape. It was a fashion connected with the late-eighteenth-century interest in rural, rustic lifestyles — Marie Antoinette and the Petit Trianon, that sort of thing.
A map from slightly later shows that, by Walsh Porter's time, Burntwood Cottage had acquired a magnificent driveway curving up to Trinity Road, suggesting it had become quite a substantial property. A sales notice from the period describes it as "seated a desirable distance from the carriage road across Wandsworth Common" — which makes it sound rather lovely. I suspect Walsh Porter sold it because he had acquired Craven Cottage and turned his attention there.
He sold it to the splendid Albinia Hobart, Dowager Countess of Buckinghamshire — he probably knew her socially, as she also moved in incredibly glamorous Georgian circles. She was renowned for extravagant fashions, lavish parties, and gambling. She held gambling parties at which they played Faro, apparently with terrible losses. A later description refers to the cottage as "formerly the retreat of Walsh Porter."
A map of 1838 shows the property with beautiful lakes in the grounds. By 1868 it had become a very substantial house, with a great field at the back and a long driveway leading up to Trinity Road. The main resident of this later period was a remarkable man called Johnson Charles D'Silva, some kind of merchant and agent for "Dr Locock's Pulmonic Wafers" — a cure-all for respiratory conditions, from which he must have made an absolute fortune. He died in 1886 at the ripe age of 76, having occupied the house for most of its later years.
After his death the house was sold, and there appear to have been no further long-term residents. Sadly, it was demolished — there is a rather melancholy advertisement for the sale of "excellent building materials comprising bricks, slates, doors and window frames," which gives you a sense of what a fine house it must have been. That was in 1891. In 1892 the new vicarage was built on the site, and Lyford Road had by then been driven through the middle of what had been the grounds. The vicarage still stands today on the corner of Loxley Road.
Bramblebury House is very much a work in progress. It was one of four large houses whose site would have been in the back gardens of numbers 45 to 50 on the west side of Clapham Common West Side. We chose to study it because it shows Wandsworth changing in a dramatic and interesting way over the course of its lifetime, and its inhabitants and their connections cast a very complex light on Wandsworth's history.
On the Corris map of 1787 there are a number of houses that had been cut out from and encroached upon the Common; the southernmost is what we now call Bramblebury. Dorian Gerhold, who wrote the history of the Corris map, has identified from land records and the All Thought papers that it was enclosed in 1734 and had been built on by 1753.
On the tithe map of 1838 it appears as quite a substantial property with its own stables or greenhouses. In the late eighteenth century it was used as a school, before becoming a private residence for most of the nineteenth century. It was demolished in the early 1890s as part of the enormous suburban development of this part of Wandsworth. There are no images — photographic or drawn — that I have been able to trace, except for a sketch made from memory about fifty years after the event by an estate agent with an uncertain grasp of perspective, found by Keith Bailey in the office of Rash Brooks. We believe that represents what Bramblebury House actually looked like.
The earliest recorded inhabitant was Joseph White, a Clerk of the House of Lords, who appears to have extended the property somewhat. By the end of the century it was described by a traveller as "a large white house." In 1787 it was used as a school, the first proprietor being one John Latimer Morton — a reasonably respected educator who wrote a book on how to run a school. The same cannot be said of his successor, a Mr Roberts, who had previously been running a school at Point Pleasant, at the mouth of the Wandle — a spot which, by the end of the eighteenth century, can hardly have been pleasant, surrounded as it was by forges and factories. He moved to the more salubrious surroundings of Wandsworth Common in order to attract the young nobleman and gentry section of the trade. Mr Roberts had at least one famous pupil: Henry Thornton, who wrote in his memoir that he left school knowing nothing at all, despite what Mr Roberts had promised.
The house then came into the possession of Thomas Deison, and his family are, I think, the most interesting group of residents. Deison was a London merchant, and the story their family tree tells is really three stories in one: the story of a cosmopolitan immigrant population in London commerce; the story of how the capital that built up commerce and industry in the United Kingdom was carried on family networks rather than borrowed money; and the story of the West India trade.
