This series of blogs in our From The Archives series is intended as a resource for schools and local residents who are interested in researching local history.

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The West Hill Estate and The Wimbledon Park Estates – Part I

We have divided this part of the blog up into a number of sections by theme rather than by strict timeline.

The West Hill Estate and The Wimbledon Park Estates – Part I – John Augustus Beaumont – this page

The money to buy The West Hill and Wimbledon Park Estates – Where did John Augustus Beaumont obtain it?- Separating fact from fiction – Part II

The District Line Crossing Wimbledon Park – Part III

The Creation of Wimbldeon Park Road – Part IV

The West Hill Estate Developing Into Mass Housing – Haldon Road & Surrounding Roads – Part V

Epilogue – Part VI – onto Lady Lane

Wimbledon Park – Through Early Photographs – From Before the Start of the AELTC Era

John Augustus Beaumont

One man was largely responsible for the development of most of West Wandsworth and Wimbledon as we know it today. His name was John Augustus Beaumont.

John Barber Beaumont [1774-1841] – father to John Augustus Beaumont, John Thomas Barber was born on 21 December 1774 in the parish of Marylebone in London. He assumed in 1812, for unknown reasons, the additional name of Beaumont (which was retained by his descendants) and was often known as “Barber Beaumont”.

John Barber Beaumont founded The County Fire Office, – an insurance company specialising the in the insurance of country houses. It was built into a very profitable business.

John Barber Beaumont also founded The Beaumont Philosophical Institution in the East End of London. The Institution was administered by the Beaumont Trust. In the longer term the Institution was one of the organisations leading up to the founding of Queen Mary and Westfield [QMW], University of London, which now has a Barber Beaumont Chair of Humanities.

John Augustus Beaumont [1806-1886] was a successful insurance magnate and succeeded his father as the Managing Director of The County Fire Office in 1841. He is often written off, by some authorities, as a ‘property speculator’ but in reality is the master planner for the whole area. It was Beaumont and his team that applied for and set out the shape of the streets and the building plots.

Historically the major local landowner and Lords of various Manors were the Earls Spencer  and The Duke of Sutherland.

By the 1820’s George John Spencer, 2nd Earl Spencer was struggling financially

By the time the 2nd Earl Spencer died in 1834 enormous debts had been built up from running three large houses full blast, the rebuilding of Althorpe, Lady Lavinia’s lavish entertaining and the 2nd Earl’s mania for collecting rare books.¹

It fell to John Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl Spencer to take some hard decisions as to what, of the very many large houses he owned, could be retained. This also pertained to lands that needed to be rationalised.

Earl Spencer’s land sales

This was conducted as a series of land sales and auctions between June 23rd 1845 [£12,990], 30th October 1835 [£32,250], 16th December 1835 [£23,800], 22nd April 1836 [£23,730], July 1836 [£17,690],  26th August 1836 [£17,440], Sale 7 date unspecified [£8,970], 19th July 1837 [£8,415] giving a total yield of £145,285 excluding the land deals that he was about to do with John Augustus Beaumont. A good selection of the auction catalogues are extant in the Northampton County Records Office [SOX 278-1] – we have only reproduced the surviving auction plans relevant to Wandsworth.

The full auction account book showing the auction receipts, this tells us exactly to whom and for how much each parcel of land was sold.

The account book from Earl Spencer’s land auctions between 23rd June 1835 – 19th July 1837. By kind permission of the Northampton County Records Offic

 

Beaumont bought some of the lands as a result the major land auctions [according to a document entitled Earl Spencer & J A Beaumont Notes for agreement – undated SOX142 Northampton Archives Service] being lot 30, 31 and 32 although he either bought them through nominees, so as not to drive the prices up, or bought them privately after the auction because Beaumont is not listed as the purchaser in the auction account book above.

Duke of Sutherland’s land sale

The Duke of Sutherland sold The West Hill Estate on 23rd May 1842 at auction. The buyer was John Augustus Beaumont.  The auction catalogue and plan are in the Sutherland Collection, in the Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent Archives Service, where there is also considerable material on the day to day life of the house.

The Duke of Sutherland banked with Drummonds and there are some banking books extant with the Sutherland Collection [D593/P/34/2/1-4] which show a deposit of  £40,500 was made by Beaumont to the Duke of Sutherland on 9th August. We are currently looking to see if there was an earlier deposit payment of, likely, 10% of the sale price on the day of the auction.² Otherwise this does not add up to the £45,000 that Beaumont claimed to have paid for the estate.

Drummonds ultimately became part of the NatWest Group however The Duke of Sutherlands ledgers for 1842 do not survive.³

The 1842 auction plan of the lands of Melrose Hall, where Beaumont was to establish himself as he carried on his great project. Melrose Hall still survives as part of the Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability. Presumably the founders of the hospital bought the hall and site from Beaumont but this is glossed over in the online history which simply references Earl Spencer and Capability Brown.

The sale particulars of the West Hill Estate and Melrose Hall  [we are trying to obtain a full copy of these].

Beaumont agreed with Earl Spencer the purchase a parcel of lands in Wimbledon and Wandsworth in a Conveyance dated 12th August 1843 entitled “Counterpart – Conveyance in fee of part of Wimbledon Park and of Lands in Southfields in Wandsworth Cou[nty] of Surrey”. The purchase price, stated in the Conveyance, was £14,425 which seems a remarkably small sum for the extent of the lands involved.

