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ACTON GREEN HISTORY
updated:
Monday, 28 January 2008
The
known history of the area is mainly from the 19th and 20th centuries,
although the find of Iron Age coins near Bollo Lane suggests settlement from
much earlier times. We know
that a Roman road ran via Bayswater, Goldhawk Road across
Acton Green Common to Staines, Silchester and Bath. A Roman VI
Legion tile is reported to have been found in the Acton Green area, and
Kelly's Directory for 1890 says: "a Roman urn and silver coins were found at
Turnham Green in 1731".
The famous battle of Turnham Green,
fought on
the 12th and 13th of November 1642, was a crucial encounter in the Civil War, ranging over the
whole of the area and along the Bollo Brook up into Acton. The battle was a defeat for the Royalists, under Prince
Rupert. The Royalists thought they could attack Parliamentary soldiers led
by the Earl of Essex, who were camped on Turnham Green; but they were
defeated in a bloody battle which, according to one contemporary account,
left eight hundred Royalists and a hundred and twenty Parliamentarians dead
on the Green. (see also Battlefield Trust on the News page).
Acton Green Common: nine hundred dead in the
Civil War
Although Turnham Green itself is outside the AGRA area, the map below from
1865 shows another part of the area on which the battle was fought two
centuries previously. Clearly
shown are a pond in front of what is now Arlington Park Mansions, and a
drinking fountain just north of the church. Christchurch (consecrated in
July, 1843) is an early work by George Gilbert Scott who later built St
Pancras station and hotel .
Click here for a
larger version of the map.
Map of Turnham Green submitted to the Poor Law Board in 1865
(see footnote)
Acton Green was connected to the small town of Acton by a cartway along the western edge of
South Field to the Uxbridge Road. Church
Path, which runs north to south, to the east of the Acton Green area, is
possibly a medieval route linking St. Mary's church in Acton (facing
Morrisons on Acton High Street) with
a little settlement on Acton Green.
Originally a small hamlet with a short row of
houses on the south side of the green by 1800 and a cluster of cottages and
houses at the bottom of Acton Lane by 1842, Acton Green became a parish when
the church of St Alban's was built in 1877-8.
Click here to see a map
of Acton & Acton Green in 1805.
Church Path: medieval route?
The area once had several small rivers. The Bollo Brook,
according to a report published in 1826,
originated near Fordhook, flowed under a bridge on the
Uxbridge Road, and then ran south-eastward to Acton Green and finally into the grounds of Chiswick House via the NW corner of Turnham Green
which was often prone to
flooding. This report also says that in times of flooding the Bollo Brook flowed over Acton Common
into the Stamford Brook further to the east. The Mill Hill Brook also flowed south from Mill
Hill and then turned east along Acton Common into the Stamford Brook. Some
later sources say that the Bollo Brook itself crossed Acton Common to the
Stamford Brook. These brooks are now culverted, but the Bollo Brook still floods after heavy
summer rain at the lower end of Bollo Lane and drains through Gunnersbury
Triangle Nature Reserve.
Another 1822 map shows Fairlawn House and
Back Common,
but little else except a small river between Acton & Turnham Green
The
Acton Green area was becoming increasingly popular in the early 19th century
due to its proximity to Chiswick High Road Several large houses were built
here, one of which, to the west of the green, was Fairlawn House (shown on early OS maps
as "Fairlawn", standing in its own grounds and surrounded by formal
gardens, ponds and orchards). Its land enclosed the site of today's Chiswick
Park station. There was a house on this site from at least as early as the
late 17th century. At that time it was in the possession of Thomas Childs,
Lord of the Bishopric Manor of Acton, whose main residence was at
Daycroft, Acton Town. It is known that Child's antecedents earlier in the
17th century had barley-yielding land in Chiswick and a brewhouse at Acton
Green. It is probable that it was on this site that the house, later to be
called Fairlawn, was built. In 1742 the property, together with its
brewhouse and one acre of gardens and orchards, as well six acres of
nearby land, passed to Sir Crisp Gascoigne, a Lord Mayor of London. The
property then passed on to the Rev. Christopher Naylor and Humphrey Bramble
before it was surrendered in May 1785 to John Bedford. Mr. Bedford had moved
to the house, probably much earlier, when he came to Acton Green from
London. In 1799 Fairlawn passed to Patrick Thomson, but in 1793 James
Christie was in tenure and Bedford was completing the house some way to the
east which we know as Bedford House.
