By Tracey Logan & Richard Szwagrzak, Brentford & Chiswick Local History Journal 29, 2020
We are very proud to report that this article was runner up in the national BALH Annual Awards for Short Articles in 2021

One hundred and fifty years ago the first residents moved into the Glebe Estate, a new development of working class housing just south of Chiswick High Road and close to the recently opened Turnham Green Station. Unlike residents of the later Bedford Park Estate, Glebe Estate residents were not middle-class commuters but less well-paid men and women who worked locally.[1]

Building had begun in 1869 on nearly twenty acres of church land formerly rented to market gardeners by the Vicar of Chiswick. He was the 31-year-old Reverend Lawford William Torriano Dale, formerly Curate of St Pancras. Dale came to Chiswick in May 1857 and died here in 1898, having bequeathed to the parish a housing development which promised healthier lives for working class men and their families. Construction of the Glebe Estate coincided with dramatic social and environmental shifts across England. Chiswick’s rural past was disappearing and its urban future beckoned. In later life, Revd Dale recalled that

‘[i]n the fifties, large houses tenanted by well-to-do families were the rule throughout the parish; now . . . the parish of St Nicolas is the abode principally of artisans, mechanics, and grades of society considerably below these, while factories of various kinds cover sites formerly occupied by substantial residences and grounds.’ [2]

While Dale was a prolific writer, his private papers are now lost. This article is the result of painstaking archival research to discover the Glebe Estate’s origins.

Dale, the Glebe and Chiswick’s Poor

Dale leased his Glebe plot of land to be developed for housing for both financial and philanthropic reasons. He needed to secure funds for his mission to the poor, similar to his work as a curate in the crowded courts and alleyways of St Pancras. A quarter of his 4,000-strong flock worked on nearby market gardens. They lived in Chiswick New Town (the site of the Hogarth housing estate today) and were served by St Mary Magdalene’s Chapel-of-Ease, a satellite of St Nicholas parish church where wealthier locals worshipped. Dale also wished to improve schooling and facilities for local children at St Mary Magdalene.[3] In 1867 he noted that, while the Glebe brought in £105 annually as a market garden, it would produce a return five times as much in ground rents on a housing estate.[4]

The Idea of a Glebe Estate

The development was probably first thought of in 1864 when Chiswick’s local authority, its Improvement Commission, learned of plans by the London & South West Railway (L&SW Railway) for a new line between Kensington and Richmond, via Hammersmith.[5] It offered hopes for a station in Turnham Green Terrace,ideal for commuting into the City. Reverend Dale was an Improvement Commissioner, as were other leading vestry men. That same year, the Improvement Commissioners asked the Duke of Devonshire to remove his obstruction of Chiswick Field Lane (now the northern part of Devonshire Road). The timing of their request suggests property development south of the High Road was already being contemplated.

How the Glebe Estate’s Developers Met

By January 1867 Revd Dale’s plans to lease this Glebe plot for a housing estate were advanced and negot-iations well underway with its four potential investors. They were Alexander Fraser, Joseph Quick (father and son) and George Reckitt.

Fraser and the two Quicks knew each other well, all three being civil engineers in the water industry. Fraser and Quick Senior were the Assistant and Chief Engineer, respectively, of the Grand Junction Water Works Company. [6] They met George Reckitt through their personal investment activities, as fellow shareholders in the Land and House Investment Society Ltd, which had been involved in Kensington property development.[7] Through another investment connection they met William Vaughan Morgan, Deputy Chairman of the London & Southwark Insurance Co Ltd. He lived at Linden House, whose garden overlooked the Glebe.[8] This may be how the Glebe’s first developers learned of the housing development opportunity there.

