Source: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol5/pp88-96
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 06:36:24+00:00

Document:
Great Stanmore (fn. 1) was a parish of 1,441 a. in 1841. (fn. 2) It was roughly the shape of an elongated rectangle, running from north-north-west to south-south-east, and the village at its centre lay some 10 miles from London. (fn. 3) Stanmore was divided before the Conquest into estates foreshadowing the later parishes of Great and Little Stanmore, (fn. 4) although the name of Great Stanmore does not occur until 1354. (fn. 5) Throughout its history the main settlement, to which there was no equivalent in Little Stanmore, was often called merely Stanmore, (fn. 6) as were the old village and its surrounding district in 1971.
John Warner (d. 1565), physician, and William Wigan Harvey (1810-83), divine, son of George Daniel Harvey of Montagues, were natives of the parish. (fn. 18) General Robert Burne died in retirement at Berkeley Cottage, Stanmore, in 1825. Charles Hart (d. 1683), Baptist Wriothesley Noel (1798-1873), divine, and Arthur Hamilton-Gordon (1829-1912), colonial governor, were also resident. In 1893 the last was created Lord Stanmore of Great Stanmore, (fn. 19) a title which became extinct in 1957. (fn. 20) Other prominent residents are mentioned elsewhere in this article, where their homes are described.
In the Middle Ages the busiest road was that running from Watling Street to Watford, mentioned c. 1170. (fn. 21) The section which entered from Little Stanmore, probably near the crest of the ridge at Spring pond was rendered useless in the early 18th-century by the duke of Chandos's diversions around Canons (fn. 22) but the north-western stretch was left to follow the old route along the edge of Stanmore Common and into Harrow parish. (fn. 23) At the bottom of the ridge a lesser route cut south-westward through the parish, linking Watling Street with Harrow Weald and Uxbridge. (fn. 24) It followed the line of the modern Broadway and Church Road, continuing between the sites of the existing church and the rectory along Colliers Lane (fn. 25) before that stretch was foreshortened by the building of Stanmore Park; later Uxbridge Road, a 'new' road in 1800, (fn. 26) was laid out with its bulge to the north. Across it ran two ways from the high ground: Dennis Lane, which joined it at the boundary and continued south as Marsh Lane and Honeypot Lane, and Green Lane. The second continued south as Old Church Lane, before turning east to meet Marsh Lane, and as Watery Lane, which itself turned to join Honeypot Lane. Dennis Lane, so called by 1578, (fn. 27) and its southerly extensions may mark a north to south trackway older than Watling Street; (fn. 28) the route along Green and Old Church lanes, mentioned respectively in 1580 and 1633, (fn. 29) led to the main medieval settlement.
The road called Stanmore Hill, reaching the Uxbridge road between Dennis Lane and Green Lane, may have started as a branch from Green Lane, which it meets half-way up the slope; since the 18th century, however, Stanmore Hill has also been the name for the old stretch between that fork and the top of the ridge. Following the duke of Chandos's building around Canons, most travellers from Watford descended Stanmore Hill before meeting those coming from Uxbridge. East of the junction, at the bottom of Dennis Lane, they could reach Watling Street by taking the new London road straight across Little Stanmore or by going south down Marsh Lane before turning into Whitchurch Lane. (fn. 30) Marsh Lane became important only in the 1930s, when improvements there and along the decayed Honeypot Lane (fn. 31) allowed traffic to head south along a course parallel to Watling Street. Gordon Avenue, running westward to link Old Church Lane with Kenton Lane in Harrow, was laid out after Frederick Gordon bought the Bentley Priory estate in 1882. (fn. 32) The network of residential roads covering the south part of the parish (fn. 33) was constructed between the World Wars.
