A friend of mine keeps telling me that I ought to write one of these articles on the history of Kidbrooke Village -he says It would he says be a big great big best seller - well – OK!
I gather that ‘Kidbrook Village’ is the name used for the new centre and the replacement housing for the much hated Ferrier Estate. Perhaps people think that some time in the past there was an old fashioned type village here and they ‘d like to know about it. To a certain extent that is true but it was a very long time ago and not in the area where the new housing is being built now. I will do my best to explain all that - but there are a lot of different subjects in the past of Kidbrooke and I think it will take me several articles to work through them – so, yet another series!
And can I remind people that these articles are supposed to be about industry in Greenwich – there was industry in Kidbrook but it needs digging out from all the other stuff and the really big industrial sites there are all tangled up with the Royal Air Force. But, after all, industry with a close relationship to the military is nothing new in Greenwich - so I’m sure I can cope with that. These future articles are going to be by way of an introduction to Kidbrooke and partly an explanation as to why it’s so difficult to write about it in way you do most towns and villages
There is already a very interesting history booklet entitled ‘Kidbrooke. Eight Hundred Years
of a Farming Community’ by the late Michael Egan. But it is a collection of subjects
rather than a straightforward description of the area.
The booklet has a good chapter on the boundaries of Kidbrook with all the boundary stones and marks which fit very well with the series of articles I’ve done here recently about the procession around the Greenwich Parish boundary - some of which, of course, are shared with Kidbrooke. Michael was a bit of an expert on these boundary stones and in addition to the booklet wrote a number of articles about them. One of the last articles I did about the Greenwich procession featured a photograph of Michael, kneeling on the ground and looking intently at a boundary stone on the Greenwich - Charlton border. I’ll certainly pick up on what he says about the boundaries of Kidbrooke and it will do very well as a sequel to the articles on the Greenwich Parish boundaries.
I think boundary stones are a subject which will, hopefully, encourage you to go out into streets and look for various features, which have been there for centuries - and I’m always very happy when I can do that.
I also think we should take on the long northern border of Kidbrooke featuring the A2 – the ancient and crucially important Dover Road. That also must make a contribution to the area and some of the things alongside it. Pubs are one thing, and we could note water works sites, and hospitals. I said in an article a couple a couple of weeks ago that at the start of the National Health Service in 1947 Greenwich Parish had at three big general hospitals. I have to admit now that one of them was on the Kidbrook side of the street.
Another subject which might get you out into the streets looking at stuff are the three Kidbrook streams. These streams are crucially important to Kidbrooke’s history and I will talk a bit about that, and, like the boundary stones. Michael took them as a separate chapter and had another separate article about them published elsewhere.
A number of other people have written some quite diverting articles and blogs about the three Kidbrooke streams and what you can see of the remains of them - where they went and where they still go hidden away. If you follow their route you come across a number of interesting buildings which were built on land which was available here. I think it might be very worthwhile to talk a bit about some of those institutions as we come to them.
Michael does go on for the short chapter about the earlier
village of Kidbrooke. This seems to be centred on the northern part of
Kidbrooke which is around the current church and a long way from the new
village which is south of the railway station. In fact today the railway
station stands between the two bits of Kidbrook which is like a figure of 8. The
southern section has
the new housing and interesting features
like Sutcliffe Park while the north has the more historic areas and some older
housing. Michael describes in as much
detail as he could the village which grew up with its church but those details
are very, very sparse and depend strongly on the little we know about that
original parish church in that area - concluding that where there is a
functioning church there is likely to be a functioning community.
The only trouble is that by about 1400 the village had disappeared and remained disappeared for the next five hundred or so years. Was caused by the Black Death? That certainly wiped some villages out in Kent as elsewhere. Personally I find that a bit difficult = Kidbrooke no distance at all from Greenwich, Woolwich and Charlton. It certainly isn’t isolated in the way that some of these plague struck villages were, and surely if somewhere so close to these urban centres had been decimated by infectious illness wouldn’t we know about it in the histories of those towns.
This huge gap in the history of Kidbrooke is strange – what was happening there? I’ve written a bit in the last couple of weeks about the histories of local government administration in Greenwich but kept quiet about Kidbrook. It is described as a ‘liberty’ and that’s a very very unusual and special definition of an area and I think we should find out why it is called that.
Michael continues with a long section on what happened in Kidbrooke over the next five hundred or so years - and I guess he had very little documents and archives to go on. What he used were property transactions about large tracts of land in the Kidbrook area which were being passed down in aristocratic and wealthy families. To find something a bit different I’ve been looking at the British Library newspaper database which isn’t something Michael would have had access to. I wanted to see if I could find any of those little stories about various people working locally and the things that happen in their lives. No- all I got was a long series of newspaper notices of births and deaths of various doings and property dealings of the same aristocratic and wealthy owners of the estates locally. None of this has actually very much to do with what was going on in Kidbrook itself! I’m perfectly willing to believe that all these large tracts of land had farms on them and had professional management = and this was not subsistence farming but growing for sale in the City of London and the inner urban areas.
I’ve seen articles about how on Mile End Road coming into the city it was jammed every morning with carts full of vegetables and fresh bread. Every day coming down from the Lea Valley were vast amount of vegetables - all specially grown Tesco as a supermarket chain grew from the Lea Valley Growers. I’ve also read about the boats which came down the Thames every morning from up river fruit farms bringing often quite exotic produce into the City. I do wonder however if Kidbrook farms might have had contracts to supply Greenwich palace complex.
The Greenwich peninsula was not good for arable farming. Fields were let to butchers who had bought ‘beef on the hoof’ and allowed the animals to rest and recover from what would often been a long and possibly traumatic walk into London so that they were in best condition when they were slaughtered. Other fields were led to cab hire and other bodies which used horses and to give them much needed rests and breaks from the streets. Kidbrook may have been the same.
But my best guess for the use of Kidbrook farm is grazing for commercial milk production. Apparently in the early 20th century three of these farms were owned by Express Dairies to supply milk to their shops and so on. My case rests!
We could move on quite quickly from this to the current situation. From the mid-nineteenth century suburban housing was moving into the northern section of Kidbrooke with a new church and community buildings and the large sites which had been big farms we’re easily sold off to the County Council and developers for housing – big facilities like the first comprehensive school. In the 1930s there was a big industrial site in the area - the rather mysterious RAF base. It included things like the barrage balloon headquarters, a language school and various other things, all of which we can happily look at.
A big site is taken over by the County Counsel and the Ferrier Estate very much against the wishes of Greenwich Council and turns out to be a total disaster.
So I will write this as best I can sand with all my good wishes the new developments and the hope that we’ll be successful with new facilities better than the hapless Ferrier. Meanwhile I think we should all relax and go along to our local yoga club.
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