The history of Hamfrith Farm

Mark Gorman (@Flatshistorian) continues his series on the farms of pre-suburban Forest Gate and district with a look at the history of Hamfrith Farm, some of which is today occupied by Godwin and Woodgrange schools.

Hamfrith (literally “Ham Wood”) was originally part of the lands of Stratford Langthorne Abbey, the great Cistercian monastery on the banks of the river Lea. In 1538, after the abbey’s dissolution Hamfrith, together with the rest of West Ham manor, was acquired by the king. At the end of the C17th George Booth was given a 99-year lease for the manor of West Ham for services to the crown. Booth later made a grant which divided the manor into two parts. He assigned Hamfrith farm (which had been made out of Hamfrith wood) to Sir John Blount, a director of the South Sea Company, for 69 years, starting in 1733.

After the South Sea Bubble burst Blount was ruined, and his estates were sold. The Stratford and Hamfrith property was bought in 1734 by John Tylney, later Earl Tylney. It was then inherited in his family until the end of the 18th century.

Map of Essex by John Chapman and Peter Andre 1777. The map shows Hamfrith incorrectly marked as "Wood Grange" (sic), Woodgrange farm is the collection of buildings to the south of the Eagle and Child pub.

Both parts of the manor remained Crown freehold until the end of the 18th century, but the demesne land (land in the manor retained by the owner for his own use) and the manorial rights were then sold separately. In 1787 the whole manor contained 290 acres demesne lands, and 54 acres of commons, most of which formed part of Wanstead Flats. The demesne lands were mainly scattered in the southern marshes, the only substantial tenement (occupied buildings) being Hamfrith farm, 128 acres lying north of the London-Ilford road, on both sides of the boundary between East Ham and West Ham, occupied by John Greenhill.

Map c 1800 showing the Greenhill holdings. Their land streches from Forest Gate in the west to what is now Manor Park, and bordered the southern edge of Wanstead Flats, as well as fields south of the road to Romford. Hamfrith farm was east of the Eagle and Child on the map.

 

By 1799, when the occupiers were William, John and Richard Greenhill, Hamfrith comprised 148 acres. William Greenhill bought the freehold of Hamfrith Farm (without manorial rights, which were sold separately) from the Crown for £8,642. At this stage the Greenhills had substantial holdings both north and south of the Romford Road. William Greenhill's father, John, was said to have been the first large-scale potato grower for the London market, probably from the middle of the C18th, and his son had continued to develop the business. By the 1820s the Greenhills were employing upwards of 100 workers, mainly Irish.

By this time, however, William Greenhill seems to have run into financial difficulties, as between 1824-8 he mortgaged the farm for a total of £9,000. He died in 1832, leaving over £50,000 (approx £4.7m today) and directing that Hamfrith should be held in trust for life, and should later be sold. Financial problems continued for his heirs, however, for in 1835 William's son, John, was declared bankrupt and the contents of Hamfrith farm were auctioned off, while three months later part of the farm itself, described as "130 acres of superior land, in the highest state of cultivation" was offered to let. John's brother, William, occupied Plashet Hall at the time, which also had farm buildings and 145 acres of farmland, much of it south of Romford Road.

 

Hamfrith Farm and "Potatoe Hall" on the 1797 draft Ordnance Survey map.

Their house, Plashet Hall, on Romford Road, was known locally as "Potato Hall". The name "Potatoe Hall" also appeared on the draft Ordnance Survey map, made in 1797 (see above), showing that the Greenhill's business was nationally recognised.

The trustees finally sold the entire estate of 300 acres, as well as Plashet House, "a most Desirable and Gentlemanly residence" in 1850. The farm was described as "superior and productive Market Garden land", but significant emphasis was also put on the extensive building frontage "to very excellent roads".

The estate was eventually bought by Samuel Gurney (see here), owner of the neighbouring manor of Woodgrange and Ham House, for £17,710. Hamfrith then comprised 131 acres, bisected by the main line Eastern Counties Railway. John Greenhill, despite having to sell off his interest in his father's estate in 1836, appears to have enjoyed a comfortable life after moving to Leytonstone, where he died in 1869.

The 1863 6-inch OS map, showing that Hamfrith Farm has become West Ham Hall with an entrance where Chestnut Avenue meets Avenue Road. The red line running through the map is the projected route of the Tottenham and Forest Gate Railway, opened in 1894.

 

West Ham Hall c1890

John Gurney, grandson of Samuel, sold most of Hamfrith in 1872 to the British land Company, who in turn, in 1874, sold it to the Manor Park Cemetery Company. The eastern part was used for the cemetery, while the remainder was gradually developed by the Cemetery Company for building. Sebert Road, built up by 1878, runs through the centre of the Hamfrith lands.

The site of West Ham Hall is now occupied by Godwin primary school

Hamfrith farm-house had existed at least since the early 18th century. In the 19th century it became a gentleman's residence, with ornamental gardens. From the 1860s it was known as West Ham Hall. It stood on the north side of Sebert Road between Avenue Road and Cranmer Road. A carriage drive stretched north to the modern-day junction of Avenue Road and Chestnut Avenue.

About 1890 it was acquired by the Tottenham and Forest Gate Railway Company, which was then building its line, via Wanstead Park, to Woodgrange Park. West Ham Hall was still standing in 1893, when the company put it up for sale, with other surplus land. The house was bought by West Ham School Board, which demolished it. Today it is the site of Woodgrange and Godwin schools.

The main entrance to Hamfrith Farm was at the junction of Avenue Road and Chestnut Avenue. The farm gates were where the post box is today.

 

Celebration of 150th anniversary of West Ham Park’s opening

Background

Surviving documents relating to the parklands date from the mid-sixteenth century. By 1670, Rooke Hall, later renamed Upton House, was the main house dominating the area.