Housing spread little in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, (fn. 78) although the village became a more important centre, with a workhouse on the east side of Stanmore Hill from 1788 and probably a separate school-house from c. 1826. By 1865, after the workhouse had been closed, an infants' school stood higher up the slope and a National school near the bottom of the hill. A post office adjoined a smithy slightly higher up than the infants' school, on the western side. Buildings were close together only where some had stood a hundred years earlier: towards the eastern end of the later Church Road, up Stanmore Hill, at the fork between the hill and Green Lane, and on island sites between the Watford road and Spring pond on Little Common. There were gaps along the hill between the National school and the old workhouse, between the infants' school and the Royal hotel, and opposite the infants' school. Buildings at the cross-roads formed by Dennis and Marsh lanes and the London road included a farm (fn. 79) in the south-west corner. Green Lane had no houses between Pynnacles, at its southern end, and a group of over a dozen small dwellings near its junction with Stanmore Hill.
East of the houses lining Stanmore Hill, Dennis Lane in 1865 sloped upwards between fields and, near the top, between the grounds of Stanmore Hall and Warren House. West of the village stretched part of the estate of Bentley Priory, with that of Stanmore Park, including Park farm, south of the Uxbridge road. The flat southern half of the parish was mainly grassland, purchased by St. Bartholomew's hospital. Labourers inhabited the decaying Old Church Farm, whose tenant lived at what had been Ward's Farm at the corner of Marsh Lane. Belmont Terrace, an isolated row of six cottages, had been built since 1827 west of the junction of Watery Lane with Honeypot Lane; (fn. 80) at Stanmore marsh, in addition to the Green Man, there was a group of cottages, numbering four in 1838, (fn. 81) and a recently erected gas-works. The northernmost part of the parish, too, was empty, being divided between Stanmore Common and the estate in the north-east belonging to the Grove. To the north-west some large houses along Heathbourne Road included one, Stanmore Villa, just within the parish boundary.
The most striking change between 1754 and 1865 was the building or enlargement of several gentlemen's residences. In addition to Stanmore Park and the manor-house, near the church, the village contained the head tenements of Montagues, Fiddles, Pynnacles, and Aylwards, (fn. 82) all of which were marked in 1827 by substantial houses. Oak Villa, Townsend Villa (later Belmont Lodge), Rose Cottage, and Vine Cottage formed an extension of the village, into Little Stanmore, at the corner of Dennis Lane and the London Road. Near the crest of the hill, on the west, Hill House and Broomfield stood between the drive leading to Aylwards and the residence next to the brewery. It was at Hill House, then called the Great House, (fn. 83) that Dr. Samuel Parr had briefly opened his school in 1771 and that the antiquary Charles Drury Edward Fortnum, who bequeathed most of his treasures to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, lived from 1852 until 1899. (fn. 84) Broomfield, later Broomfield House, was designed c. 1860 by James Knowles. (fn. 85) On the opposite side of the road, south of the corner with Wood Lane, a house erected by the duke of Chandos (d. 1744) had been enlarged in the late 18th-century by James Forbes of the East India Company, who had adorned the grounds with the first pieces of Hindu sculpture to be seen in England. (fn. 86) The mansion itself had been rebuilt, as Stanmore Hall, in 1847. (fn. 87) Forbes had also owned Warren House, farther east along Wood Lane, which he sold in 1813. (fn. 88) By 1827 it had passed to the architect Robert Smirke, who held it with 23 a. in Great Stanmore and 108 a. in Little Stanmore in 1838. (fn. 89) Almost opposite Warren House a drive led northeast to the Limes, which had been built by 1851 on the Little Stanmore side of the border. (fn. 90) Beyond Little Common the banqueting house attributed to Chandos had been the seat of George Hemming in 1795 and of his widow in 1816; (fn. 91) it had recently been pulled down in 1820. (fn. 92) Farther north stood the Grove, where a Jew named Aaron Cappadoce had died in 1782; a grotto and other embellishments made by his successor, one Fierville, were to survive a remodelling of the mansion in the 1870s. (fn. 93) Spacious grounds in many places restricted the spread of humbler housing: in 1865 the gardens of the manorhouse and Pynnacles stretched along the western end of Church Road, and those of Aylwards and Stanmore Hall separated the main village from the settlement around Little Common. The rich owners of such houses, led by Col. Hamilton ToveyTennent of Pynnacles (fn. 94) and encouraged by the Hamilton-Gordons and Queen Adelaide of Bentley Priory, had been responsible for abandoning the 17th-century church in favour of a larger one, consecrated in 1850.
