Thames Tributary River Mole - Esher
Thames Tributary River Mole
The flows north towards the Thames
Post to the west Esher Road
Post to the north Sandown
Broom Close
The 175th most expensive street in Britain
Milestone. This stands outside a house called ‘Milestone’. It was originally in Claremont Lane
Church Street
Christ Church. A Victorian Gothic building with a tower and tall stone spire. It was built to replace the original parish church, St George's and accommodate a growing population. It has a Walker organ and a peal of eight bells. It was designed in 1853-4 by Benjamin Ferrey and built of buff rubble stone. Inside is whitewashed with a painted wooden gallery. There is a marble statue of Leopold King of the Belgians brought here from Windsor and a bust of the Duke of Albany, youngest son of Queen Victoria. There is also an Elizabethan monument of Sir Richard Drake from the old church – he was a cousin of Sir Francis Drake and went with him to the West Indies.
Claremont Lane
3 Friends Meeting House. 1797 very simple in yellow stock brick and with Central double doors
Alstonfield. Sheltered housing scheme of 1959 by Roger G Simmons Memorial Housing Association set up in the memory of his daughter. On the site of a house built 1909
Clive Road
The road name refers to Robert Clive who moved to Claremont in 1769
Dawes Court
A lone survivor of courts and passages which led off the High Street pre-20th., Weather boarded cottages
Esher
Esher, this is pronounced 'Ee-sher', and is generally a very very posh area. The place name is generally thought to derive from ash trees but the Kingston Zodiac points out that Alfred’s Welsh bishop and biographer had a palace here.
There are tunnels underneath much of the village from which fine sand was quarried
Esher Close
Broomhill Court, care home. The building is locally listed
Sentosa. House built in 1934 by Easton & Robertson for the Erhardt family. Brick with artificial stone dressings and cantilevered steel joists over the corner windows. There is a shelter on roof for outdoor sleeping.
Esher Green
Part of the road is called Cato’s hill
Fire Engine House, built in 1980s on ground from Sandown Park Racing Club, to whom they paid 1/-year rent. In the 1930s the station moved to as new station house. He old building is now a private house.
War memorial
Wheatsheaf on the Green pub 18th building
Toll bar.
Lammas, the 18th Rectory, brown brick house
19 Esher Green Adult learning centre in Esher Church Schools 1859 built on the site of the workhouse.
28 -34 row of cottages called Encott, Westeria, The Cottage and
Force Cottage. Late 18th in red and blue brick with brown brick centre.
St. George. The old Parish Church built in 1540 with a chapel of 1725-6, probably by Vanbrugh, and another chapel from 1812. It is built of stone with flint and tile in a chequerboard pattern. There is a shingled bell turret under a wood and copper weathervane – this turret is an important example of Surrey woodwork. It has the original roof beams and a clock, perhaps Tudor, with cannon balls for weights. There is also a mass dial from an earlier church. Inside it an open timber roof. There is a special ‘Newcastle’ chamber pew with posh columns and decoration from 1725 which was divided into two so it could be shared between the Duke and his brother, Henry Pelham, also a Prime Minister. Each section has its own fireplace and high box pews for servants. You can only get into this from outside the church, and it was used by Queen Victoria.. The gallery was a gift of Sir Thomas Lynch; Governor of Jamaica- a third gallery was removed. There is an 18th three-decker pulpit and lots of posh Monuments – including one to Leopold and Princess Charlotte showing Prince them tending the poor and another showing her death and him accepting the Crown of Belgium. There is an altar painting by Sir Robert Ker Porter, historical painter to the Tsar Alexander I of Russia and another by A. W. Devis of the Apotheosis of Princess Charlotte.
Esher Place
Esher Place had been a Norman abbey but taken over by the Bishopric of Winchester in the 13th with a grand house built in the mid-15th. It was loaned to Cardinal Wolsey and it is where he was held under house arrest after his fall as Chancellor. It then became Crown property – although briefly returned to Winchester under Mary – and was acquired by the Drake family, and three Spanish admirals were imprisoned here. It passed through a number of hands and was owned by Henry Pelham, Duke of Newcastle, some times Prime Minister, in the 18th. He commissioned work here by William Kent as a rococo landscape and included part of the house built for Bishop Wayneflete of Winchester in 1478. The centre of this house is Wayneflete's Tower, which survives with a grotto, an urn and the lodges. It is a three storey brick building with octagonal turrets and accessed by a water gate. In the early 19th the house was rebuilt for John Spice by Lapidge. In the late 19th it was owned by Money Wigram and then by D’Abernon, who once again had the house rebuilt – and included a private theatre, a Real Tennis Court and a sunken garden by Lutyens. In the 1930s D’Abernon sold much of the estate for housing and the house itself to the Shaftesbury Society, and it became a girls’ home. In the 1950s it was sold to the Electrical Trades Union and is now used as a training college and conference centre by Unite.
Tulip tree oldest in England and planted in 1684 in memory of Sir Thomas Lynch, a Jamaican colonist, by his daughter.
