Plaxtol Place - Arthur Martin - Sperati

 

The first book, that I’m aware of, which is about London’s industrial past dates from as long ago as 1967.  It claims itself to be ‘the first’ - and it’s a glossy publication with a new and large photograph on each page. It was called London. Industrial Heritage by somebody called Aubrey Wilson, about whom I know nothing, with photographs by Joseph McKeown who equally I know nothing about.

There are one or two photographs and write-ups about sites in the Greenwich area. One of them is about a 19^th-century planing machine which was then still in use at a firm called Grafton’s which was in Eltham on the site in Footscray Road that is now B&Q. People might remember Graftons which was a strange castellated factory which made I think made office sundries – typewriter ribbons and so on.

But Grafton’s is not what this is about.

This article is the fourth one in a small series about the Coombe Farm area north of Westcombe Park Station. So what has this got to do with industrial heritage and Grafton’s in Footscray Road?

The planing machine itself is interesting. It was made – I guess around 1890 - by the 19^th-century engineering firm of Joseph Whitworth in Manchester.   There is a very much earlier model from the 1840s in the Science Museum and there is a page description of it at  https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co8404490/whitworth-planing-machine-planing-machine

But what is particularly interesting about this old machine and its relevance to Coombe Farm is that in the last paragraph Aubrey Wilson’s page on it says that Grafton’s acquired the machine around 1900 and it was thought to have been sold to them by ‘the famous tool and cutter makers, Arthur Martin & Co of Westcombe Park, London’.

 And Arthur Martin & Co may have been famous to Aubrey Wilson in 1967 but to me they are bit of a mystery.  In fact Aubrey Wilson would have saved me a lot of bother if he had asked around before he wrote his book and given a bit more detail.  Arthur Martin closed, I think, in 1961 but they were still advertising for staff “a permanent position offering advancements’  in 1959. So there must have been people around who knew about them.

They were on the site of the small industrial area which moved into the remains of  Coombe Farm was to the north of Westcombe Park station and fronted onto Westcombe Hill. It is now the site of Mayston Mews and a site now cleared for  building where the button factory and some other buildings were. The address is sometimes given as a Plaxtol Place although I am not sure which bit of the area rhat actually was.  On some maps there is a through road to Ormiston Road shown called ‘Stewart Road’ but I’m very unclear if that road ever actually existed. The area hardly looks to have enough space for an engineering workshop  - and there were other businesses there as well.

At Plaxtol Place before the Great War there was also a firm called Sofnol who moved out in 1917 to a bigger factory in Anchor and Hope Lane, Sofnol had been setup by James Paul who was a pioneer in the manufacture of hydrated lime, used as an agent in industrial water treatment works.  He consultant to boiler makers Babcock and Wilcox.  Softnol is short for Water Softening Materials Company. After 1917 they retained their offices at Plaxtol Place until the early 1950s by which time the company was called Turfssoil and was basically a landscape gardening organisation – busy selling trees to new motorways. The company eventually moved to Maidstone in the 1970s - and I wonder if ‘Maidstone’ has any relevance to the name of Mayston Mews which is now on part of the site in Westcombe Park. Turfsoil are still at work and have, for instance, a long-term contract with Greenwich Park dating back to 1970s.

The final business on this site was the button makers, SperatiI, who closed only a few years ago and it is their works which has been demolished most recently. I knew Beryl, who worked there, and she was keen to have something about them in the local press.  Eventually an article appeared in Westcombe News about the firm, written by Jo Hadland.  Sperati had set up a wholesale button manufacture  and sales business in Tooley Street in Southwark in 1856,moved to Milk Street in the City and then in 1961 to Westcombe Hill.  As 1961 seems to be the date Arthur Martin closed, did Sperati move into the premises they had just left??  They were one of the main manufacturers of button In this country and apparently there are only six. They made buckles and buttons for leading luxury fashion retailers and also tailor's chalk, tape measures, pins, ribbons, and various kinds of tailor's shears. The other site which I ought to  mention is a bit further to the north and is at the back of the houses in  Westerdale Road. It was always said to be an old barn from Coombe Farm and I remember in the 1970s and 80s when it belonged to Councillor Frank Burton – he kept in it a miniature roundabout which he used for fundraising at local fetes and fairs.  Since then it has been done up a studio and you can’t see it from the road.  A lot of doubt has been expressed as to whether it really was a barn or even anything to do with the farm at all. Philip Binns did a lot of research into it and published an article with his findings. He thought  it was built between 1869-1894 because it isn’t on the 189 OS map; which shows the Farm buildings. The 1894  OS map shows Combe Farm with new development all around and - most importantly a property at the rear but outside the Farm area. It was accessed via a passageway from what was then called Milton Road.  By 1916 Combe Farm had gone but the property was still there and was accessed from Westerdale Road. The 1916 directory gives the occupant as Ernest Palmer with the premises being used as a laundry. 

So,  back to ‘the famous’ Arthur Martin about whom I can find very little. I have a suspicion that the firm  might have come from Clerkenwell in around 1901 but I could find no definite proof of it.  They moved to Westcombe Park in the late 1890s and presumably didn’t want their large and probably expensive planing machine and so sold it to Graftons around 1900.  Arthur Martin himself died in 1945 and all I know about him is that he lived in Felbridge just outside East Grinstead - a family of blacksmiths had lived nearby in an earlier period and I wondered if he was one of their sons.  I don’t know why they were famous or exactly what they did but it was to do with cutting metal in special ways.  There are small mentions of them in those infuriating Google search ‘snippets’ which indicate that they were doing something interesting and important and some of their equipment had standard applications.  There is never enough detail to pin them down. 

I am going to try and put a note out in the historic engineering press to see if anybody knows about them and why they were famous and why they had this really rather important planing machine.   I don’t what happened to the machine when Grafton’s closed but in the back of my mind is an idea that it went to a museum or something similar - but I can’t find any reference to that.

This is almost the ends of the story of Coombe Farm which stood for so many centuries in what is now Westcombe Hill was swept away by encroaching urban development. The big change came about with the motorway and its often difficult to relate what is on old maps to what is there now.

The motorway came through from the Sun in the Sands in the 1960s and changed Westcombe Hill.  The bottom end of it is now Farmdale Road and in the last 10 years the last little relic of its existence as Westcombe Hill has gone. At the bottom embedded in the road was one of those old-fashioned traffic light pads that changed the lights when a vehicle went over them. That was put there when Westcombe Hill was a major road and, well - nothing lasts.