In 1971 there were striking contrasts between the monotonous suburban avenues covering the south of the parish, the old village in the centre, and the partly wooded common in the north. The road ascending Stanmore Hill retained many 18th- and 19th-century houses, while others were recalled by the mellow red-brick garden-walls and established trees which sheltered later buildings.
Along the foot of the ridge the oldest survivals are scattered. Oak Lodge, Belmont Lodge, and Rose Cottage, built of yellowish-brown brick c. 1800, are on the corner of Dennis Lane and just within Little Stanmore. On the far side of a busy cross-roads is a timber-framed range of two-storeyed tenements, nos. 57-65 the Broadway, built in the early 17th-century as one house, possibly as an inn, but with later doors and windows. The building is plastered outside and contains, in no. 59, an elaborate chimneypiece and panelling. Despite the loss of a ninth bay at the western end, the jettied upper storey facing the street for 98 feet is unequalled in Middlesex and one of the longest continuous jetties in the country. (fn. 122) Farther west the upper storeys of an early-18th-century house, (fn. 123) formerly no. 33, are scarcely distinguishable from those of a red-brick shopping parade into which the building has been incorporated.
Close to the neo-Georgian Crown inn in Church Road, which continues the line of shops, is the twostoreyed Regent House, (fn. 124) whose red-brick front contains an early-18th-century doorcase with a broken pediment. Bernays memorial gardens, at the west end of Church Road, look upon the back of Church House, a rambling building in the Tudor style, where old timbering is incorporated in a church hall. (fn. 125) Opposite its entrance, at the top of Old Church Lane, a tithe barn has been converted into cottages. The buildings, with trees in the memorial gardens and around the church, give what was once the western end of the village a rustic air belied by the heavy traffic.
Many houses dating from the time when Stanmore was a select village survive along Stanmore Hill between later buildings, entrances to closes, and sites awaiting development. Along the west are Elm House, early-18th-century with a later addition, Nunlands, with a 19th-century stucco refacing, Hilldene, the Old House, and the Coach House. Farther up no. 73 is an early-18th-century house of two storeys and attics, parapeted, with a pedimented doorcase and, in the south front, a venetian window. It was called Robin Hill in the 1930s and Loscombe Lodge in 1899, when it became for nearly two years the home of Edward Wilson (1872-1912), the naturalist and Antarctic explorer. (fn. 126) Close by a cluster of 19th-century brick cottages and shops, some whitewashed or part weatherboarded, fills the fork between Stanmore Hill and Green Lane.
The east side contains a stuccoed two-storeyed early-19th-century residence, formerly called Raven Dene, which has been divided; Doric columns flank the central porch, facing Stangate Gardens, and a balustrade surmounts the centre of the west front. Higher up are Ivy Cottage (no. 52) and the Abercorn Arms, a three-storeyed pedimented building of c. 1800 in red brick, with a verandah along the end facing the road and an extension, built about 100 years later, to the north. Near the crest of the hill on Little Common are more 19th-century cottages, many with black diapering on their brickwork. Other cottages border the road next to the Vine, a twostoreyed yellow-brick building of c. 1800. Almost opposite is the 18th-century Hill House, built of red brick with stone dressings and comprising a parapeted main block of two storeys with pedimented one-storeyed wings; the house has been much altered and divided into flats. (fn. 127) To its north stand the Rookery, pink-brick and early-18th-century, with its stable range and the premises of the brewery.
1. The article was written in 1971. Any references to later years are dated. The help of Mr. R. W. Thomson in making material available and commenting on the article is gratefully acknowledged.
3. Except where otherwise stated, the rest of the para. and the following para. are based on O.S. Maps 6", Mdx. V. SE.; X. NE.; XI. NW. (1865 and later edns.).
4. V.C.H. Mdx. i. 125, 128.
5. See below, p. 96.
6. e.g. Rocque, Map of Mdx. (1754).