Peter Deison, from a Huguenot family, went into business in 1770 with his friend James Henkle, from a Dutch merchant family. Each married a daughter of a Flemish clergyman. Peter reinvented himself as an Anglo-Welsh squire but sent his son Thomas back to where the family had connections, to learn the business of Henkle and Deison, a merchant house that also ran one of the iron mills on the Wandle. Thomas then married his cousin Elizabeth Burt. He came to live at Bramblebury around 1811.
Thomas's three children were: James, who inherited the property and the business; Elizabeth, who remained a spinster and devoted herself to charitable works; and Lucy Deison, who lived in the house and died relatively young. James Deison married Sophia Rucker, the daughter of another India merchant who lived on West Hill and who inherited considerable money from various sources. James still lived at Bramblebury when he remarried after Sophia's death; the whole business eventually descended to Thomas Deison junior, who owned the property until the 1890s before retiring to the country in Sussex.
The property was then rented to Francis Dickinson, whose son Willoughby Dickinson was a prominent politician of the time, though he was there only briefly. By the time of the 1875 Ordnance Survey map, Bramblebury, the house next door, East Lodge, Ivy House, and a great many trees are all visible; on the equivalent 1916 map in their place stand 560 houses built by Henry Cornelis between 1890 and 1896.
We would like to know more about the Deison business. Henkle and Deison were West India merchants and all traded in sugar; we do not know whether they traded in enslaved people. They do not appear in the register of compensated slaveholders, but Sophia Rucker's father Sigismond probably did, and she certainly inherited money from James Anthony Rucker, another Wandsworth resident who owned plantations in Grenada. Finding out more about that is important.
We also want to know more about Willoughby Dickinson's political activities while he was resident at Bramblebury. He joined the London County Council in 1889, having been offered the chance of representing both the Conservative and Liberal interests, went on to become a Liberal MP, and was a champion of the League of Nations. And I would very much like to find out what became of Francis Dickinson's daughters — one was an anaesthetist, a remarkable thing for a woman to be in the 1890s, and the other a painter whose works I have not yet been able to trace.
With thanks to Philip Boys, who contributed several good ideas, and to Keith Bailey, who has written so much about the history of the estates.
In 1898, J. J. Sexby wrote of the Gables:
There is a cluster of houses on the north side of Wandsworth Common close by the Huguenot Cemetery, and The Gables are certainly the most picturesque of these if not the oldest. It is now divided into two, but the division does not take away any of its beauty. Covered from top to bottom with creeper, and approached by an essentially English garden, it forms a lovely picture.
Marbury Cottage, as it was originally known, stood on the north side of the Common, close to what is now the South Circular. On the wonderful All Farthing Manor map of the seventeenth century — oriented with east at the top — we can see this area before Marbury Cottage was built, with the River Thames visible to the left. By 1640 there were already houses on the site. Jump forward a hundred and fifty years to the Corris map of 1787, and Marbury Cottage appears clearly. We believe it was built prior to 1750.
The most famous eighteenth-century inhabitant was Captain Francis Grose. Well into the nineteenth century, Marbury Cottage was referred to as "formerly the residence of Francis Grose Esquire." He was known as the Falstaff among antiquaries — immensely corpulent, full of humour and good nature — and he produced the eighteenth century's most extensive series of illustrations of ancient monuments in his Antiquities of England and Wales, followed by companion volumes on Scotland and Ireland. Always short of money, he also published more popular works, among them the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, which gives a wonderful insight into the seedier side of eighteenth-century life. He left a painting of the back garden, made in 1767.
At some point Marbury Cottage was divided into two and became known as The Gables. A picture from 1825 still refers to it as Marbury Cottage, but by the tithe map of 1838 it has been split into two plots (numbered 289 and 290). By 1841 both houses were occupied: the larger, with its garden, was owned by Henry Granger; the smaller was occupied by William Bellamy and his family, who remained there from 1841 right through to 1898.
