Wood Cottage and the Maller Nurseries of Lee

There is a postcard that appears from time to time on Lewisham Facebook reminiscence groups and for sale on eBay of a small house set back from the road with the label Burnt Ash Hill.  In the former locations, it often causes consternation as there are no obvious current or even recent landmarks.  The house was Wood Cottage and this post seeks to tell at least some of its story, and more particularly the nurseries that it was linked to.

The cottage probably dates from the 1870s and was broadly where the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of Lourdes now stands (pictured below) – midway between Lee Station and what is now the South Circular of St Mildred’s Road and Westhorne Avenue. 

The origin of the name is unclear, although the most likley scenario is after one of the Wood family who farmed the neighbouring Horn Park Farm who may have farmed the land for a brief period in the 1860s.

The firm running the nursery for much of its life was Maller and Sons.  It was set up by Benjamin Maller, a gardener who hailed from Surrey (Sussex in some censuses).  Born in 1823, he was living with wife Mary and daughter Mary at Belmont Lodge in 1851 – which was attached to Belmont a large house  on what is now Belmont Hill, where he was the gardener. 

In the 1861 census, Maller had moved just down the hill and was listed at 5 Granville Terrace, later it was to have the address 61 Lewisham High Street.  It is now part of the Lewisham police station site, but before that, became part of the Chiesmans empire.  Maller was listed as a ‘Nurseryman employing two boys’ in the census. Long and Lazy Lewisham which is covering the history of the High Street, notes that he had been there, trading initially with Robert Miller for around 5 years.

The partnership with Miller was short lived as was another with George Fry which ended in 1860. The next decade saw a rapid expansion, the 1871 census suggests he was employing 31 men and 6 boys. 

By 1881 they were listed in the census as being in Leyland Road – the numbering isn’t totally clear as the road was being developed and the house is just described as ‘The Nursery.’  This is pictured above (back middle), it was later numbered 72 and puts it now at the corner of Leyland Road and Alanthus Close. The nursery shown on an 1890s Ordnance Survey map. below, along with several other areas cultivated.

This would have been land leased from the Crown, part of the former Lee Green Farm (pictured below) which ceased operating in the1860s.  While the exact geography of the farm isn’t completely clear – it seems to have been a narrow farm covering land to the east of what is now Burnt Ash Road and Hill from Lee Green to around Winn Road.  Just a few hundred metres wide, it shrank rapidly as homes and shops were developed by John Pound following the arrival of the railway in Lee in 1866.  Land was also temporarily lost to clay pits and brickworks just south of Lee Station and north of The Crown.

In 1881 Maller was listed as a nursery man with 30 acres employing 4 men 8 boys.  The family included grown-up children Mary, Benjamin and Herbert – in the 1881 census at ‘the Nursery, Leyland Road’.

There had been  of significant reduction in labour since 1871 – 31 men to just 4 over 10 years.  This probably relates to the land they cultivated being rapidly lost to Victorian suburbanisation as streets like Dorville, Osberton and Leyland Roads were developed. 

Benjamin died in 1884 but the business continued as B Maller and Son afterwards, with Benjamin Boden Maller in charge – living variously at 107 and 111 Burnt Ash Road (there was access to the site from Burnt Ash Road too) and 72 Leyland Road. Benjamin Boden Maller died in 1913 although his son, also Benjamin, continued for a while.  However, in the 1939 Register he was listed as a Civil Servant living in Reigate.

So what did they grow? In 1879 an advert in the Kentish Mecury suggested the land cultivated from Wood Cottage (Burnt Ash Hill site) was for roses. The site around Leyland Road (listed as Burnt Ash Lane) was used for trees and and shrubs as well as having greenhouse plants and other plants that needed warmth – stove plants. While they cultivated Brockely Nursery they had moved from there as the Billinghursts (see below) were there by 1880 (1),

It seems that before the end of the century there was a change in focus with a lot of plants being grown for seed – they were regualrly advertising their illustrated seed catalogue to the gardeners of south east London and beyond (2).

In the early 20th century, they would also have auctions of surplus stock in September each year. The 1910 sale included 20,000 winter blooming heaths, gorse, winter aconites, ferns and palms (3).