Fraser Street, Reckitt and Quick Roads bear the names of the Estate’s eminent developers. Alexander Fraser designed the Italianate water tower at Kew Bridge Waterworks; Joseph Quick, in 1848, advised the government on improvements to London’s drinking water supply.[9] George Reckitt, was the son of Isaac Reckitt, founder of the Hull-based starch dynasty and its London salesman.[10] Meanwhile Binns Road appears to have been named after the developers’ solicitor, William Binns Smith. Glebe Street’s name reflects the origins of the plot. Dale Street recalls that far-sighted Vicar of Chiswick. And the Duke of Devonshire gets two mentions due to his former ownership of Chiswick Field Lane and also an 8½ acre plot, on the western side of the Estate, swapped with the Vicar at the turn of the nineteenth century.[11]

From Investment to Estate Planning and Building

There were two original Glebe Estate leases, not one. The first, signed by Fraser et al in August 1868, was for 999 years from Lady Day (25 March). The second, signed in January 1869, was for 998 years. Comparison of plans attached to these leases (shown below), drawn up with Revd Dale’s approval, shows dramatic changes were made to the Estate’s layout in late 1868.[12] If Plan No 1 had gone ahead, the Glebe Estate would look very different today. Here, we see Chiswick Field Lane blocked by gates, so new houses would have to back onto it, their front doors facing the Estate’s interior. They would have looked onto a bizarre interior landscape (shown in green). Plan No 2 shows the Lane un-gated and now two rows of houses built along it, back to back. One row faces the Lane, the other faces today’s Dale Street.

The fact that the earliest Glebe Estate plans had it almost entirely inward-facing, may explain why today it retains a subtle enclosed feel. Originally, the Estate’s only entrances were from Chiswick Field Lane and the streets of Chiswick New Town. It was not until 1882, when construction was nearly finished, that a new northern opening was created connecting Duke Road to Chiswick High Road. This was subsequently widened to its current dimensions after 1884.[13]

The second lease committed developers to building first on the pink plots and only then on the green. From 1869, on the pink plots, developers committed to building 185 houses, with the first 100 to be erected within five years. Of these at least 20 of the largest had to be built on Chiswick Field Lane. These pink plots would provide the £500 annual ground rent sought by the Vicar of Chiswick. A further 300 houses were to be built on the green plots, but the vicar would receive no income from these – they were developed at a peppercorn rent.[14] Roads adjacent to the pink plots were a generous 40ft wide, the rest, a still ample 36ft.

These Glebe Estate plans, No 1, 1868 and No 2, 1869, were drawn with north at the bottom and have been inverted here for clarity, though this means some text is upside down. Notice the 5-bar gates at each end of Chiswick Field Lane. (courtesy of the Church of England Records Centre)

In both plans we see an indentation to the Estate’s northern boundary. In Plan No 1 it is above plot ‘H’, and in Plan No 2 it is between plots ‘M’ and ‘L’. This still remains today, in the back gardens of Nos 55 and 57 Glebe Street, recalling the footprint of a former copyhold strip, the mediaeval equivalent of a leasehold plot.

It was the death of Mr Brand, resident of Sulhamstead House whose grounds abutted Chiswick Field Lane, which so dramatically altered the Glebe Estate’s layout. The Duke of Devonshire owned the Lane and his predecessor, the 6th Duke, had promised Mr Brand that ‘during his life [it] should not be opened.’[15] When Brand died on 11 December, 1868, that pledge died with him. Now Fraser et al could buy Chiswick Field Lane from the Duke, along with a ‘plantation’ or cultivated strip separating the Glebe from Chiswick New Town to the south.

Lessees were delighted that they could now build ‘superior houses’ on Chiswick Field Lane, and the vicar was ‘much pleased’ to remove the plantation ‘as it materially improve[d] the parish.’[16] It would connect the new Glebe Estate with Chiswick New Town and St Mary Magdalene’s chapel two streets away. Within nine months, building was ‘rapidly going on.’[17] Dale and his curates used St Mary Magdalene’s and Glebe Estate properties, to serve growing numbers of Chiswick’s poor. By 1886 they boasted Sunday Schools and Adult Schools there, as well as Band of Hope temperance meetings in Binns Road.[18]