William Bellamy was a doorkeeper at the House of Commons — a post that still exists today, with some 37 holders — and had three daughters, all of whom remained unmarried and lived at The Gables until 1898, when they moved along North Side to number 46. They are all buried in the same grave in Wandsworth Cemetery.
Thomas Watson owned the main Gables and lived there until at least 1851. His daughter Ellen married Henry Attlee in 1870, and she was the mother of Clement Attlee. In his autobiography, Attlee left a vivid description of the house in the 1880s and 1890s:
My grandfather lived in an old house on Wandsworth Common — The Gables — which formed an important part of the background of my childhood, for my aunts and uncle were always very kind to all of us. The family lived mainly in the drawing room; the dining room was very dark. We were intrigued by a window placed over the fireplace. The other rooms on the ground floor were rather full of furniture and books. In grandfather's time the smoking room had no curtains and, I think, no carpet, and there were swords and daggers on the wall. Upstairs there were great four-poster beds. Aunt Janet's room was very jolly — it had a hob grate with Dutch tiles, deep window seats, and a shining mahogany wardrobe. I see it most clearly in the firelight of a Christmas evening when we used to dress up and act a play. There were little closets off it used for washing, pervaded by a general smell of Pears soap. Uncle Alec did a good deal of pottering in the garden. There was a large, smoky garden with a big cedar tree surrounded by a great circle of ivy, a tennis court cut off by an old brown brick wall, and a fascinating greenhouse and sheds.
In 1898 the house was purchased by the Wandsworth and Clapham Board of Guardians — the workhouse authority — who intended to use it as a new boardroom and offices. By 1903 they had abandoned the idea and agreed instead to erect a new children's infirmary on the site, but a few months later the London Government Board blocked that. In December 1904 the London County Council bought The Gables for "the erection thereon of a substation required for the electrical working of the tramways in Battersea and Wandsworth" — as far as I know, that was never built either. At some point the house was demolished, and in 1909 numbers 72 to 82 North Side were built on the site. In the late 1960s the dual carriageway of Trinity Road was driven through, and number 82 was itself demolished as part of that development.
The sad mood of those final years is caught in a letter written by either Emma or Edith Watson to the son of Edwin Ransom, who chaired the Common Conservators and had raised a petition to save The Gables from demolition:
Dear Mr Ransom, it's very nice of your father to think our dear old house worth saving, but I fear there is too little known of its past history to make it really interesting. The vans are taking away the furniture today and tomorrow, but it is ours to March the 25th, and if any of you care to ramble over it, please do so and take anything you like. You can imagine how sorry we are to part with it, but a country life seems to suit my brother and sister better, and old Wandsworth is not country now — much as I love it, I cannot call it so any longer.
What follows is a small taste of what we found — with much assistance from Philip Boys — about one of the five lost houses of Bolingbroke Grove. Robert Dent, a banker, acquired land between the Commons from Earl Spencer and built himself a house — not this house, but Old Park House, on Nightingale Lane — in 1775–76. He then built five houses as a speculation along the tree-lined lane now known as Bolingbroke Grove.
Bolingbroke House was the largest of the five, with the most extensive grounds. It was situated opposite Wandsworth Common, where Bolingbroke Academy now stands, set back from the road by a carriage drive, and opposite a large pond which no longer exists. The house was designed by a surveyor rather than an architect, so it was not of any great architectural merit — a three-storey, five-bay classical Georgian flat-fronted house, quite plain, with a portico entrance. The rear elevation was more interesting and had a projecting central bay, visible in a lithograph that Henrietta will show you.
At the time the house was put up for sale in 1858, a newspaper notice records that it had eleven bedrooms, two drawing rooms, a dining room, a library, conservatories, and a range of service buildings — quite a substantial pile.