The land that is now part of Alanthus Close seems to have remained with the Mallers until around the mid 1920s. On Burnt Ash Hill they will have added the land of the former brickworks less the frontage onto Burnt Ash Hill and a development next to The Crown centring on Corona Road.  This will have been an extension of the land cultivated from Wood Cottage.

It seems that the land was split three n the mid to late 1920s when the Mallers left.  There were different names at 107 Burnt Ash Road (May Scotland), 111 Burnt Ash Road (George Friend Billinghurst) and Norris Buttle at Wood Cottage.

May Clark Scotland was appropriately Scottish, born in Perth, she was running a florists at 111 Lewisham High Street by 1911, the name over the door was Alexander Scotland.

George Billinghurst was born around 1871 and seems to have spent his early years in Eliot Place in Blackheath, his father Friend Billinghurst was also a gardener.  There is no obvious link to the more well known Blackheath Billinghurst family, which included disabled suffragette (Rosa) May. They seem to have cultivated Brockley Nursery for a while (4), after the Mallers moved out, but family moved on to Croydon. By 1891 George was listed as a gardener, a decade later a florist and by 1911 a nurseryman living in Annerley Road.

Norris Buttle was living at 172 Ennersdale Road in 1901 and at 31 Leahurst Road in 1911 (these were probably the same house as the Ennersdale originally dog-legged around) – he was listed as a gardener then nursery gardener. 

With all three of them, details beyond 1911 proved difficult to work out.  Certainly none of them were at 72 Leyland Road – it was empty in 1939 as were 8 out of 10 the houses of that end side of the street going southwards.  It was a different picture going northwards.

Time was running out for the nurseries too, the land cultivated from Wood Cottage was lost in the 1930s as leases ran out and the Crown sold the land for development.  The land behind Wood Cottage was lost to the Woodstock Estate of Woodyates and Pitfold Roads.  Further south, the new South Circular and the developments around Horncastle and Kingshurst Roads, pictured above, further depleted the land.  The Cottage itself was lost to the new Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of Lourdes – the church had acquired the land in 1936.

The land sandwiched between Leyland and Burnt Ash gradually was encroached upon with development at the southern end of Leyland Road although there were memories of roses being grown until the early 1960s when many Crown Estate leases ended. 

And finally, while no longer cultivated, there is a small piece of undeveloped land where the nursery was – the green space to the south of Alanthus Close. On some satellite images of the area in drought conditions show rectangles, probably the ghosts of greenhouses past – a little less clear than the prefabs around Hilly Fields.

,

Notes

1. Kentish Mercury 16 August 1879
2. Kentish Mercury 09 February 1894
3. Kentish Mercury 02 September 1910
4. Croydon Guardian and Surrey County Gazette 3 July 1880

 Credits

• Census and related data come from Find My Past (subscription required)
• Kelly’s Directories were accessed via a combination of Southwark and Lewisham Archives, with the reference to Lewisham High Street via the on-line collection of the University of Leicester
• The postcard of Wood Cottage is via eBay in January 2021
• The drawing of Lee Green Farm is from the information board at Lee Green
• The photograph of the land between Burnt Ash Road and Leyland Road is part of the collection of Lewisham Archives, it remains their copyright and is used with their permission.
• The Ordnance Survey map is part of the collections of the National Library of Scotland – it is used here on a non-commercial licence
• The satellite image of Alanthus Close is via Apple Maps

Beating The Bounds of Lee Part 2 – Winn Road to Grove Park

In the last post, we returned to the old tradition of ‘beating the bounds’ of the civil parish of Lee, ‘armed’ mainly with a Second Edition Ordnance Survey map of the area and a decent amount of local knowledge of the history. The survey for the map had been carried out in 1893, but it seems to have updated to reflect boundary changes relating to Mottingham in 1894.

We had left the Lee boundary on Winn Road, part of a small estate developed by William Winn, which, appropriately for the time this post was written, includes Corona Road.

The route followed is the red line on adjacent Ordnance Survey map. It was broadly the same circuit that had been followed in 1822 by the great and the good of the parish. Included in their number, although not in the ‘good’ part, was the final tenant of Lee Place, the odious Benjamin Aislabie – a slave owner after slavery was abolished in the Empire. At least the parish spelled his name incorrectly as ‘Aislibie’ when naming a street after him.

