Woodgrange Farm and the growth of modern Forest Gate

Mark Gorman (@Flatshistorian) continues his series on the agricultural lands that dominated the pre-suburban Forest Gate. In this article he examines the history of Woodgrange farm, the longest surviving farm on the edge of Wanstead Flats.

Although only its name survives today in the names of a road, an estate, a school and a medical practice, Woodgrange was the longest surviving farm on the edge of Wanstead Flats. Its name means the farm in the wood, and it may have been established when, after the Norman Conquest large areas of the manor of West Ham appear to have been cleared for agriculture.   

This reflected the growing importance of the London market for food production, which was to dominate the agricultural economy of the area round Wanstead Flats until the nineteenth century. 

A charter of 1189 confirmed the donation of Woodgrange to the abbey of Stratford Langthorne, which held it until the dissolution by Henry VIII in 1538. Both the Abbey and the later owners of Woodgrange manor claimed the right of grazing sheep between Woodgrange and Walthamstow, on what is now Wanstead Flats.

Woodgrange Farm appears on a mid-18^th century map of the estate holdings which were later owned by the Pelly family.

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Woodgrange Farm land south of the Romford road (“The Highway”) on 'A map of Plaistow Ward taken by Ino. Iames 1742'. Upton Lane is on the right of the map. Possibly Stark House was an earlier dwelling than the 19^th century farmhouse just to the north. (London Borough of Newham Archive).

The map shows Woodgrange Farm, or fields which were part of the farm, on the south side of the road to Romford, land belonging to “Mr Chaynie”. Two buildings are also shown, labelled Stark House, which may have been an earlier farmhouse replaced by the one a few hundred metres north in the 19^th century.   

One hundred years later the sale of Woodgrange Farm in 1845 included one lot of 24 acres of “very valuable garden ground” called Margery Hall, which may refer to this piece of land. In the early nineteenth century Woodgrange Farm, along with much of the built property in Forest Gate, was owned by John Pickering Peacock. 

His tenant Samuel Winmill was a member of one of several farming families in the area (the Plaxtons and the Lakes being others – see Cann Hall Farm and Aldersbrook Farm articles, earlier in this series). When Winmill died in 1827 the farm consisted of 110 acres (of which nearly half was sown with potatoes). The rest was sown to wheat and rye (which supplied the Truman, Hanbury and Buxton Brewery) together with the usual complement of five cows, probably kept for domestic consumption.

All the crops, together with a substantial amount of farm equipment and “20 powerful cart horses”, were put up for sale, pointing to a significant commercial operation. Winmill’s successor at Woodgrange Farm believed that the farm business had been severely undermined by thefts, and indeed that Winmill had been bankrupted by them.

While Peacock retained ownership of the valuable freehold land, the new tenant was Richard Gregory, from a long-established Spitalfields family with aspirations to join the gentry. Gregory was a potato wholesaler at Spitalfields market who “in the course of a few years had become the first in the trade”, earning a large fortune in the process. 

This enabled him to invest in local agriculture and become a country gentleman, and in the 1841 census he was living at Woodgrange with three small children and 4 or 5 servants (though he also appears to have maintained his home in Spitalfields, presumably to be close to his main business).

The farm also made him significant profits; the potato crop alone could yield 13 tons a day in summer, which would have sold for up to 50 shillings a ton in the Spitalfields wholesale market (August 1838 prices). When he died Gregory left his family over £100,000 (worth over £7 million today). Even though Gregory died in 1843 the farm for a number of years was known as Gregory’s, and what became Woodgrange Road as Gregory’s Lane. 

By the mid-nineteenth century Woodgrange was a little over 200 acres in size, and like most of the neighbouring farms, continued to comprise mainly market gardens. It extended from Stratford Green in the west to the East Ham parish boundary (modern day Balmoral Road) with the farm buildings located to the east of what is now Woodgrange Road.

 Woodgrange Farm on the Ordnance Survey 25-inch map 1863-67. Forest Gate station is on the left; the farm was situated south of what is now Hampton Road.

In July 1845 Woodgrange Farm was auctioned off as part of John Pickering Peacock’s estate. The farm was described as having “a farm residence, extensive farming buildings, in stabling, cow-houses, barns, wheelwrights’ and smiths’ shops and shed”. The potential of the estate as building land was emphasised in the sale advertisement, a sign of the rapid changes that were about to come in Forest Gate. By that time the farm was let to William Adams, a locally born farmer who was still at Woodgrange for the 1851 census.