We were asked to look at the lives of the owners and occupiers, and, unlike all the previous speakers, we found nobody of any particular interest. The early family were the Willises, who were bankers. These five houses were country retreats — not the sole residences of their owners, who were mainly City merchants and bankers. After the Willises came Robert Davis, a merchant; and the family who lived there longest, and were the last residents, were the Wheelers. Henry Wheeler was a merchant and fund-holder — very wealthy: when he died in 1873 he left an estate of £350,000, worth about £33 million today. His main biographical distinction is that he married an Italian girl of fourteen in 1828, who proceeded to give him fifteen, possibly sixteen, children — a very busy woman. The household in 1841 comprised nine living-in servants, including a cook, nursemaids, housemaids, a footman, and a coachman.
By 1980 Bolingbroke House had become Bolingbroke Hospital. The local vicar — whose name I have momentarily forgotten — saved the house by setting it up as a pay hospital; but as new wings were gradually added, the original house became increasingly hemmed in and was eventually demolished in 1937. The hospital, as you will know, came to the end of its life in the 2000s and is now the school.
I want to take Bolingbroke House's gardens and parkland through a series of maps, from the mid eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth.
The earliest map, the Roque map of about 1750, is simple but revealing. It shows what was long known as Five Lanes or Five Houses Lane — now Bolingbroke Grove — and the Falcon Brook, now roughly the line of Northcote Road. Wonderful hatching shows the slope down from Bolingbroke Grove to the brook. A farm sat in the north-east corner of the map, and we think Bolingbroke House was situated roughly in the middle of the row, with Diss House at the far end and the other three houses in between.
A hand-drawn map of 1773, known as the Harmon map, depicts the farm and shows what was grown — mainly barley, with meadow and pasture land, strips of potatoes, and wheat. The first depiction of Bolingbroke House on a map proper is on the Corris map of 1787, where it appears within a roughly rectangular plot. You can also see the beginnings of a grove of trees along the lane, and the ponds appearing.
The tithe map of 1838 was a real gem of information for me. It shows a pond — now gone — opposite Bolingbroke House, a reminder that this was all poor, damp, gravelly land. The Three Island Pond, still familiar to you today, is also clearly marked. There is a carriageway linking the house with its stables, and tracks leading up to Bolingbroke Farm.
The owner at this point, a Mr Willis, bought the farmland in 1797, giving him a total holding — farm, gardens, and parkland — of 64 acres. The landscape style is recognisably that of the period: clumps of trees, naturalistic planting, sweeping views down across the stream, with the gardens kept close to the house in the manner associated with Capability Brown and Humphrey Repton. You can see how several of the houses along the brook widened the Falcon Brook to make ornamental lakes, with bridges linking to a further access point on what is now Battersea Rise. Repton was very keen on gravel walks throughout.
The tithe map shows "Garden" marked against several of the five houses, but curiously nothing against Bolingbroke House itself. What we do know is that substantial houses of this kind typically had heated greenhouses with melon grounds — manure banks to encourage melons to ripen — a cold bath fed by a spring (an eccentric but popular Victorian amenity), walled kitchen gardens, and so on.
By the 1860s and 1870s one can see on the maps the beginnings of the enormous changes to come: the Borough Cemetery, the Royal Victoria Patriotic School nursery — still very large and still very much in existence — which may well have supplied many of these gardens with plants. And then there is the lithograph of Bolingbroke House which is a real prize for us, one of the very few images we have. It shows the house from the rear, with that extra storey not visible in the west-facing view, and a softly landscaped lake of the Capability Brown type, with clumps of trees. When Bolingbroke House acquired land on the eastern side of the Falcon Brook, those views would have extended all the way up to where I am now standing.
Finally, a photograph taken from Bolingbroke Hospital in 1883 shows a view across the Common: a pioneering part of the hospital's regime was to give patients rest and recreation in the open air, with a good view. You can make out very mature trees across the Common — probably elms — similar to those of The Elms, another of the five houses.
I chose Fernside because it was the nearest house to where I live. I kept digging in my garden and coming across masonry under the soil whenever I tried to plant a tree, and I became curious about what had previously stood there — which is what drew me to join this group.
