Last week I started writing about the small industrial area which lies to the south of Westcombe Park station. I didn’t get very far with it and all I wrote was about the early history of Coombe Farm which was on the site of the future industrial area. The farm buildings remained on the site until around 1900. I finished last week with the late 18th century when the farm was owned by members of the Moore family. They seemed to be operating a copperas works on the Greenwich Peninsula and had had one for some years at Deptford Creek. The Moore family was one of a succession of owners and residents on the site who had industrial interests nearby. I also hope that I had established that, although I’m sure it was farmed the sense of keeping cows or growing fruit and vegetables, the farm had a very strong industrial aspect to it.
Although the Moore family were still at the farm around 1800 we need to go back a few years in the history of the area. We need to go just up the road from the farm into what is now Mycenae Road. RIght at the top is the building which is now used as the Steiner School but which was for many years the Greenwich Local History Department. Called Woodlands, it was built in 1774 for John Julius Angerstein and the presence here of the Angerstein family would very much influence the future of Coombe Farm. John Julius Angerstein is well known and has featured in a great many local history books and articles. Recently he has been investigated for links to slavery in the West Indies and one of the main contributors to this debate has been the National Gallery, which was founded using the pictures which Angerstein collected to show in his Blackheath House. John Julius died in 1821 but his work was carried on by his son, John.
In 1833 the farm was advertised for sale as a ‘Remarkably Valuable Freehold Estate .comprising that capital and well-known Farm called East Farm with a Spacious House, barn, stabling, granary, and other agricultural buildings, and One Hundred and Eighteen Acres of very Rich and Productive Arable, Meadow, and Pasture Land’. Most tellingly however the house is described as being ‘easily convertible Into Villa Residence’. A few months late another sale advertisement sounds more like part of a farm ‘two stacks of excellent straw, 10 acres of potatoes, a quantity of mangel straw, a stack of flags, large grain cart, a strong cart mare, sundry harness’.
John Angerstein bought the farmhouse in 1838. He used it as a home for his daughter and her up husband, a naval captain, Richard Rowley. They stayed there until 1846. The farm was then sold to Mary Roberts.
The Roberts family’s tenure of the farm is the subject of Sally Jenkinson’s part of the booklet about Coombe Farm which was published by the Gordon Teachers Centre in 1987. It is presented to us up as a diary of life on the farm in 1858 with material taken from diaries, one by Mary Roberts herself and another, later one, written by her son Daniel. It is illustrated by a series of entertaining drawings by Sally Jenkinson herself.
Mary Roberts was a commercial grower of vegetables for London markets. She had had a business in Wick Lane, Hackney and was looking to expand. The Roberts family were to keep Coombe Farm for 40 years. In 1861 it covered-30 acres had a staff of 64 men 46 women and two boys.
The book begins in January with skating on local ponds and work of the farm - planting red cabbage and radishes. The family go to see army parades In Woolwich, and, more excitingly,the launch of Brunel’s Great Eastern - later they go by boat to have a good look at it close up. The book continues with the work of the farm along with social events and news of family and friends. At the end are some advertisements and lists of things like the contents of workshops, farmyard equipment. It also tells us what they grew in the garden and what furniture was in the house.
In 1847 some other things going on in the neighbourhood. John Angerstein's workmen had constructed a fence on the west side of Coombe Farm Lane and the Parish Highways Committee went to view it and decided it encroached on Parish property. This was resolved within a couple of months and resulted in the straightening of the lane and widening it to 30 feet - which would be much more suitable for the sort of suburban road it was becoming – no longer just a farm lane -and seen as a ‘great improvement and great convenience the public’.
One of the recommendations by the ParishSurveyorwas that the ‘watercourse … remain on the east side of the hedge which Mr Angerstein had erected’. There is no sign of this water course on numerous maps of the area but there were, and are, many streams which go down the hillside from Blackheath and I would be more surprised if one didn’t exist, than if one did.
There is also an issue about the fields on the east side of the farm, across what became the AngersteinRailway line. It’s quite clear from maps that this field had been used for chalk extraction in that there are two large craters marked on contemporary maps as ‘chalk pits’. In 1848 there was an incident concerning 1,000 yards of copper wire being removed by some men ‘calling themselves builders’. This mentions aMr.Noakes of the ‘Combe Farm lime kilns’- so, who is he? It is some sort of subcontractor leasing the field to manage the lime kilns? On the 1867 OS map a lime kiln is marked south of the main railway between Westcombe Park and Charlton. It is north of the curve of the railway which takes the line from Charlton to the Angerstein Line and the River. Effectively it was inside the ‘U’ shaped line easily seen on maps, then and now.
Today this area appears to be some sort of clearing used as a rubbish dump, reached by a path from the Police Car Pound. It is marked on other maps as ‘old chalk pit’ and some old photographs show chalk’ cliffs around some of the area. Was this chalk pit attached to the farm – who worked it and when? Was lime kiln still worked in the 1840s and 1850s?
Chalk was sometimes extracted to use for ‘land improvement’ and so maybe needed for the marshland. I don’t know,but it is clearly part of the farm.
In 1848 more changes were comingwith great rapidity. There is a report in this year of a fire in the workshops of the railway tunnel between BlackheathStation and Charlton, still under construction. I don’t know if these workshops, said to be at one end of the tunnel, were near Blackheath station or on the much wider piece of open ground, adjacent to Coombe Farm Lane. This is where the tunnel mouth now stands, almost totally unseen although in constant use.
The tunnel was built to connect
Charlton and Woolwich with Blackheath and central London. It came into use with the original North Kent Line on 30th
July 1849. The South Eastern Railway would have preferred extending the line by
tunnelling underneath Greenwich Park, to reach Greenwichand the London &
Greenwich Railway station. However, opposition from the Royal Observatory
prevented this, so the circuitous route via Blackheath and Lewisham was provided
–and thetunnel was part of it.
With the tunnel coming so near to the area in Coombe Farm Lane/Westcombe Hill which we are looking at, this is surely about the steadily ‘modernisation’ of the area. We take very little notice now of the railway which comes through Blackheath, and down to the Charlton junction. That is because the Angerstein line, built in 1851, and the motorway, effectively masks the main line railway although they lie parallel with Charlton Farm Lane/Westcombe Hill.
I’m sure you’ve all heard more
than enough about the Angerstein Line - I write about it constantly. But it is about change from a rural farming
area to an urban one.
Many little houses were beginning to be buit and cover the area through the late 19th century. In newspapers then are advertisements for blocks of housesbeing built around the area - we know them well and many of us live in them. Theywere being constructed by building companies and then being rented out. They were then sold on to a commercial agency as investments by making money from the rents. Today most of them have been sold and the people in them are owner occupiers. We forget this exploitative system which built up so much of our urban areas in London. And yes it may have been the countryside in 1870 was very soon inner city.
To finish this episode of our story of the little trading estate north of Westcombe Park Station - this is another letter from John Angerstein to the parish council – whose members, I regret to say, all had a bit of a chuckle and said they hoped that his letter might be an invite to dine with them.His proposal was to level, at his own expense, the inequalities of the hill and surface of Coombe Farm Lane.The Parish councillors,however, were quite clear that the plan were about the as yet unannounced railway and would 'no doubt greatly benefit Mr. Angerstcin'.
At around the same time a letter was received Mrs Mary Roberts and her son at Coombe Farm. She was very concerned and called attention to the fact that the extreme end of the pariah it was not properly lighted and there were no proper kerbs on the streets. The place is becoming more urban by the minute
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