Fairlawn House on 1841 map. The meeting of the fork of the Y shape
below it is the present site of Chiswick Park
tube station.
Using land from both Fairlawn House and the District Railway (which had
arrived in 1879 - see below), a development known as Fairlawn Park was planned in 1880 but approval for building was not given until 1888.
When Fairlawn House was eventually knocked down in 1889 it gave its name
to the roads
built on its grounds - Fairlawn Grove & Fairlawn Avenue.
Earlier in the 19th century, another house called Fairlawn Villa was
erected on the corner of today's Rothschild Road and Bollo Lane, and is
shown on the OS maps of 1865 & 1893 as having ponds, gardens and stables.
Fairlawn Villa became the new Fairlawn House after the old house was pulled
down in 1889, and was itself demolished
in 1909 when Rothschild School was built on the site. During World War II,
children from Rothschild School were evacuated to Dorchester in Dorset. The school was pulled down
in the 1980s and an old people's home called
Garden Court was built. The pond in
the grounds of Garden Court
is
perhaps a reminder of the large pond which was once in the grounds of the
new Fairlawn House.
This plaque in an alley on the south
side of the west end of Weston Road marked the boundary of the land used
for Rothschild primary school which later became Garden Court old people’s
home
The Bedfords of Fairlawn House indulged in some
property speculation, building Bedford, Melbourne and Sydney Houses.
Melbourne House (in South Parade) and Bedford House still remain. The front of Bedford House is
obscured by the shops of Bedford Corner, at the south end of the Avenue,
but its side view can be seen. Also the home of John Lindley the
famous botanist, Bedford House is being considered by English Heritage for a
blue plaque. It was through the
naming of Bedford house that the name of Bedford lives on in the area as
Bedford Park, first developed in the mid 1870s.
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The map below shows that Acton and the Acton Green area (though not shown
specifically on this map) lay between two early major trunk roads: the road to Oxford through
Acton, and the road to Bath through Chiswick & Brentford. Some 18th
Century and early 19th Century building had already taken place with the
erection
of large houses such as Fairlawn House, Cumberland Villa, The Elms, Sydney
House etc.
However, most of the area had for centuries been either parkland or devoted
to agriculture until the Enclosure Laws of 1859 when farmers could
purchase land in return for the strips which they had traditionally worked.
In turn, the farmers sold their plots to developers as building lots, some
no wider than sixteen feet, for the building of small houses for the lower classes,
some
who moved to the western suburbs as
London grew rapidly with the expansion of the railway network. The land of
the larger estates was sold off to speculative builders, one of whom was the
British Land Company whose property portfolio today includes the Broadgate Centre in
London and the Meadowhall shopping centre in Sheffield. Within a
few decades most of the Acton area was completely transformed as new streets and rows of
neat, terraced, two-storey houses appeared. The former large houses
were demolished, in some cases passing on their names - such as
Fairlawn - to the roads built on their ground. Many of these
new houses were rented by workers in local occupations such as brickmaking
and laundries. Often lodgers were taken in to help pay
the rent or the wives took in washing in order to earn extra money
(see below). The 1881 census has details of one house where 18 people lived
in a tiny four-bedroomed house.
This 1822 map clearly shows the two major trunk
roads
In
1835 the German banker
Nathan
Meyer Rothschild (1777-1836) bought the large mansion at
Gunnersbury
and its lands to the south west. He had arrived in England in 1796 and took
British citizenship in 1806, becoming the first of the "English Rothschilds".
He died one year after buying Gunnersbury and never lived in the house, but his son,
Baron
Lionel Rothschild (1808-1879) who was both an MP and a philanthropist,
lived at Gunnersbury and extended the park until his death in 1879. During
this time visitors of the highest rank were entertained here, including
Disraeli the Prime Minister. By the time Lionel's son
Leopold
(1845-1917) inherited the estate, the Rothschild family owned not only
Gunnersbury and much of the property north of Pope's Lane up to Ealing
Common, but also much of the land in south-west Acton extending down to the
Acton Green area. From the 1860's
their farming land and paddocks were sold off and
around 1870
new
streets started to appear such as Rothschild and Antrobus roads and
Cunnington Street. Building companies like British Land tended to
be free of restriction on use, with the result that South Acton quickly
became a mixed industrial and residential district. Laundries (see below)
were run in private houses, several occupiers kept pigs and other businesses
included bone-crushing plants and slaughter houses. As early as 1869 the
local board held an inquiry into the conditions there, and officials
consequently tried to remove pigs and noxious trades. The mixture of
residential and industrial use survives today in the Acton Green area.