7. The bounds were first recorded at a court of survey in 1680: Davenport MSS., Gt. Stan. ct. rolls. For the Davenport MSS. relating to Gt. Stanmore, see p. 102.
11. W. W. Druett, Stanmore and Harrow Weald, 112.
12. See below, p. 104.
13. Geol. Surv. Map 1", drift, sheet 256 (1951 edn.).
14. P.N. Mdx. (E.P.N.S.), 65.
15. Geol. Surv. Map 6", Mdx. XI. NW. (1920 edn.).
16. Except where otherwise stated, the para. is based on O.S. Maps 6", Mdx. V. SE.; X. NE.; XI. NW. (1865 and later edns.).
18. Except where otherwise stated, the para. is based on D.N.B.
19. Complete Peerage, s.v. Stanmore.
20. Who Was Who, 1951-60, 1036.
21. Cat. Anct. D. ii, A 2097.
23. C. F. Baylis, Short Hist. of Edgware and the Stanmores in the Middle Ages, map facing p. 1.
24. Except where otherwise stated, the rest of the para. and the following para. are based on O.S. Maps 6", Mdx. V. SE.; X. NE.; XI. NW. (1865 and later edns.).
25. Druett, Stanmores and Harrow Weald, 79 and map facing p. 32.
27. P.N. Mdx. (E.P.N.S.), 66.
28. A. J. Garrett, 'Hist. Geog. of Upper Brent' (London Univ. M.A. thesis, 1935), 27-8.
29. Davenport MSS., Gt. Stan. ct. rolls.
32. V.C.H. Mdx. iv. 206.
34. Rep. on Bridges in Mdx. 208.
35. O.S. Map 6", Mdx. X. NE. (1865 edn.).
36. Davenport MSS., Gt. Stan. ct. rolls.
37. Ex inf. Mr. R. W. Thomson.
38. Pigot, Com. Dir. (1826-7).
39. P.O. Dir. Home Cnties. (1845).
40. Garrett, op. cit. 132 and fig. 15.
41. Harrow Gaz. 5, 12, 19 Apr. 1912; Harrow Observer, 27 Feb. 1964; A. W. McCall, Omnibus Soc. Hist. Notes, 1964, 13.
42. Garrett, op. cit. 133, 135, 138, 141, and figs.
43. Harrow L.B., Official Guide .
44. V.C.H. Mdx. iv. 152, 198.
45. Railway Mag. lxxxviii, 203-4; xcix, 91-4.
47. Druett, Stanmores and Harrow Weald, 78; see below, pp. 98, 106.
49. Druett, op. cit. map facing p. 32.
51. Enfranchised in 1865 and 1859 respectively: M.R.O., Acc. 658/6, ff. 275, 199.
52. See below, p. 100.
53. Druett, op. cit. 79; Davenport MSS., Gt. Stan. ct. rolls.
54. Druett, op. cit. map facing p. 32.
55. Davenport MSS., Gt. Stan. ct. rolls.
57. Davenport MSS., Gt. Stan. ct. rolls.
59. Ex inf. Harrow L.B., legal and admin. dept.
61. Davenport MSS., Gt. Stan. ct. rolls.
63. Ex inf. Harrow L.B., legal and admin. dept.
64. E. C. Willatts, Mdx. and the London Region, 298.
65. Except where otherwise stated, the para. is based on Rocque, Map of Mdx. (1754).
66. H. H. Bolitho and D. Peel, Drummonds of Charing Cross, 36-7, 207-8.
67. See below, p. 101.
69. Lysons and others connect the banqueting house with a bowling green laid out by Chandos but the green was much older: see p. 102.
71. Davenport MSS., Gt. Stan. ct. rolls.
73. Harrow Cent. Ref. Libr., sales parts. (Stanmore Hall).
75. Druett, Stanmores and Harrow Weald, 159-60.
76. O.S. Map 6", Mdx. V. SE. (1865 edn.).
77. H.O. 107/1700/135/2; O.S. Map 6", Mdx. XI. NW. (1865 edn.).
78. Except where otherwise stated, the foll. three paras. are based on O.S. Maps 6", Mdx. V. SE.; X. NE.; XI. NW. (1865 edn.).