New Glebe Estate Development Map

Our research, based on Chiswick rate books and original leases generously shared with us by many of today’s Glebe residents, has allowed us to draw a colour-coded map of key phases in the Estate’s development up to 1885. This map remains a work in progress. Since it is drawn on an 1893 OS map, when Chiswick Field Lane had been renamed ‘Devonshire Road,’ we will use this from now on. There is more of some colours on our map than others, showing how the Estate’s construction was affected by booms and busts of the economic cycle. Its backdrop was the late 19th century’s ‘Long Depression’.[19]

Here is our colour-coded summary of the sequence of development:

Green 1870-1873 (57 houses)
The oldest surviving houses sit beside the Estate’s original north and south gateways. They are 21-33 Devonshire Road (formerly Chester Terrace) at its junction with Glebe Street and 97-105 Devonshire Road at its junction with Devonshire Place and Fraser Street. The Chester Terrace houses, whose first residents included a school mistress and police inspector, are unlike any others on the Estate. Tall, with a basement and steps up to the ground floor, they express an urban classicism that recalls Fraser and Quick’s earlier Kensington housing developments, but on a smaller scale.Chester Terrace contained the only tall houses ever built on the Estate.

Chiswick’s local authority reacted to new housing by passing building bye laws in 1870. These restricted the heights of houses in relation to the width of streets, so that ‘no building shall be erected on the side of any new street which shall exceed in height the distance from the front of such building to the opposite side of such street’ [20] The 1870 regulations ensured a low-rise future for the Estate. Also, fashion had shifted towards more rustic, cottage-style housing. [21] The spaciousness of the estate today, with its modest two-storey terraces, back gardens, and wide streets, still demonstrates the success of these first bye laws and the original lease terms.

The Estate’s first low-rise housing went up in 1871 and was built by George Long. He grew up in Notting Dale, a notorious slum district of Kensington. His presence on the Estate may have influenced the passing of Chiswick’s new building regulations. Long started by building 3-19 Dale Street (between Binns Road and Glebe Street), which are small and flat fronted, with fashionable red brick detailing. Long’s next house, 1 Dale Street, was different. Larger than the others, this had a single storey rendered bay window with modest classical detail, which he also used for 2-10 Dale Street, opposite. Meanwhile similar houses went up in Glebe Street, some with attractive red brick diamond patterning. By 1873 the Glebe Estate norm was for houses with two storeys, a ground floor bay window, patterned brick and decorative mouldings or tiles.

Blue 1874-1876 (80 houses)
After a slow start in 1874, the building market recovered in 1875. Architectural fashion had moved on in that year and canopies with delicate curved wooden brackets and fish scale clay tiles now appeared on the southern side of Glebe Street (4-42, then Stanley Terrace). These canopies suggest the nostalgic rural idyll of ‘Domestic Revival’, an architectural style more fully expressed later in the red brick and tile-hung walls of Bedford Park. In 1876, ten house plots were set aside on Glebe Street and Binns Road for an infants’ school.[22]

Purple 1877-1879 (91 houses)
By 1877 canopied houses were the norm on the Estate, including Linden Villas on the north side of Glebe Street (79-93). The last row of flat fronted houses was built on Dale Street (21-39, originally Williams Terrace). Only one architect, Frederick Beeston, is known to have worked on the Glebe Estate. He was also its surveyor, overseeing road layout and construction. In 1877 Beeston designed a row of 20 houses for Binns Road (1-39, Sidney Villas).[23] The professions of surveyor and architect was often inter-changeable at this time.[24]

Yellow 1880-1882 (200 houses)
1880 was a boom year, with 118 houses erected, compared with just 19 the year before. This was the pattern across London at the time.[25] Nos 12-50 Binns Road (then Clarence Villas) were then completed, as were 41-81 Dale Street (then Avenue Terrace). Since houses did not go up all at once, streets were left with a gap-toothed appearance which was impossible to number in the modern way. This is why we see small groups of houses named as terraces and villas at this time. In 1885, when the Estate was mostly complete, streets were re-numbered sequentially, odd on one side and even on the other.The fashion for tiled canopies on houses ended in 1880, to be replaced with new decorative styles. Now we see delicate lintels and columns with fancy capitals on the windows (eg in 29 Reckitt Road), which almost seem a cut-price echo of the Venetian Doge’s Palace, but in miniature. Now, too, new combinations of red brick and render appeared and more elaborate classical details, including heroic plaster heads.