Many of the new street names were
associated with the Rothschilds’ interests;
Bridgman, Kent, Kingswood, Temple and Weston are
thought to be the names of their Buckinghamshire estates, and even their
gardeners. However, some street names derive from local residents,
developers or personalities. William Antrobus was a
prominent Rector of Acton 1797-1853. Montgomery Road is not related to Montgomery of Alamein (though he lived for a time in Grove
Park), but is more
likely to be named after Miss Montgomery, a bridesmaid at the wedding
in 1865 of Baron Lionel Rothschild's daughter. The 1861 census shows a Thos.
Cunnington, soap manufacturer, at Woodland Villas in the same area.
Beaumont Road is named after Mr Barber Beaumont who developed and
renamed the former Broomcroft Estate where Broomcroft House (demolished
c.1870 and previously owned by Sir John Fielding, the blind Bow Street
magistrate and half brother of novelist Henry Fielding) once stood on
the west side of Acton Lane, south of Antrobus road. Broomcroft Lane was an earlier name given to Acton Lane (see also
"Records and Recollections" on the
Old Times page).
Acton
Green had been famous for its many laundries since the 1860s when the
gentrification of areas like Notting Hill displaced working class families
who settled further west to continue their cottage industries. Tradition has
it that a good supply
of soft water in the Acton Green area was favourable for laundries, but this
has been disputed on the grounds that, despite there being many springs and
brooks in the area, they were often polluted with waste and manure from the
farms and piggeries. Some laundries had wells, three of which have been
found in Rothschild Road. Others had Artesian wells, though the laundry
owners said that this water was harder than mains water which arrived in Acton
Green in 1879 thanks to the Metropolitan Water Act. The mains water was taken from
the Thames at Hampton above Teddington, then to Kew where it was filtered
before being piped into houses. Old
proprietors complained that the water was "shockingly hard" and needed to be
softened with liberal doses of soda. Whatever the truth about the water,
there were other reasons why laundries became established in Acton: west
London was cleaner than the east which meant that washing could be dried
outdoors; rail transport had improved with stations at South Acton and Acton
Green (later Chiswick Park); good road transport to Hammersmith, Kensington,
Knightsbridge and the West End; a flourishing soap industry at Brentford.
Some houses were advertised for sale as being suitable for conversion to
laundries which often entailed building additional accommodation at the
bottom of the garden, with a wash-house below and ironing and mangling rooms
above. Many of these converted houses can still be seen today in the older
parts of Acton and Acton Green. The 1861
census gives the names of one hundred "laundresses" and lists an "Acton Green Laundry" run by James and Sarah Liddiard
employing 4 men and 20 women. By 1873 there were around 60 laundries on the
Mill Hill estate (where South Acton Housing Estate is today), and by 1899
there were over 178 laundries of all sizes in 19 streets in the area, many of
them small one-woman businesses washing by hand.
At one stage there were about
25 laundries in Rothschild Road alone, some long-established like the
Advance Laundry at number 32 where Beaulieu Place is today.
Hence the area earned
the nickname "Soapsuds Island" or the "washtub of London" which it retained
well into the 20th century. The number of laundries diminished as electrical power
became available around the time of the First World War, and was estimated
to have diminished to about 70 just before the Second World War. As
late as the mid 1950s around 50 remained - as do some
even to this day.
A permanent reminder of former days can be seen in many streets where
arched
carriage entrances and dropped kerbs, once used to provide access for laundry carts or
other industrial vehicles, are still
visible on the front of many properties.
Several trades to complement the laundries were generated: hand-woven baskets and
hampers were made in Antrobus and Bollo Bridge Roads; mangles, wringers,
washing machines and tubs were supplied from Trussler in Bollo Bridge Road.