We had left the boundary at the final of a trio of 1903 Lewisham boundary markers at the south easterly junction of Winn and Guibal Roads. Lee was merged with Lewisham into the Borough of Lewisham in 1900. The 1893 boundary was about 15 metres to the west and cut across to what is now Burnt Ash Pond, mid way down Melrose Close. The current Lewisham boundary with Greenwich veers off to the east down Winn Road to the Quaggy.

Burnt Ash Pond is usually a delightful little oasis of calm, but seemed to be suffering from lock down, seemingly covered with either duckweed or green algae when passed by on this occasion. The 1893 variant of the boundary passed through the Pond and continued southwards down Melrose Close, attractive late 1970s council housing, diminished by an entrance through largely abandoned garages. In 1893 the boundary passed through back gardens parallel to Burnt Ash Hill, almost opposite College Farm. There is an 1865 Lee Parish marker hidden in the undergrowth next to the pond, although it is not visible from the outside.

The name ‘Melrose’ came from another farm which seems to have evolved out of Horn Park Farm, whose farm yard we crossed in the first post, and was essentially a market garden operation and was also referred to as Woodman’s Farm, after its tenants. The Close was probably part of its land. Its farmhouse in Ashdale Road remains and was used as a site office for the developers of much of the area we are about to pass through, Wates. The farm’s main claim to fame was the unintentional landing of Willows II (pictured below) which was aiming for Crystal Palace and in the process created a record for the longest airship flight.

The boundary continues parallel to Burnt Ash Hill until a point almost opposite Ashwater Road when it follows what are now the rear fences of houses on the northern side of Senlac Road, presumably named after the likely location of the Battle of Hastings. In the back garden of a group of Wates built interwar semis between Exford and Ashdale Roads, there was once the junction of the parishes of Lee, Eltham and Mottingham. The house with three boundaries, then had two and now has none – the Bromley boundary is now at the bottom of the hill following the Quaggy. The change is a relatively recent one, dating from 1991 proposals, the current resident remembers paying council tax to both Lewisham and Bromley. In 1893 we would have been in fields.

The 1893 boundary broadly followed what is now an access road to the rear of houses in Jevington Road. The end of Jevington Road has a chain link fronted jungle facing it, the boundary pierces through the chain link, on the Mottingham side of the 19th century border is now a Den of a former Dragon, a Bannatyne Health Club. The Lee side is, arguably even healthier – some allotments, along with a community volunteer run library.

This section would have been very different if the Conservative run Greater London Council (GLC) plans for Ringway 2 had come to fruition in the late 1960s. In South London, it was essentially a motorway replacement for the South Circular.

There was much secrecy about the detail of the route, although the most likely version suggested by Chris Marshall would have seen a five lane motorway driven through the allotments, with a minor interchange for Burnt Ash Hill and a major one on Baring Road. There was much opposition across south London to the scheme, and the absence of a motorway here points to its success. The only tangible remains of Ringway in the area is an eponymous community centre on Baring Road.

Returning to 1893, when the Ordnance Survey cartographers visited, the Grove Park Hospital had yet to be built – that wouldn’t be for another 15 years. We’ve covered the hospital when we followed the Quaggy through these parts.

On the northern wall is a boundary marker – the ‘MP’ is clear in that it relates to Mottingham Parish which from 1894 to 1934 was a ‘detached’ part of the Bromley Rural District. The ‘LP’ is less clear, Lee had disappeared into Lewisham by the time the hospital was built, but it was the Borough of Lewisham rather than the parish.

In 1893 the parish of Lee meandered across the soon to be hospital site, changing direction at a tree that doubled up as a boundary marker. The tree is long gone, presumably felled when the hospital was constructed and the boundary moved to the edge of the hospital site. Oddly, in the housing that replaced most of the hospital buildings, there is a tree at the same point as the former boundary marker.

On the eastern side of the hospital site, Lee’s boundary takes on a new format, the Quaggy. Rivers and streams often form the boundaries between parishes and local authorities, as we have found with several streams and rivers – including the River Wilmore in Penge and Border Ditch that we will encounter later in our perambulation around Lee.

Alas, the conterminous boundary with the Quaggy (shown top left below) only lasts for around 50 metres, about 2 and a half chains of Victorian measurement. However, we swap one watercourse for another as the boundary veers off the the east, following Grove Park Ditch, which depending on rainfall levels either cascades or splutters into the Quaggy (top right, below).