Samuel Gurney bought the estate in 1845 and the 1852 tithe apportionment map shows that William Adams was his tenant for nearly the whole of Woodgrange Farm, including the fields east and west of modern day Woodgrange Road (Gravel Pit Field to the west, and White Horse Field south and east of the farm). 

Adams also rented two fields north of Forest Lane, the splendidly named Jack Ass Field (between modern day Magpie Close and Forest Gate School) and “The Twenty-Seven Acres”, which Gurney subsequently sold to the Parish for what is now West Ham Cemetery. The farm continued to focus on vegetable production for the London market, not only potatoes but also peas, parsnips and rhubarb.

 

The farm was obviously profitable in the 1840s, as this advertisement indicates (although Woodgrange is misspelled). Chelmsford Chronicle, 19 February 1847

Nevertheless, the urbanisation of Forest Gate was gathering pace. Gurney clearly saw Woodgrange Farm as a development opportunity, and as early as 1846 was planning to build large houses along the main road to Ilford (today’s Romford Road).

By the early 1860s William Adams was no longer living at Woodgrange Farm, but at Plashet Hall. Presumably he still had the tenancy of Woodgrange Farm, and the census records him as farming 850 acres and employing 116 men. In 1871 there is no census entry for Woodgrange Farm itself. The farm foreman, 64 year-old James Hayes, was living at the Farm Lodge in Woodgrange Road, while John Garrett, the farm bailiff (either for Woodgrange Farm, or possibly by this time Plashet Hall Farm, William Adams’s residence), was living in a terrace house at 1 Suffolk Street. Farm workers were becoming suburban residents.

In the mid-1870s the Glasgow businessman Thomas Corbett bought the 110 acres of Woodgrange Farm which lay on the east side of Woodgrange Road between Romford Road and the Great Eastern Railway line. He paid the Gurney estate £400 per acre, £44,000 in all. In 1877 Corbett started building the Woodgrange estate, in the process obliterating all traces of the farm.  

In 1897 the Woodgrange Estate celebrated its twentieth anniversary, and a local newspaper commented on the changes to the area in that time

An effort to the imagination is required to realize the Forest Gate of twenty years ago. A stranger emerging at that time, into the Woodgrange Road, from the old wooden railway station would see market-gardens directly in front of him as far as the eye could reach, and on his way towards the Romford Road would have these same market gardens on his left hand and only a few private houses on his right. The population of Forest Gate, all told, at that time did not exceed 5,000. Now it is at least ten times that number. The houses on the Woodgrange Estate alone number 1,160 and account, probably, for a larger population than the whole of Forest Gate contained in 1877.

Woodgrange Farm disappeared under the new estate, the farmhouse building now lying under the gardens of 26 Hampton Road and 25 Osborne Road. Within two decades Forest Gate had been transformed out of all recognition.

 Woodgrange Farm’s owners and occupiers in the 18^th and 19^th centuries

Date	Owner	Occupier	Notes
1738	John Pickering		London merchant
c.1814	John Pickering Peacock	Samuel Winmill	JP’s Indirect descendant
1827	John Pickering Peacock	Richard Gregory	Winmill died 1827
1843	John Pickering Peacock	William Adams	Gregory d. 1843
1845	Samuel Gurney	William Adams	Peacock d. c. 1845
1856	John Gurney	William Adams	Samuel Gurney d.1856
c.1877	Thomas Corbett	Farm unoccupied	Sold by Gurney estate

Footnote 1. For more information on the Gurney family, the penultimate owners of Woodgrange farm, see here:http://www.e7-nowandthen.org/2017/12/samuel-gurney-1786-1856-forest-gates.html

Samuel Gurney

 Footnote 2. For more information on the Corbett family, last owners of the farm, and builders of the Woodgrange estate, see here: http://www.e7-nowandthen.org/2018/06/archibald-cameron-corbett-man-and-his.html

Archibald Cameron Corbett and the clock tower he donated to Forest Gate

 Footnote 3. Early years of the Woodgrange estate: http://www.e7-nowandthen.org/2013/06/the-woodgrange-estate-early-years.html

Woodgrange Manor House, 1861

 

"The most interesting personality in the borough of West Ham" (1896)

This was Forest Gate Weekly News' description of Gustav Pagenstecher. It was almost certainly true then, and the fact that the reader of this article has probably never heard of him is part of his fascinating story.