Red 1883-1885 (50 houses)
Building now slowed on the Glebe Estate, compared with the previous period. Fewer houses were built, but an entire terrace of shops appeared on Glebe land to the north of the Estate (where La Trompette sits today, originally Market Place, now 1-19 Devonshire Road). By then, with most gaps filled on Quick Road and Fraser Street, we see the Glebe Estate nearly completed.

Working Class Culture

In 1882 a public house, The Bolton Hotel, opened on Duke Road and was promoted as: ‘[i]n the midst of a marvellous locality hemmed in by numerous streets intersecting each other, teeming with inhabitants most suitable to property of this class.’[26] The Bolton offered not just drinks, but a dining room, stables and pub games like billiards and skittles. Licensed for music, but not dancing, it was a popular venue for all of Chiswick. Local Freemasons, the Conservative Workmen’s Group,the Chiswick School Board and the Turnham Green Bicycle Club all met there.[27]

Seven shops stood next to The Bolton, with more on corner sites around the Estate. None remains today, but we are reminded of the ‘Glebe Supply Stores,’ which was operating in 1882, by the faded, painted sign on the brickwork of 61 Dale Street.

The Glebe Estate’s Significance

From its earliest plans, Glebe Estate housing was built with newly aspirational artisans in mind, skilled workmen like bricklayers, plumbers and engineers. By the 1881 Census we see them living alongside lower middle class residents like clerks, policemen, school-teachers and travelling salesmen. Artisans were the class of men given the vote by Disraeli in his Representation of the People Act (1867), but not their poorer neighbours in Chiswick New Town.

We might expect the Glebe Estate, once built, to have been a healthier place to live than the meaner, older terraces of Chiswick New Town. Not so. As it neared completion, and despite the formidable engineering expertise of its original investors, the Estate was, in 1883, Chiswick’s deadliest neighbourhood. Sixty-nine people died there that year, compared with 40 in 1882. Chiswick’s Medical Officer of Health put its high mortality rate down to ‘the dampness of the subsoil,’ blaming ‘jerry building’ (cutting corners to complete houses quickly) for exposing residents to this.[28]

We end our story of the Glebe Estate’s origins in 1885, because that is where we have got to in our on-going research. There is so much more to learn about its later development, its social and cultural history. Working class culture thrived during the Estate’s first half century at least. In 1882, shortly after their construction, Nos 55 and 61 Dale Street boasted working class reading clubs.[219] In 1895 No 41 Glebe Street housed meetings of the Independent Labour Party.[30[ And in 1920, 42 Dale Street was home to one of Chiswick’s first Labour Councillors.31 The early Glebe Estate had a thriving retail economy such that by 1913 it boasted about 32 shops.[32]

The Estate’s connection with post-First World War town planning and social housing development is evident in Glebe and Binns Terraces. Their nine houses, looking so different from others, were built in 1927 based on earlier plans for the redevelopment of Chiswick New Town amid the ‘Homes for Heroes’ movement.[33] Finally, the modern houses of 86-92 Duke Road remind us of the Second World War. They sit on the former site of homes destroyed in a single night-time German bombing raid on 20 October, 1940. It killed two people and wounded eight others.[34] Today, Glebe Estate houses are well-kept and the Estate a relatively safe place to live.

Older residents [35] recall it was very different in their youth. Historians of social housing may one day learn why the Glebe Estate went downhill, and lessons can be learned for the maintenance of social housing today. So much is known about Chiswick’s distant past, so little of its more recent history and less still of its working class residents, who toiled in its fields and market gardens and built the houses and roads we see around us today. We hope, by our findings, to have stimulated others to explore this forgotten aspect of our local history.