The confluence is a pipe opposite the Sydenham Cottages Nature Reserve, named after the farm workers cottages above. The nomenclature ‘Ditch’ is used quite a lot within the Quaggy catchment, it shouldn’t be seen as belittling or derogatory it is just the way smaller streams are described – there also are Milk Street, Border and Petts Wood further upstream.

About 50 metres inside the Lee side of the boundary, Lewisham Natureman has been recently active – a new stag has been painted, drinking from the Quaggy (or would be in more typical flows) in the shade of an elder bush. We will return to his work at a few other points on our travels around the Lee boundary.

The course of Grove Park Ditch isn’t certain, it is culverted for almost half a mile, but would have crossed the fields below more or less parallel to a very rural looking Marvels Lane from 1914, presumably coterminous with the boundary.

There is a boundary marker outside 94 Grove Park Road. It is weathered and unreadable, but marks the Lee boundary with Mottingham – given the style is similar to those around Winn Road at the beginning of this section it probably dates from 1903, however, the location of the boundary was the same in 1893.

In the next instalment, we will follow the boundary through the rural Grove Park of 1893.

Picture Credits

• The Ordnance Survey Map is via the National Library of Scotland, it is used here on a non-commercial licence
• The picture of Willows II is from an original postcard in the authors ‘collection’
• The Ringway map comes from Chris Marshall’s fascinating website
• The postcard of Grove Park is from e Bay in November 2016

The series of posts on the Lee boundary that this post is part of, would probably not have happened without Mike Horne, he was the go-to person on London’s boundary markers; he had catalogued almost all of them in a series of documents. He was always helpful, enthusiastic and patient. He died of a heart attack in March but would have loved my ‘find’ of a London County Council marker in some undergrowth on Blackheath during 2020’s lockdown, and would have patiently explained the details of several others he knew to me. A sad loss, there is a lovely series of tributes to him via this link.

Beating The Bounds of Lee, Part 1- Lee Green to Winn Road

As regular readers of Running Past will be aware, the blog has followed the course of a number of natural features and human constructs – rivers and streams, notably the Quaggy and its tributaries, the Greenwich Park branch railway and the Prime Meridian from the edge of Croydon, back through Lewisham and to the Greenwich Observatory. Such wanders make for interesting cross sections of the city. We turn our attention to another of these constructs – the boundary of the former civil parish of Lee which existed until 1900.

Beating the bounds is an ancient tradition, reminding parishioners of the importance of boundaries which was carried out during Rogationtide—the fifth week after Easter. There would be a walking of the parish boundaries, with children would carrying willow which would be used to beat the boundary markers. The boundary markers might be stones, streams or marks on trees, or roads. Oddly, other than around Lee Green, roads seem to have been neglected in deciding the parish boundaries of Lee.

No willow will be harmed in the perambulation of Lee, the on-ground research for which appropriately started on Rogation Sunday. The variant of Lee that we will be metaphorically beating is the civil parish mapped with the second edition of the Ordnance Survey 6” to the mile series. It was was surveyed in 1893 and published a few years later, just before Lee was merged with Lewisham to form the new Borough of Lewisham in 1900.

Lee in 1893 was a long narrow parish, a width of just over a mile and a quarter at its broadest point between Lee Bridge at the western end of Lee High Road to just beyond Cambridge Drive’s junction with Eltham Road. It’s length was around 5 miles at its longest – Blackheath, just to the north of the railway, in the north, to Marvels Wood on the borders of Mottingham to the south. The boundary was around 14 miles long, although with the diversions made to avoid trespass and Hot Fuzz style demolition of garden fences the actual 21st century trip around the borders of late 19th century Lee is somewhat longer….

We start at Lee Green, one of the three original centres of Lee, along with Old Road and the top of Belmont Hill; it had the green that it’s name implies, along with a windmill and a farm. The boundary with Liberty of Kidbrooke was to the north east, beyond the Quaggy and with the Parish of Eltham in the north eastern quadrant of Lee Green and to the north of Eltham Road. In 1893, that quadrant included a previous incarnation of the New Tigers Head, then called the Tiger Tavern, the photograph below was taken around 1897.

The Old Tigers Head shown above was the 1896 variant; three years before, when the Ordnance Survey visited, it was the earlier building pictured below. It was about to be demolished with the pub briefly migrating a couple of doors down during the rebuilding.