80. St. Barts. Hosp., Surveyors' Reps. EO 8/1, pp. 171-2; EO 8/6, pp. 32, 186.
83. Davenport MSS., Gt. Stan. ct. rolls (1782).
84. Druett, Stanmores and Harrow Weald, 199-200; Who Was Who, 1897-1916, 254.
85. TS. notes penes Harrow Cent. Ref. Libr.
87. TS. notes penes Harrow Cent. Ref. Libr.
89. M.R.O., Acc. 262(26); TA/S'MORE Gt; TA/ S'MORE Lt.
91. Lysons, Environs, iii. 395; Brewer, Beauties of Eng. and Wales, x(5), 629.
92. Druett, op. cit. 185.
93. Brewer, Beauties of Eng. and Wales, x(5), 630-1.
95. Thorne, Environs, ii. 563.
96. Letters of Wm. Morris, ed. P. Henderson, 306.
97. Druett, op. cit. 182-5, 187-9, 201-2.
98. Harrow Cent. Ref. Libr., sales parts.
99. O.S. Map 6", Mdx. V. SE. (1897 edn.).
102. St. Barts. Hosp., Journals of Governors, Ha 1/30, /31.
103. O.S. Maps 6", Mdx. X. NE., XI. NW. (1935 and 1938 edns.).
104. Except where otherwise stated, the para. is based on O.S. Maps 1/2,500, TQ 1790, 1791 (1963 edn.).
105. Boro. of Harrow, Facts & Figures (1963-4).
106. Ex inf. Dept. of the Environment.
108. Druett, Stanmores and Harrow Weald, 259.
110. Druett, op. cit. 210, 260.
111. Kelly's Dir. Edgware (1934); ex inf. Mr. R. W. Thomson.
112. O.S. Map 1/25,000, TQ 19 (1950 edn.).
113. Druett, op. cit. 189, 198; Burke, Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage (1931), 971, 1984.
114. Kelly's Dir. Edgware (1933); Who Was Who, 1961-70, 864.
117. O.S. Map 1/25,000, TQ 19 (1950 edn.); R.A.F. Stanmore Pk. Inf. Handbk. 19, 24-5, 48.
118. Min. of Town and Country Planning, List of Bldgs. (1950).
119. O.S. Map 1/2,500, TQ 1792 (1963 edn.).
120. Boro. of Harrow, Facts & Figures (1963-4).
121. Ex inf. Dept. of the Environment.
122. Ex inf. G.L.C. Hist. Bldgs. Div.; see plate facing p. 241.
123. Min. of Town and Country Planning, List of Bldgs. (1950).
124. Except where otherwise stated, the foll. three paras. are based on Pevsner, Mdx. 146; Robbins, Mdx. 331-2; and Min. of Town and Country Planning, List of Bldgs. (1950).
125. See below, p. 95.
127. Kemp's Dir. Harrow (1971).
128. Except where otherwise stated, the foll. two paras. are based on TS. notes on Stanmore Hall penes Harrow Cent. Ref. Libr.; Druett, op. cit. 192-6; and inf. supplied by G.L.C. Dept. of Architecture and Civic Design.
129. Handbk. to Harrow on the Hill (1850), ed. T. Smith, 16. The new ho. was by J. M. Derick: W. Keane, Beauties of Mdx. (1850).
130. Who Was Who, 1916-28, 263.
131. Ex inf. the sec., Royal Nat. Orthopaedic hosp.
132. Pevsner, Mdx. 146; see below, plate facing p. 160.
133. See plate facing p. 160.
134. Studio, i. 214-26; iii. 99-101.
135. See below, p. 105.
136. Pevsner, Mdx. 146; Druett, op. cit. plate facing p. 160.
137. Ex inf. Clarke & Hale (Pinner).
138. Harrow Cent. Ref. Libr., sales parts.
139. Ex inf. Marconi Space and Defence Systems Ltd.
141. H.L., Mdx. Protestation Rets.

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