Counterpart Conveyance in fee of part of Wimbledon Park and of Lands in Southfields both in Wandsworth Cou[nty] Surrey. dated 12th August 1843. By kind permission Northamptonshire Archives Service. SOX142

 

In 1845/6 Earl Spencer and Beaumont agreed a further purchase of lands.

We can be absolutely certain of  the consideration [purchase monies] and the extent of the lands as the full set of records is extant.

There is also a fascinating head of terms agreement entitled “Articles of an Agreement made this Eighteenth day of June one thousand eight hundred and forty five Between The Right Honourable John Charles earl Spencer of the one part and John Augustus Beaumont of West Hill Wandsworth in the County of Surrey Esquire of the other part.”

The sum of £80,000 was settled on as the land was parkland and was not agricultural land. Beaumont therefore got a very good deal on this building land.

Heads of terms agreement between Earl Spencer and Beaumont for the purchase of Wimbledon Park. Northamptonshire Archives Service. SOX142

 

By the time of the Ordnance Survey Map of 1870 which was actually surveyed in 1865-7 we can clearly see considerable development of The Wimbledon Park Estate. Many of the early houses in the Wimbledon Park development had considerable basement excavations, as was common at the time for storage, kitchens or staff quarters.

A good selection of original deeds survives which gives a very good idea of the scale and timing of the transactions.

In a beautiful, 1879 plan, entitled The Plan Of The Wimbledon Park Estate, we can see the full extent of the lands that Beaumont bought up. There is considerable detail shown here including the extent of major tree planting on the site. We can also see Wimbledon Park Lake before it was modified in a series of schemes to enhance local surface water drainage. The lands that formed the later Wimbledon House Estate, complete with its lake, are marked as belonging to Sir H. W. Peek Bart and the lands that formed the Belvedere House Estate of the 1900’s are unfeatured.

In a beautiful, 1879 plan, entitled The Plan Of The Wimbledon Park Estate, we can see the full extent of the lands that Beaumont bought up. There is considerable detail shown here including the extent of major tree planting on the site. We can also see Wimbledon Park Lake before it was modified in a series of schemes to enhance local surface water drainage. The lands that formed the later Wimbledon House Estate, complete with its lake, are marked as belonging to Sir H. W. Peek Bart and the lands that formed the Belvedere House Estate of the 1900’s are unfeatured.

Wimbledon Park Road has been created, however The District Line, as we now know it, is yet to be created as is the extension of Sutherland Road, that runs alongside the District Line today.

To the East of the plan it is clear that Beaumont had been less successful with buying up the entirety of the lands and there is clearly a field where Beaumont had ownership of odd strip but by no means that whole area. This may well have been because the Wandle valley was highly industrialised, so Beaumont was less interested in those areas. Beaumont was keen on sweeping views and the, already by then, highly industrialised Wandle Valley was a far cry from that paradigm.

What the 1879 map does make plain is just what an enormous area John Augustus Beaumont had succeeded in buying up. This was by no means, the only area of Wandsworth that he snapped up in the various sales of the 1830-1840’s. Which rather leads to the question ‘where did he get the money to buy all this land so quickly?’

Continue reading – Where did John Augustus Beaumont get the money from?

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Footnotes

¹In a coincidental wrinkle in a document dated, 31st March, 1813, document “Report on great tithes and on those parts of South Field and Wimbledon Common taken into Earl Spencer’s Park” by John Trumper of Harefield [LMA/A/JM/505] was prepared for the trustees of John Marshall’s Charity. Clearly there were some issue and we suspect that this centred around Earl Spencer not wanting to pay the higher great tithe rates for productive agricultural land once his ancestors had volitionally turned agricultural land into parkland. This could well have been the final trigger to the sale of Wimbledon Park to John Augustus Beaumont – the sheer ongoing costs of paying tithes as well as upkeep.

² Personal correspondence with Sunderland Archives 14th December 2023

In terms of account books, the majority of the financial records we hold relate to the estates, primarily Trentham of course. There is less information as to the private accounts of family members. I presume the sale of an estate would go into a personal account, perhaps a trust. We do have some personal bank books for the Second Duke for the period, with his bank Drummonds 1833-1854 (refs D593/P/34/2/1-4). There is also a chance that something will appear in the correspondence between the Duke and the Chief Agent, but this is a voluminous series, with monthly bundles each containing a large number of letters arranged by correspondent – the Agent usually dealt with estate correspondence and then wrote to the Duke as necessary. But again the Agent mainly dealt with the estates. There were also Private Secretaries who conducted personal business, and we do have some miscellaneous correspondence for the right period (series D593/Q).

³ Personal correspondence with NatWest Group Archives 15th December 2023

I’m afraid we don’t hold the accounts for 1842. The customer account ledgers of Drummonds Bank are complete for the period 1716-1815. The ledgers continued after 1815 but only survive for every 10th year thereafter, the remainder having been pulped during the Second World War.

We do hold accounts for the Duke of Sutherland for 1845 but they wouldn’t have anything about a transaction from 1842.