On the Lee side, the farm, called Lee Green Farm, had been there in 1863 when the Ordnance Survey cartographers first mapped the area, but had been demolished soon after. The farm building had been relocated to the current site of Leybridge Court on the already built Leyland Road by 1893.

Opposite, the impressive Fire Station would still be 13 years away, and its predecessor on Lee High Road a couple of years off, it would be the temporary Old Tigers Head first.

The boundary followed the centre of Eltham Road; in 1893 there was a boundary post more or less next to the easternmost leg of Ravens Way, presumably named after the Ravensbourne Athletic, whose buildings were incorporated into the post war development, but had not been developed in 1893. In the first incarnation of the Ordnance Survey map, the Lee Green Toll Gate (pictured below) would have been a few metres behind, a bus stop is located in its place now. Tolls were meant to cover the costs of maintaining the roads, but with the coming of the railways (1849 in Lewisham and Blackheath) income dropped and in 1888 the remaining Turnpike Trusts were wound up with responsibilities going to the local authorities.

The current, and indeed 1893 surveyed boundary, goes to the rear of the houses in Cambridge Drive, following the edge of the Old Colfeans playing fields. Cambridge Drive, originally Road, and the land bordering Eltham Road had been one of the first parcels of land sold from Horn Park Farm for housing by the Crown Estate. The 1890s and current variants of the boundary slightly diverge around Dorville Road, briefly, home to Edith Nesbit. The former border slightly cut across the playing fields, but was presumably revised to ensure that the cricketing boundaries weren’t crossed by administrative ones.

The boundary, now with Greenwich (in 1863 with Eltham), re-emerges on Upwood Road. Former municipal generations needed to make boundary stones or even marks on trees to indicate the edge of their territory. Their modern counterparts have more subtle methods – different shades of tarmac, wheelie bins of changed hues and my favourite here, the humble street light. Lewisham has energy efficient, 21st century LED lights whereas the Royal Borough has a cornucopia of types including some rather attractive Borough of Woolwich concrete ones which probably dates from the 1950s.

The 1893 and current variants again diverge at this point, the former boundary heading south east, the current one turning back westwards behind elegant interwar detached houses of Upwood Road. The divergence seems to have been after the move of Colfe’s, then a Grammar School, in 1963. The original had been in a site between Lewisham Hill and Granville Park in Lewisham.

It had been largely demolished by a V-1 flying bomb in 1944 – the site is pictured above, and until the 1960s used what are now Brindishe Green and Trinity Primary schools in Beacon and Leahurst Roads respectively. The new school would have stood astride the then Woolwich and Lewisham boundary, so the current variant hugs the railway line heading towards Mottingham from Lee.

The boundary crosses the South Circular close to Alnwick Road where a pleasant Green is situated. The 1893 flâneur would have found the last large farm of Lee at the southern edge of the green on what is now Horncastle Road. Running Past has already told the story of Horn Park Farm; but there was a cautionary tale that is worth repeating in relation to boundaries.

Magistrates at the Green Man in Blackheath had to decide on the case of whether Lee or Eltham parishes should pay for the care of a farm worker at the farm. The boundary passed through the centre of the house on the farm he lived in. In fact, his bed was actually on the boundary – the magistrates found in favour of Lee as the farm labourer would have put his feet on the Eltham side first.

The development of Horncastle Road seemed to follow field boundaries, which also marked the administrative border. There were a couple of stones in 1893 that have been replaced by rear garden fences. As we saw in a post on Corona Road, the Crown Estate, had sold off land alongside Burnt Ash Hill, initially used as a brick works used by John Pound and then developed by William Winn. Almost all of Winn’s development has been lost to the Blitz and post war redevelopment.

The 1893 boundary bisected a tennis club within the development, but seems to have been adjusted soon after as there are a trio of very weathered 1903 boundary markers marking the current border between Lewisham and Greenwich on Corona Road at its junction with Guibal Road, on Guibal Road itself and at the junction of Guibal and Winn Roads.

While the derivation of Winn and Corona Road is clear, developer and relating to the Crown, Guibal isn’t immediately obvious. It isn’t a family name of either William Winn or his wife and the only obvious mentions in the press at the time relate to the development of a centrifugal mining fan by a French engineer, Théophile Guibal in 1872. It is not an obvious connection to an area with no mining heritage.