Gustav Pagenstecher in 1896

He was key to establishing West Ham Park, and wrote its first history; edited the first history of West and East Ham; and was: a leading figure in the development of the then West Ham hospital, a committee member of Essex County Cricket club for over 20 years, instrumental in ensuring cricket was (and still is) played in West Ham Park, secretary and tutor to the Gurney/Buxton families of Upton, a prominent member of Forest Gate civic society, an active local Liberal, somewhat implausibly a committee member for the Essex County Agricultural show; and, for good measure, a leading light in the Peabody Trust's housing management development.

Pagenstecher was born in Westphalia to a wealthy German father and Franco/Caribbean mother in 1829. His father died when he was five; the boy was subsequently privately educated - mostly at home.  

He was cousin to a famous eye surgeon who seemed to spend most of his working life attending to Queen Victoria's children and her relatives on the other thrones of Europe.

Gustav studied at the universities of Berlin, Bonn and Halle, reading classics, history and modern languages. In 1852 he was awarded a PhD for a Latin dissertation on Socrates.

He came to England immediately afterwards and acted as tutor to a family in Norfolk. He then performed a similar role for the MP Sir Edward Buxton, also of Norfolk.

Buxton came to stay with his relatives, the Gurneys, in Ham House (in what is now West Ham Park) in 1860, and Pagenstecher joined him there. Gustav was active as Buxton's secretary in Parliament, and spoke of having seen the likes of "Palmerstone, Russell, Disraeli, Gladstone and Bright" at work on the floor of the House. He also tutored the families' young and did the adults' bidding - even in their ancestral home of Norfolk, where he was to be found organising benefit concerts on their behalf, for almost a decade.

Ham House, in its grounds
- now the site of West Ham Park

He left the family's employment in 1869 until 1874, during which time he was secretary to a wealthy banker, William Gibbs. But Forest Gate still had a pull on his attention and commitments.

The Gurney family encountered financial difficulties in the 1870's (which will be referred to in a subsequent post) and Samuel Gurney's grandson, John, wished to dispose of their family seat, Ham House and the 72 acres attached to it, to ease these problems. He turned to Pagenstecher to assist with the sale.

The grounds of Ham House,
before turned into West Ham Park

Gurney's preference was that the grounds should become a public park, but he did not wish to bequeath the grounds gratis to the area.

The land was valued at about £25,000. Gurney was willing to offer a £10,000 price cut if the grounds were to become a public park and he used Pagenstecher to fix the deal. Gustav approached the then West Ham local government body to finance it, but they had neither the money nor the powers to do so.

West Ham Park, 1904

He was able to persuade friends of the Gurneys to contribute £5,000 to the reduced asking price and  then cajoled the Corporation of London to fund the remaining £10,000 and take responsibility for its on-going upkeep. It was opened to the public, under their aegis, in 1874.

That is why a little bit of the Corporation remit nestles in a  small corner of Forest Gate today. (Wanstead Flats - well, that's a different story, emanating from a similar period - see here!).

West Ham Park c 1905

Having engineered the transformation of grand residence and grounds into public park, Gustav Pagenstecher was to remain as deputy chairman of the Park's Committee until his death in 1916. He wrote the first definitive history of the Park in 1908, and was awarded a gold watch for his 40 years of service, by the Park Committee on 27 June 1914.

A plaque, commemorating his dedication to the Park was erected within it for some years. It is now long gone, and events towards the very end of his life may provide the explanation for the disappearance.

After his success in establishing the Park, Pagenstecher  became secretary of the Peabody Trustees - responsible for large estates of charitable housing for the poor, until 1888.

He cemented his relationship with Forest Gate when he moved into his own property, Cedar Cottage, 206 The Portway, in 1886. This had previously been the house of the Gurney family's bailiff. It is long gone and is now replaced by 1930's housing, and was adjacent to what is now East St, facing the park.

Cedar Cottage, Pagenstecher's
 house on The Portway

In 1889 he popped up in press reports, somewhat bizarrely, as Deputy Returning Officer for elections in Ilford.

The following year, he became the first, and very successful, secretary of West Ham Hospital - then located behind Stratford Town hall. These were, of course, pre-NHS days, and so the institution was almost entirely dependent on charity donations for its development and upkeep.

"Ladies" ward, West Ham hospital, 1900
 - shortly after Gustav's period as secretary there.

Press reports show him to have organised a Masonic Ball at the Town Hall in 1893, to raise money for the hospital.  The extract from the Chelmsford Chronicle, below, is an unintentionally funny description of the event.

Four months later, the philanthropist Passmore Edwards laid the foundation stone of a new wing at the hospital that was to bear his name. Pagenstecher had, no doubt, been instrumental in arranging this. Edwards contributed £2,000 of the £2,8000 required to build the eponymously named ward.