By the 1880s Acton had its own soapmakers, including a soap works behind the
Cambridge House Laundry. The need in the early days to transport the washing
by horse-drawn vans also gave rise to the need for smithies and chaff
merchants.
Light
industries, some to support the laundries, were also established in the
area at the end of the 19th century, and scattered remnants of these small
factories or workshops can still
be seen today. One of the largest factories was Evershed & Vignoles,
built in 1933, at the
bottom of Acton Lane, to where the company had originally moved in 1903, which employed 4,000 people making many kinds of
electrical test equipment. During the Second World War the factory
produced radar equipment, petrol gauges for Lancaster bombers and dashboards
for Chieftain tanks, perhaps making it a target for several bombs which fell on the
area. The company became part of Thorn Electronics in 1971 and factory was turned into expensive
luxury flats in the 1990s. The access road
was named Evershed Walk.
Many of the premises that once housed the small
workshops still survive throughout the Acton Green area, though they now
support different trades. Some workshops have become residential dwellings,
others have been replaced by smart, new housing developments.
Once the Evershed & Vignoles factory,
now luxury flats and a trading estate
By 1874 the District Railway had already reached Hammersmith
and in 1877 the line was extended via Turnham
Green to Richmond,
thereby allowing easy access to the West End of London for people living in
the Kew and Richmond area. The service to Turnham Green had been an
immediate success as it served Bedford Park, London's first "Garden Suburb". Residents of Acton and Ealing, however, still had
to take a circuitous route via the "North Pole Junction" on the
North London Line if they wished to
travel to Victoria by train. People wishing to get from Ealing to Hammersmith had no
option but to walk. In 1877 the District Railway submitted a bill to Parliament to
request that they be allowed to build a line from LSWR station at Turnham
Green along 2 miles & 75 chains of new track to Ealing. The parliamentary
Select Committee on Railway Bills of April 1877 heard many arguments both for against this
extension, though most were in favour. When questioned at this committee,
the Rev. Andrew Hunter Dunn, vicar of South Acton, said: "It is a
populous district - we have about 5,000 inhabitants now, and it has grown
1,000 in about 4 of 5 years. We have a good sprinkling of clerks who live in
smallish houses and who go to town every day. Then we have some agricultural
people, some who keep pigs, but the main part of the population is made up of
a large number of
laundries. There are about 30 hands employed in some of them, and there are
a great many cottages for the people to live in who work in these laundries".
Opposing the new railway was one Baron Rothschild, owner of much of the
surrounding land (see above), who feared that the trains would disturb the brood mares in his
paddocks. Eventually the arguments in favour won the
day
and the Act received Royal Assent on August 14th, 1877.
When the railway first opened on 1st July, 1879, "Acton Green" was the
original name given to what is now Chiswick Park Station; it was renamed "Chiswick Park and Acton Green Station" in 1887, until it became simply
"Chiswick Park
Station" in 1910.
Chiswick Park station area around 1920
Within living memory the Acton Green area was well
supplied with many small shops. Along the length of Cunnington Street and
Kingswood Road there were almost 20 shops including a butcher, draper,
newsagent, fish shop, green-grocer, hardware store and an off-licence. By
1988 only three shops remained: Mr Patel who sold wine on the corner of
Church Path, Mr Patel who sold bread at the corner of Antrobus Road and
Cunnington Street, and Mr Patel who had videos at the corner of Kingswood and
Kent Road. Today only one
corner shop
in Cunnington Street remains. The Acton Green area was in many ways a
self-sufficient community and partook in the activities that were common at
the time. Now, much of that era is lost, leaving behind
forlorn reminders of former work and
social activities as old buildings fall into disuse. The pictures below show
the demise of a derelict shop at the
corner of Antrobus Road and Cleveland Road - now demolished and replaced by
a block of flats.
Local shops are unable to survive - Sept
2003
Reduced to a pile of bricks - 30th Oct 2003
Now a block of flats called "The Island"
History of
Acton Green researched and written by Geoffrey Rippingale
Footnote: map of Front
Common (Turnham Green) by kind permission of National Archives Kew from whom
permission must be obtained before it is reproduced or printed (Image
Library, TNA, Kew, Surrey, TW9 4DU).
© 2008 Acton Green Residents' Association
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