In the next post on ‘beating the bounds’ we will look at the boundary from Winn Road southwards towards Grove Park.

Picture Credits

• The Ordnance Survey map is on a non-commercial licence from the National Library of Scotland, other maps from the same source have been referred to for the post;
• The photographs of Lee Green and the Lee Green Toll Gate are from the collection of Lewisham Archives, remain their copyright and are used with their permission;
• The photograph of the earlier version of the Old Tigers Head is from an information board at Lee Green; and
• The photograph of Lewisham Hill and Granville Park bomb damage is via the Imperial War Museum on a Creative Commons).

This, and the series of posts on the Lee boundary that will follow, would probably not have happened without Mike Horne, he was the go-to person on London’s boundary markers; he had catalogued almost all of them in a series of documents. He was always helpful, enthusiastic and patient. He died of a heart attack in March but would have loved my ‘find’ of a London County Council marker in some undergrowth on Blackheath during 2020’s lockdown, and would have patiently explained the details of several others he knew to me. A sad loss, there is a lovely series of tributes to him via this link.

Corona Road – The History of a Lee Street

The word ‘Corona’ with the suffix of ‘virus’ is currently striking fear into the population of much of the world.  In a leafier part of Lee, just off Burnt Ash Hill, there is a street with the name which pre-dates the virus by 140 years and has a much more benign meaning – ‘something suggesting a crown.’  This post looks at some of the history of the street and the neighbouring area.

The land to the east of Burnt Ash Hill in Lee had been probably been in the ownership of the Crown since 1305 as part of the estate of the Eltham Palace which was originally used for hunting.  The area has been covered several times by Running Past in relation to two of the farms on the land, Horn Park and Melrose Farms, as well is in passing in relation to pubs linked to John Pound – including The Crown.

As the city expanded with coming of the railways, they arrived in Lee 1866, the Crown began to sell off fields for housing and related activities.  One of these sales was land for a brick works on the corner of Burnt Ash Hill and what would become Winn Road – a hundred metres or so down the road from another of Lee’s farms, College Farm.  By the 1850s these were, at least partially, owned by John Pound – one of the more significant builders of the Northbrook estate (generally to the west of Burnt Ash Road and Hill) who, as mentioned, also built a quartet of pubs plus a public hall for popular entertainment.

It appears that the brick works was bought by William Winn by 1874 as he had made an application soon after to build what was to become The Crown pub (above) on land which was formerly part of the brick works; in the application he was described as a lighterman and barge owner living at 16 St Stephen’s Road in Bow (1).  Despite being married to Elizabeth, he was living there separately as a lodger, something that was still the case in 1881.   There was another William Winn who was the bailiff at Burnt Ash Farm in the 1850s and early 1860s of a similar age both from East London; however, unless William Winn had two families, it wasn’t him.

In addition to Corona Road, the roads developed by Winn were the eponymous Winn Road and Guibal Road, along with some houses on the eastern side of Burnt Ash Hill.  The early press reports for what was initially called the Burnt Ash Hill Estate are silent on the builder.  However, William Baker who was based at 43 Ronver Road in the 1881 census and employing 12 men, was mentioned in the second phase of the development of the street applying for permission to build 5 homes on the north (2) and 5 on the south side of Corona Road.  So it is quite possible that he built the entire estate.  The houses were substantial ones at the edge of Victorian suburbia – beyond and to the back was rural Kent – as the Ordnance Survey map from 1897 shows.

While the Board of works provided four gas street lights in 1881 (3), it wasn’t until 1889 that they adopted the street and planted lime trees (4); the Board had previously refused to do this, despite complaints from residents, until the builder brought it up to an acceptable standard (5).

It isn’t known how much the houses were sold for but the annual rent was 55 Guineas (£55.25) in 1882, applications could be made at 15 Corona Road which was perhaps being used as a show house for the second phase of houses (6).  This house, now numbered 61, is the only remaining one from the 1880s – it is the left of the two above..

Four years later number 5 was for rent and was described as (7) being in a

Rural situation, on high ground with bracing air.  Near station, shops and tennis ground. Kent £60

The tennis ground was in the apex of Corona Road and Guibal Road and was probably lost in the 1930s as the southern section of Woodyates Road was developed – it isn’t clear whether this was part of the same development as the northern part of the road which was covered a while ago in Running Past.