Two years later, the 67-year old Dr Pagenstecher was interviewed by the Forest Gate Weekly News. The paper raised the subject of his employment with the hospital, but found a reluctant interviewee: "The Doctor seemed disinclined to discuss the point further and we broached other topics"!

Children's ward, West Ham hospital, 1900
 - shortly after Gustav's period as secretary there.

Among those were his Forest Gate-related past times.

Katherine Fry, prison reformer, Elizabeth's daughter, of Cedar House, had, during her lifetime collected a large and jumbled collection of documents relating to the history of East and West Ham.  According to the Weekly News, Pagenstecher "rescued the valuable manuscripts from the gloomy side of oblivion" and spent two years knocking them into shape. They were published in 1888 (see press advert, below).

Pagenstecher was more than a little aggrieved that in the reviews of the book Fry was given all the plaudits for its excellence and he all the blame for its perceived faults!

Gustav was a pianist of some distinction and:

... a member of the Shakespearean Society, which holds its meetings in Forest Gate. I am also a member of the Upton Literary Society, which holds its meetings in Norwich Hall.

I am a Liberal; always was; but not a radical". He regularly represented Stratford at regional Liberal meetings and bodies.

I've always been an enthusiast for cricket. On the Park Management Committee, I used every endeavour to ensure that portions of the Park should be laid out as cricket pitches. I was secretary of the Upton Park Cricket Club, which dates as far back as 1854.

Dr Paggy, they always called me - that was my cricket name. They gave me a silver cup when I stood down.

Pagenstecher was a member of the Essex County Cricket Club committee from 1886 - when it moved its headquarters from Brentwood to Leyton - until 1910 (and was for a short period its secretary).

He was, additionally, an active supporter and promoter of the Stratford |Music Festival, whose origins can be traced to the Earlham Grove  Academy (see here), and a chess player of some repute.

Surviving evidence suggests that Pagenstecher was, by modern standards,  somewhat pompous; but was quite capable of a degree of self deprecation.

So - he caught the cycling bug, that was so popular in the area in the 1890's (see here), and in a passage that may have come straight from a modern day Alan Bennett diary, he told the Forest Gate Weekly News in a letter in 1896:

You must sit perfectly upright', said my kind instructor, 'lay hold of the handle, keep your balance and treadle quite slowly with your feet' This seemed all very plausible in theory, but I found it jolly hard, in practice.

The letter continued:

.........

Pagenstecher was a "confirmed bachelor". Whether that term was used as euphemistically at the end of the nineteenth century as it was a hundred years later is not clear. He was, however, quite self mocking about his status in his last known published work - a letter to the Chelmsford Chronicle on 8 May 1914, as the extract below indicates:

Chelmsford Chronicle 8 May 1914

Pagenstecker felt very much at ease in his adopted home of Forest Gate, telling the local Weekly News in 1896:

One's tastes and habits are formed along English lines ... I have lived in a good society, and thoroughly enjoyed the good things in life, including the true friendship of several good and true English gentlemen.

In his later years, Gustav would spend the three summer months in his ancestral home of Germany. He was appalled when war broke out in the summer of 1914 and rushed back from his vacation to his adopted home of Forest Gate, dying soon after.

Pagenstecher in his later years,
 from Stratford Express obituary
 of him, February 1916

Pagenstecher's legacy

For: -

• ·         establishing West Ham Park and writing its first history;
• ·         editing the first history of East and West Ham;
• ·         being a successful fundraising secretary for the old West ham hospital;
• ·         being an active member of Forest Gate civic society;
• ·         serving for 20 years as a member of the Essex County Cricket Club;
• ·         being described in 1896 as "the most interesting personality in the whole borough of West Ham";
• ·         being an active member of the Liberal party at local and regional level;
• ·         working as a senior housing association manager
• ·         becoming "an English gentleman".

what was Pagenstecher's reward?:

• ·         a knighthood?
• ·         Freedom of the City of London, or West Ham?
• ·         a building, street or facility named in his honour?
• ·         a blue, or indeed any colour, plaque?

No. He was rounded up as an 85 year old alien on his return from Germany in 1914 and was required to report to West Ham police station daily.

it is said to have broken his heart. He died 18 months later, on 11 February 1916 and the memory of his local contribution has been allowed to fade away. So much so, that today Gustav Pagenstecher remains largely unremembered and completely unrecognised in Forest Gate.