Coombe Farm - Pepys - Moore family

 Coombe – the area between Westcombe Park and Woolwich Road

Railway stations are good places to find small industries.  If we look around the area of many stations there are all sorts of things hidden away inside streets.  I thought we could look at Westcombe Park Station which has some of these interesting things hidden away – and an even more interesting past.  We don’t think of it as an industrial area – but in fact the last factory closed relatively recently and I guess most people had no idea at all that it was there.  It’s also an area which, had been a busy workplace, but was turned into a suburb in the 1880s and 1890s with a great deal of housing development. 

It changed dramatically when the motorway was built as streets disappeared or were rearranged. I’ve heard people who lived there before the motorway came describe it as a sort of little village with community buildings and facilities like the Relief Office, the, now closed, police station, and across the road the fire station. Today it even has a hidden away folly belonging to well-known TV star. 

Basically its area of what was Coombe Farm and I’m very aware that Coombe farm is relatively well known and several people have written about it.  There is a great booklet about the Roberts family who lived there in the 19th century, written by Barbara Ludlow and Sally Jenkinson. More recently there was an interesting article by Ann Robbins in the Westcombe News and I guess there have been several others. 

Whatever, I think I am justified in writing about it as workplace.

I very much suspect that Coombe Farm dated from ‘time immemorial’ and the name of the area where it stood is not particularly precise.  There are all sorts of ‘Coombes’ in this area listed in deeds and various official documents - ‘Eastcombe’, ‘Westcombe’, Nethercombe’ - and it’s often very unclear exactly which name is being used for what. Although we understand ‘Coombe Farm’ to be the name of the building we are looking at,  on the 1697 Travers plan it’s marked as ‘Eastcombe Farm’, but from its position on the map it is clear that the same farm standing in what is now Westcombe Hill – but was then Coombe Farm Lane.

The farm, and today’s Westcombe Park Station, are situated on rising ground with the Marsh to the north of Woolwich Road. There are mentions of flooding in the mid-16th century, and later, in 1636, the sea wall was damaged leading to flooding of some of the farm’s property. On modern flood risk maps there is a narrow corridor of risk reaching up from the Marsh to Westcombe Park Station and the site of the farm.  So Coombe Farm Lane probably followed the line of a stream coming down the hill side from Blackheath – thus the farm was sited where the stream reached the marsh and widened, providing a water supply, but it was above the main flood risk area.

The very earliest records seem to be describing a village, rather than just a farm, and people are listed as ‘of Coombe’. It came into Crown ownership in 1531. Much has been made of the farm apparently being bought by Henry VIII for Ann Boleyn.  Personally I am very suspicious, and would point out that much the same is said of the conversion around the same time of the old Court House on Ballast Quay for her.  Or did Ann actually use it like Marie Antoinette did at Versailles and played at being a shepherdess? – that doesn’t seem quite Ann Boleyn’s style to me. It’s more likely that the Crown invested these properties in the Queen’s estate, whoever the Queen happened to be at the time.

The property records continue with assigning the farm to successive men. Some of whom seem to be interesting and important individuals. I suspect they were different to those who were doing the actual farming but throughout the history of Coombe Farm as show in many legal documents it seems unclear if this is an actual working farm or a country house conveniently near London - where some farming is also going on. 

There is a very well-known mention of Coombe Farm in Samuel Pepys diary.  He describes how he had heard that the plague had arrived at Coombe Farm ‘which is very strange it being a single house all alone from the town’ and says it is because they let beggars sleep in the barns. He describes how on  22nd  August 1665 he was walking to Greenwich and  at ’an open close belonging to Coombe farm‘  he saw a coffin with ‘a dead body therein, dead of the plague’. 

Later, on September 4th, he walked past again and was troubled to pass the farm ‘where about twenty-one people have died of the plague’.  Twenty one does seem rather a lot of people for ‘a single house’– even if they were all live-in farm workers sharing beds in outhouses’. Does it imply a small community?  

I wonder what Pepys knew about the farm? He must have been walking along the Woolwich Road but the farm was up the hill a bit from there – so, did he go out of his way see what was going on? Has he visited in the past and did he know the new lessee of the Farm – a prominent City Councillor and dissenter – Jams Hayes?

In 1666 the farm was leased to James Hayes. Sadie, this is probably not the place to spend a lot of time on details of the career of this interesting man. He was a Linen Draper, and a London politician with a brother-in-law in Parliament. He was active in City politics as well as in the politics of dissent and he was one of Joseph Caryl’s, later John Owen’s, congregation. Throughout the Commonwealth and Restoration he was active – for example in 1670 having been arrested he refused to pay a surety for good behaviour and sued the City magistrates for false imprisonment.

In 1672 following the Declaration of Indulgences James Hayes acquired a license to open a Congregational Meeting House at Coombe Farm. He installed a Mr. Stackhouse (or Stockhouse) as ‘teacher’. I look forward to discovering which of several Mr. Stackhouses was leading this 17th century dissenting congregation in Greenwich.

So what was Coombe Farm like in this end of the 17th century? It is shown on the 1697 Travers’ plan with its frontage onto ‘Coombe Farm Lane. It is on a large square plot which presumably is the farm yard and which stretches from roughly where the downside of Westcombe Park Station is now to the Woolwich Road.  It is shown with a building at the entrance and to the north is long low range of buildings. Roughly in the middle of the plot is an E-ish shaped building which I assume is the main house.  In the centre of the square is an odd -shaped structure which I think must be a pond. 

A description from 1695 says it a ‘fair hall with two parlours’ and ‘chambers, loft, garrets’ and more above. There is a kitchen with ‘a larder, a buttery, a cellar and then a bake house and a pastry house ---- a what? What is a pastry house?  What exactly is it doing in a 17th century farm house?  It seems to be rather more upmarket than you would expect - unless they were eating nothing but pies! I really don’t know.

This description of the site also says it is an old property and that there are plans to improve it.

As far as the wider farm is concerned Samuel Travers’ map is very revealing. He shows several fields on the eastern side of the Marsh adjacent to Lombard Wall (which I wrote about here last year) and they have names like ‘19 Acres’ or ‘21 acres’.  These fields down on the Marsh would be the ones which were flooded. 

By 1718 some of the marshland was held by the Moore family and in 1735 Coombe Farm itself is leased to Thomas Moore.  Thomas also has a lease on the Goose Pool on the Peninsula which was near where the Ecology Centre is today. Henry and Abraham Moore are described as ‘a milkman’ i.e. they are dairy farmers. The family also had land near Deptford Creek which was almost certainly a copperas works on the Greenwich side of the Creek - at the end of Lamb Lane, back of St. Alfege's Church.  This shows their interests were not just confined to the farm. There is some evidence that there was a copperas works with an associated vitriol (sulphuric acid) plant on the Peninsula on the site which is now Enderby wharf. It seems likely that the Moore family were associated with this. 

In 1798 Thomas Moore is listed in the rate books as the owner of Coombe Farm which is described as a ‘busy but prosperous farm'. The main house is a substantial brick house with walled gardens built around 1790. 

We need to move into another century and what was going on here in the 19th century. Eventually, hopefully, I will get to trading estate and the major engineering works which replaced the farm in the 20th century.