Fernside was a handsome house with a portico, like many of the stuccoed villas in what was then rural Clapham — Old Park House on Nightingale Lane, for instance. It stood on high ground where today Fernside Road meets Ravenslea Road. The landowners were the wealthy Duane family, who owned many farming estates in the Streatham area as well as Broad Lodge in Essex.
In medieval times the hamlet of Balham was surrounded by pastures and woodland. The Domesday survey records that two plough-teams cultivated the fields around the Falcon Brook. In 1103 the d'Andevilles, who held the manor of Clapham, gave Balham to the church and monks of Bermondsey Abbey, who rented out smallholdings to the villagers; they in turn grew oats, barley, wheat, peas, and vetches, and kept a variety of livestock. In 1538, following the Reformation, the Balham estate was broken up. The largest portion — about 130 acres — between Nightingale Lane and Balham High Road, was acquired by Thomas Cromwell (who was executed in 1540), and then passed to Henry VIII before being leased to a carpenter in Tooting called John Simmons.
In 1700 the estate was sold to John Scrimshire, who sold it to the Duane family. The plan shows how the fields were divided up; an eleven-acre portion adjoins Wandsworth Common on one side and the Falcon Brook on the other. Peter Duane sold the plot to William Nunn of Cheapside, and it is on the lower part of this plot — marked on the plan as the "Little Grub Field" — that Fernside House was built.
The Ordnance Survey map shows Fernside as it had latterly evolved, below the city of the Falcon Brook. A counterpart lease held by the Lambeth Archives does not mention Fernside by name but describes the property of "Joseph Kay Esquire" as comprising "a messuage or house with its associated garden, outbuildings, orchard, tenement, with stables, coach houses, cottage, brew house and wash house." Zooming in on the Ordnance Survey map, you can see Fernside's layout: a side entrance from Ravenslea Road, all the stables and outhouses, and an ornamental lake fed by the Hyburn, which comes down from Balham Hill along what is now Old Bridge Road, with the Falcon Brook continuing down to Battersea village.
Joseph Kay took up the tenancy of Fernside around 1812 at the age of 55. He and his wife Sarah had eleven children, most of whom were married. He worked as a solicitor, and among his clients was the Bank of England; his firm later became known as Freshfields. His son Charles followed him in the profession, and two of Charles's sons went to India in 1832. One of them, John William Kay, joined the Bengal Artillery and took part in the First Afghan War, before very wisely pursuing a literary career in Kolkata. A sketch of him was made there by the artist Colesworthy Grant. He wrote several well-received books about the military campaigns in India and was knighted. Joseph Kay died in 1840.
After the Kays, Fernside became the home of the Coventry family. Millis Coventry was a corn factor who traded in grain in the City. He was married to Mary Bevington; her nephew was the photographer Geoffrey Bevington, who took a portrait of two of the Coventry daughters. Her brother was James Buam Bevington, who lived at Ivy House nearby and was married to Mary Knox from County Londonderry. I imagine the two families would often have strolled across the Common to enjoy a game of croquet or a row on the lake at Fernside. Millis Coventry died in 1886.
In 1890 Fernside was put up for sale. A new estate was built by William Darnell and James Habber; the architect was William Newton. Fernside Road, Gosberton Road, and Calbourne Road now occupy the site.
Janet and Rebecca were unfortunately unable to be here tonight, so I'm presenting their slides. The picture that first whetted their appetite for this research was a photograph of Wilby Lodge — they are not sure when the house was built or who the family shown in the photograph is.
In 1883 Wilby Lodge was described as "a detached residence containing five bedrooms, box room, two reception rooms, conservatory and usual offices, with stabling and coach house, and extensive grounds well stocked with fruit trees and shrubs." Both houses were visible on the Ordnance Survey map of the mid-1860s. Note the curved boundary line of the garden of Wilby Lodge — that curve is still traceable today.