In 1762, physician and botanist Dr. John Fothergill bought the house (see here for details), enlarged the grounds, built extensive greenhouses, and planted them with rare and exotic botanical species from around the world.

Dr John Fothergill

Unfortunately, 260 years later, the Corporation of London has decided to tear down the last of the greenhouses and cover the area with housing.

Fothergill’s botanical gardens were second only to Kew in importance in England. He recorded the details of his plants in records that survive in the British library and commissioned paintings and drawings, many of Catherine the Great of Russia acquired on his death. They languish, untended, in a small botanical museum on the outskirts of St Petersburg.

Although the greenhouses have gone and the paintings are inaccessible, at least one of Fothergill’s specimens remains in the park—the Gingko Biloba tree (pictured), which he is believed to have planted there in 1763.

Fothergill's Gingko Biloba tree

Upton House was renamed Ham House in the 1780s and eventually acquired by Quaker banker and philanthropist Samuel Gurney in 1812 (see here for details), where he resided for the rest of his life. When he retired from banking in the 1840s, he dedicated his efforts to philanthropy and local land acquisition, and in a piecemeal fashion, he purchased over 30% of the land that is now recognised as Forest Gate.

Samuel Gurney

Gurney’s older sister, prison reformer Elizabeth Fry’s (see here for details) household fell on hard times in the 1820s. Samuel allowed them to live in a house named the Cedars on the edge of his landholding from 1829 until 1844. That house later became a Territorial Army barracks and local headquarters.

Elizabeth Fry

Soon after Gurney died in 1856, his own immediate family faced financial difficulties following the collapse of the bank he once led. His grandson, John, set about disposing of some of the land Gurney had accumulated, which in many ways led to the growth of Forest Gate as the Victorian commuter suburb it largely remains today.

Ham House in its grounds, before demolition in 1872

John Gurney was keen that the 77 acres of his grandfather’s immediate estate should become a public park. He valued it at £25,000 and offered to sell it at half its valuation if local people contributed the other half towards its sale price. A fund was launched to find the money, led by one-time Gurney employee and administrator Gustav Pagenstecher (see here for details). 

Gustav Pagenstecher

The then local authority was unwilling to contribute, and only £2,500 was raised from immediate local sources. Pagenstecher turned his fundraising attention to the Corporation of London, which was already interested in acquiring Epping Forest, including Wanstead Flats, for public use (see here for details).

The Friend, a Quaker publication dated 1 April 1873, explains the Corporation’s interest. It noted, “No parish in London has expanded more rapidly than West Ham. It has seen an increase in population of more than 60% over the last 10 years.”

Gurney and Pagenstecher feared that developers would have bought the land and turned it into housing if it had not become a public park.

The Corporation contributed £10,000 towards purchasing the Park, which was to be open to the public “in perpetuity … at its own expense” from its opening in July 1874. The corporation has run and managed it ever since. Pagenstecher maintained a keen interest and was deputy chairman of its board of trustees from its establishment as a park until he died in 1916. He wrote the first history of the park.

Elements of the history of the park

One of the first things the Corporation did during the acquisition was demolishing Ham House and leaving some of its remnants as a cairn near the park’s main entrance (see photo).

Ham House, before its demolition in 1872

 

 

 

The cairn near the main entrance to the park, all that remains of the house today

The park has many fine features today, including a delightful ornamental garden, children’s play area, bandstands, a café, and pitches and greens for many sports. It is a Grade 11 listed park.

It has often attracted large attendances for special events. The Godwin school diary of 10 September 1895, for example, noted: “The attendance (at school) was good this morning, but owing to the visit of the Lord Mayor and Corporation to West Ham Park, it was greatly affected in the afternoon.”

Entrance to the park, 1907

An Edwardian postcard of the formally laid out park

Another significant turnout was recorded for the Civil Defence Ceremony of Remembrance on 26 September 1943 – see photo below.

Civil Defence ceremony in the park, 1943

Sport has always featured prominently in the park, and Pagenstecher ensured it was well catered for, as indicated in his memoirs:

I’ve always been an enthusiast for cricket. On the Park Management Committee, I used to endeavour to ensure that portions of the Park should be laid out as cricket pitches. I was secretary of Upton Park Cricket Club which dates back as far as 1854 (ed: i.e. some 20 years before the land was formally adopted as public parkland).

Football

West Ham Park is perhaps better known for its unusual football heritage. From 1866, eight years before the grounds were formally designated a park, it hosted Upton Park FC, a club with a couple of unique achievements. It was one of the fifteen clubs competing for the inaugural FA Cup trophy in 1871 and has the distinction of hosting the competition’s first-ever goal, when Upton Park went 1-0 down in the 11^th minute of the game (eventually losing 3-1) to Clapham Rovers, on 11 November that year.

Crest of Upton Park FC

As we approach the 2024 Paris Olympics, Upton Park’s second great claim to football fame comes into view. The club represented GB in the 1900 Paris Olympics and emerged victorious gold medal winners! There is no GB team at this year’s Olympics, so Upton Park’s record as victorious UK footballing Olympians in Paris cannot be matched this summer.

Logo of 2nd Olympiad - Paris 1900

The local area has boasted the strange quirk of having Upton Park FC playing at West Ham Park, while West Ham FC played at Upton Park!

What a hotbed of football this small area of Forest Gate was at the turn of the 19^th/20^th centuries. Just a couple hundred yards from West Ham Park is the Old Spotted Dog ground, home to Clapton FC, who boast several impressive achievements. In 1890, they became the first English football team to play in Europe (beating a Belgian X1 7-0) and competed in six (winning five) FA Amateur Cup finals between 1903 and 1928.

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