A touch of class: Landed estates in Croydon when Queen Victoria came to the throne

Nowhere near Croydon were there any such landed estates as could be found in the Midlands and in southern and northern England where the landed classes measured their acres in tens and hundreds of thousands. Surrey as a whole was not a county rich in vast landed estates, and, despite being near London, the hub of progress, its methods of farming were backward. The countryside to the east and south of Croydon was mainly chalk downland, given over to heathland and sheep pasture.

With one or two exceptions the size of landed estates in and around Croydon came within three to five hundred acres. The exceptions were in the parishes of Coulsdon and Addington, now within the borough of Croydon but then adjoining the parish of Croydon, an exceptionally large parish of nearly ten thousand acres, since subdivided into numerous other parishes. The four thousand acres of the parish of Coulsdon was largely owned by the Byron family who were resident landowners. Addington was also unusual. Since 1807 the Archbishops of Canterbury spent much of their summers there in peaceful retreat from the busy capital. They owned a quarter of the parish but Addington Park itself totalled 650 acres, the rest of the cultivated land leased out to tenant farmers. Within the parish of Croydon there were smaller estates at Haling Park, at Selsdon Park and at Shirley Park.

Shirley Park hosted a fancy dress ball in 1837, attended by the Duke of Brunswick. Lady Dudley Stuart, Count Kesensky and Sir Henry Bridges. Even so, it could not compare with the illustrious company that attended Johann Strauss's concert at Beulah Spa about the same time when the Dukes of Buccleugh and Sutherland (his Scottish estates exceeded a million acres) were in attendance. Haling Park went on sale in 1837. It included eight best bedrooms, a library, stabling for nine horses and standing for four carriages.

Selsdon Park was owned by members of the Smith family, not a name to conjure with as such, but none the less related to Lord Carrington and ultimately to the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Abel Smith owned eleven thousand acres at Woodhall Park in Hertfordshire, but at Selsdon his relatives George Smith and then his son George Robert Smith owned about three hundred acres and also more land in Chelsham. They were still involved in banking, beside being M.Ps, so the size of their estates is not a true indication of their wealth.

Shirley Park was sold to the 3rd Earl of Eldon, the grandson of a former Lord Chancellor, in 1839 for £8000. Earlier it had been owned by an M.P., John Maberley, just as in Addington he had once owned Spring Park Farm.

It was convenient for bankers and M.Ps to have an estate within easy reach of London where they could entertain or go hunting. They might join the Duke of Cumberland's staghounds or the Surrey Foxhounds but more likely shoot pheasants and other game on their own estates. To manage their farms they employed land agents such as Hewitt Davis who managed both Selsdon Park's home farm of 149 acres and the smaller Oaks Farm owned by the Archbishops. He himself was the tenant farmer of Spring Park Farm, now belonging to John Temple Leader, a wealthy Radical M.P., making it into a model farm visited by farmers, agriculturalists and farmers' clubs.

Davis also wrote regularly for the press, and he has left a description of Addington and its neighbourhood as it was at the turn of the century when it had been a poor, cold, desolate place but now at the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign containing so much park and so large a proportion of wealthy resident owners.

Brian Lancaster

[Reprinted from The Link for September 2004 with the permission of the Forestdale Residents' Association]

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