By 1867 there were two families in the houses: the Cuts in Stanton House and the Oliviers in Wilby Lodge. By 1881 the Cuts were still at Stanton House, but Wilby Lodge had a new family, the Lestells. The head of the household was John Lestell, but I draw your attention to his son Arthur, at that time the baby of the family. Arthur Lestell went on to receive the Victoria Cross in the First World War for an action described here; the sad footnote is that he was killed on 7 November 1918 — four days before the Armistice.
In 1883 Wilby Lodge was listed for sale by auction as the second lot of a freehold estate on Nightingale Lane; the estate was owned by George Jennings, who also owned Ferndale, the neighbouring property. Janet and Rebecca speculate that the architect of Ferndale may have been the same one who worked on Wilby Lodge.
Stanton House underwent improvements in 1892 with the addition of a gardener's cottage and a morning room extension. Residents came and went — a different family at Wilby Lodge roughly every ten years — while Stanton House was somewhat more settled under the Cut family. George Cut died in 1894 and his widow Annie remained until her own death in 1903. A new occupant, Alfred Boon, appears in the 1911 census.
Stanton House was demolished in 1926, its contents sold off. Wilby Lodge was occupied from 1924 by Thomas Green, who bought it in 1926; the Green family remained there, the house being renumbered 109 Nightingale Lane. Thomas Green died in 1941 at the age of 81. Wilby Lodge was then marked as "damaged beyond repair by a V1 flying bomb" on the LCC bomb damage map. On the 1947 Ordnance Survey map there are no houses anywhere to be seen in that stretch of Nightingale Lane — substantial damage on both sides of the road. In January 1952 the Wilby Lodge site was used for a new house, now known as 125 Nightingale Lane. The curved boundary line of the original garden is still visible in the aerial view today.
They want to identify the family in the early photograph, find more photographs, learn more about the other residents of both houses, and — in particular — find out why Stanton House was demolished in 1926.
Ian offered two items of information: first, that Bolingbroke Hospital (now the school) has tiled walls in what was formerly the children's ward — now the library — with drawings of fairy tales and nursery rhymes, some by a local artist. He suggested the school would probably allow members to view them. Second, he drew attention to an italianate house on Nightingale Lane with a curious tall wall with buttresses and curious finials: the story is that it was built to block the view from a house further down the slope, whose owners objected to being overlooked. He also noted that the mention of Capability Brown is relevant to the controversy over the All England Club planning proposals, and that those wishing to protect the historical associations of the area may wish to consider objecting.
Stephen confirmed that the group had been in contact with the principal of Bolingbroke Academy and that she had agreed to allow a group visit to see the tiles. "We're very excited about that — it's definitely work in progress."
A further contribution from the floor clarified that the tiles were in the children's ward, now the library, and that they were associated with the Lady Carmichael Ward — Lady Carmichael being the wife of James Carmichael, the local builder who has various associations in the area.
Sue noted a connection with the Burntwood House presentation: she had written the article on Endymion Porter in the Friends' history volume. Porter was a favourite of Charles I, came to a bad end in the Civil War, but his descendants recovered the property at the Restoration. She had believed the family connection continued until just about the Victorian period, but had not known that a descendant had returned to the neighbourhood so much later. "When you said 'Porter' I quivered — it's a fantastic link of continuity."
Peter added that it was the Bolingbroke Hospital tiles — along with the war memorial in the hallway and the faux marble of the entrance hall — that had led to the campaign to secure a listed building designation for Bolingbroke Hospital. Fortunately the listing was more extensive than an interior-only listing, which is why the whole building was saved and has now become the school.
What a brilliant run-through, and what an exciting uncovering of history — how interesting this area is. Thank you all so much. Our plan is to have a full presentation next year: the group working on the five houses will give a much fuller account — possibly eight hours, set up as a whole day. It just leaves me to thank them again, and to wish you all, on behalf of Richard and myself and our committee, a very Merry Christmas. We'll see you in the New Year.