References
1 Cheap workmen’s fares only came to Chiswick in the late 1880
M A Jahn, Railways & Suburban Development: Outer West London 1850-1900, MPhil Thesis (1970), Chiswick Local Studies & Archives (CLSA)
2 ‘Reverend Lawford William Torriano Dale, Vicar of Chiswick (1857-1898)’ Chiswick Times (CT) 6 May 1898, CLSA
3 ‘St Nicholas, Chiswick, Middlesex. Queries Prior to Visitation …’ 31 August, 1858, Lambeth Palace Archives (LPA)/Tait/440/39
4 Application ‘for the Consent of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners … to a Sale or Exchange…’, 14 January, 1867, Chiswick St Nicholas…, Church of England Record Centre (CERC)/ECE-7-1-36597
5 Minutes of Chiswick Improvement Commissioners (CIC Mins], 30 November 1864, CLSA
6 Alexander Fraser, and Joseph Quick, Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History
7 The Portobello and St Quintin Estates, Survey of London Vol 37 (pp298-332).
8 ‘London and Southwark Insurance Corporation (Limited),’ London Evening Standard, 27 December 1864
9 Alexander Fraser (1823-1895) and Joseph Quick (1809-1894), Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History
10 The Late Mr & Mrs George Reckitt, Ours (Reckitts staff magazine), July 1923, p29
11 T Logan, ‘A New Discovery: A Portion of the Lost Chiswick Enclosure Map,’ London Topographical Society Record, 31 (2015)
12 Two Glebe Estate layout plans, CERC/ECE-7-1-36597
13 CIC Mins, 6 February, 1884
14 ‘Memorandum, The Rev L W T Dale & Alexr Fraser Esq & others,’ 20 November 1868, CERC/ECE-7-1-36597
15 Correspondence: CIC Mins, 26 April, 1865
16 Correspondence: R W B Smith to Ecclesiastical Commissioners, 30 December, 1868, CERC/ECE-7-1-36597
17 Correspondence: Rev W Walsh to Bishop of London, LPA/FP Jackson 37
18 ‘Chiswick Parish Church District Almanack, AD 1886,’ LPA/FP Temple
19 A E Musson, ‘The Great Depression in Britain, 1873-1896’ Journal of Economic History 19(2),June 1959
20 Chiswick Parish Bye Laws (1870), The National Archives (TNA)/MH13/50/259
21 S Muthesius, The English Terraced House (1982), p147
22 Correspondence: Ecclesiastical Commissioners and Glebe Lessees, 17 September 1875, CERC/ECE-7-1-36597
23 J Wisdom, The Making of a West London Suburb:Housing in Chiswick (1861-1914) MA Thesis(1976), pp156-7, CLSA
24 D Kroll, The Other Architects who made London… 1870-1939, PhD Thesis (2013)
25 H J Dyos, ‘The Speculative Builders and Developers of Victorian London,’ Victorian Studies, 11 (1968)
26 Particulars and Conditions of Sale ‘The Bolton Hotel’, London Metropolitan Archives ACC/0891/02/09/0010
27 Acton Gazette (AG): 21 April 1880; 28 & 21 October 1882 (respectively)
28 Chiswick Parish, Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1883, CLSA/614 Chi.
29 AG, 14 October and 4 November 1882
30 ‘Local Organisations,’ CT, 7 June 1895
31 Cllr Maurice Leahy, elected for Chiswick Park ward, CT, 1 April 1920
32 ‘Chiswick District Council,’ CT, 24 January, 1913
33 Glebe Estate Pt I Scheme, TNA/HLG47/273 and Chiswick UDC Minutes April 1925 – March 1928
34 Bomb Book Index, CLSA

At the time of writing this article, Tracey Logan and Richard Szwagrzak had lived on the Glebe Estate for 25 years. Tracey was studying for a PhD in Urban History, concerning Brentford and Chiswick’s experience of Greater London’s growth (1895-1927). Richard was researching the architecture and development of the Glebe Estate. The authors would be grateful to see original leases of Glebe Estate houses and any other related historical documents

At its cabinet meeting on 3 September 2024, Hounslow Council approved the designation of the estate as a conservation area. The Conservation Area Appraisal is available online.