So who lived there?  A few of the houses were occupied and sold or rented out by the time the census enumerators called in 1881 – in Corona Road itself, only 9 was let or sold, it was home to the Powells – Harry was a senior Civil Servant.  Several on the wider Burnt Ash Hill Estate were the temporary homes to those working for the builders.  Archibald Harrison who was living in one of the houses on Corona Road ‘Burgoyne Cottage;’ he was described as ‘Builder and Decorator, Master’ in the census – it is possible that he may have built some of the estate, or have been a subcontractor for William Baker.

Next to The Crown, on the corner of Corona Road, at Corona Villa, was Elizabeth Winn the seemingly estranged wife of William, their two adult children including William (born 1859) and three servants.  It is worth pausing on the middle one of these, which given the issues that have brought the street name to the fore in 2020, her name seems depressingly apt – Mary Le Fever (see above).  This is almost certainly an enumerator mangling the relatively common French name for an ironworker or smith – Lefèvre.

By the time the census enumerators called again in 1891 Corona Road was an established community. Archibald Harrison, the builder and decorator was still there. The rest of the street clearly oozed wealth an included several were living on their own means, with inherited wealth or had retired with a sizeable income; there was an East India Merchant, a Shipowner and broker, an Accountant, a Civil Engineer and a Chemical Manufacturer. Virtually all had servants, most had more than one.  Elizabeth Winn was still thereon the corner of the street but marked as a widow, with her daughter Maria who was also a widow.

A decade later Archibald Harrison remained and the ‘class’ of occupant was much the same and included a grain merchant, a confectioner, a hardware merchant, a wholesale bookseller, a couple of living on their own means, a shopkeeper, a retired engineer, a solicitor and an accountant. There was also a Mantle manufacturer, George Smith, perhaps the supplier for Alexander Aitken’s shop next to the Lee Green fire station. Again virtually all had servants.

By 1911, not that much had changed, the households were still relatively small in the large houses, almost all with a servant – amongst the occupants was still George Smith, his neighbours included a retired builder, an artist (living on her own means), another living on own means, a ship broker, a company secretary, a bookseller, and a bank cashier.

The 1939 Register was compiled soon after war broke out. A lot had changed since the 1911 census, only one, quite old household had a servant and the household incomes sources and occupations had changed dramatically – jobs now included a teacher, a municipal accountant, office maintenance worker

Corona Road, more particularly the northern side of it fared badly in World War 2, the London County Council maps show much of that side destroyed or damaged beyond repair (8). By 1948 when the Ordnance Survey surveyors mapped the post war urban landscape, that side of the road was full prefab bungalows, no doubt not dissimilar to those that are still present (spring 2020) on the Excalibur Estate a mile to the west.

From the exterior of the current blocks and houses the prefabs were probably replaced in the late 1950s or early 1960s by Lewisham Council.

On the opposite side of the road while the bomb damage maps had marked the land as less badly damaged, the site seems to have been cleared by 1948.  This was presumably for the blocks of Elwyn Gardens, which look as though they may have been built soon after the war.

The housing at the western end of Corona Road is newer, perhaps from the early 1980s, following the demolition on the houses facing Burnt Ash Hill.  Like the rest of the estate, where homes have not been sold under right to buy, it is now owned and managed by a housing association L&Q.

Either side of the only house from the 1880s (pictured above), there are a few what look like 1930s houses, but almost certainly date from the 1950s given the wartime destruction.

Notes

1. Kentish Mercury – 29 August 1874
2. Woolwich Gazette – 02 October 1880
3. Kentish Independent – 10 December 1881
4. Woolwich Gazette -27 September 1889
5. Kentish Independent -13 November 1886
6. 22 September 1882 – Kentish Mercury
7. 26 February 1886 – London Daily News
8. Laurence Ward(2015) ‘The London County Council Bomb Damage Maps 1939-1945’

 

Credits

• A massive thank you to Pat Chappelle who made the link of Corona Road to the correct William Winn – any subsequent errors are, of course, mine.
• The 1881 census image is via Find My Past as are all the other census, 1939 Register and related references – subscription required
• The Ordnance Survey maps from 1897 and 1948 are via the National Library of Scotland on a Non-Commercial Licence