Esher Place Avenue
East & West Lodges. Late 18th standing 8 feet apart in red brick. All that remains of the Esher Place estate
High Street
Drinking Fountain and surrounding railings from 1877. This has a Marble bowl with bronze lion's head spout above and it says:"Presented to the Parish of Esher by Queen Victoria ".
77 18th House, now office and ‘restored‘ in 1970's. Built in brick with 20th extension
Statue of Britannia from 1897. A red marble plinth with a 20ft high copper figure which carries a spear. An inscription says it commemorates the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria
79 & 79a Grapes Cottage & Grapes House. 17th house, partly used for offices. Timber framed with rendered front
82 Albert Arms
83 18th House with shop front below in whitewashed brick and with a carriage entrance at the end.
85 18th House, now a shop in colourwashed render
99 -103 18th row of red brick houses now with shop fronts and used as offices.
136 -138 late 17th house, now shops. It is timber framed with plate glass shop fronts
Letter box outside 21
Cannon Cinema – this was the Embassy Cinema. Built 1936-1937 by John Evelyn Nye for the Shipman and King circuit, forming part of a parade of shops - The street facade here needed to be traditional to get approval. It is in Brown brick with artificial stone dressings. "EMBASSY" appears on the cornice. There are 5 double doors in late 20th aluminium and original terrazzo steps in black, white, red and buff to the foyer with its original fibrous plaster domed lighting. the auditorium still has its circle and stalls with an unusual double rake - From the rear wall the floor sloped to about half-way down then it rose at towards the front so that the front audience would need to lean their heads backwards. This was because of the underlying ground levels and was a money saving device. The auditorium decoration was by Mollo & Egan and the walls have patterned grilles illuminated from the rear which are ventilations and organ chamber openings. The circle walls have designs of tropical plants. There was a first floor café later converted to a second screen. It was opened on 23rd August by the novelist Ruby M. Ayres, with an address by actress, Frances Day.
71 Bear Hotel. An old coaching inn, once guarded by two stone bears. The inn might have been once a 15th hunting lodge for the Earl of Warwick whose sign is the bear and ragged staff. In the 16th the sign was reduced to just the bear. The building dates from the early 18th with a 19th century façade. It was then second stop on the route from London to Portsmouth with stabling for 100 horses. For years a pair of jackboots belonging to Louis Philipp’s post boy were displayed in the bar. In the 18th the pub was known as the Brown Bear. It became part of the Young’s group in 1888.
Pump. It is cast iron, 6 feet tall with an octagonal plinth above and an octagonal pump shaft which is decorated. It was previously in Sandown Park and marked the wedding of the Comte de Paris to H.R.H. Infanta Maria Isabella in 1864. Parish Pump. Cast iron over the public well. Money used given by the Compte de Paris in 1864.Cast by Dickie. Taken to Sandown Park because the water was bad in 1876 and returned in 1961. Trough not returned. Same as one at Hampton Court
Lammas Lane
Lammas Hill
The Kingston Zodiac says that Esher concerns the god of light and that Lammas is the summer festival
More Lane
7 Garden Reach Cottage. 18th in red brick. Said to have been the gardener's cottage in the 1830s when Esher Place was done up by William Kent. North of the house are the remains of the old kitchen garden.
Orangery - east of Garden Reach Cottage. 18th Red brick
Walls and gate from the 18th also associated with William Kent’s work at Esher Place for Henry Pelham in the 1730s. The roadside wall and gates and part of the east-west section of wall are in plum brick. The boundary wall is taller and with the gateway in soft red brick. The wall has buttresses and the gate piers have 18th Coade stone pineapples. There is another gateway with a round arch. These walls bound a triangular area once the kitchen gardens of Esher Place. Until the 1950s the gardens were run commercially.
Park Road
Esher Green Baptist Church opened in on 1983. The original church had been closed for six years due to lack of support. In 1852 the members met in the Friends' Meeting House but the site in Park Road developed. By 187 the church had about 80 members, and grew in the early 20th. its last service was held in May 1977, the property was then being leased to ABC Music of Esher as showrooms.
Pelham’s Walk
36 folly temple in the garden, 18TH in ashlar and flint with brick dressings. It is, built into a hill side with a retaining wall.
Portsmouth Road
1 – 4 Myrtle Cottages. Early 19th Red brick mile
Hillside Place
Lodge to Moore Place. Built 1905 by Sir Ernest George and Yates in Yellow brick
Moore Place . 17th house on the site Of a farm owned by a Gilbert de la More in 1263. In 1840 Lady Byron, widow of the poet, lived here as did the Duchess of Orleans.
Moore Place golf course. opened in 1926 by Harry Vardon,
Edward VIII Pillar box, opposite Moore Place
Clive House. 18th red brick house . the home of William Neville, the surgeon to Princess Charlotte
West End Lane
Princess Alice Hospice
Clover Way, pair of cottages now one house. 17c Timber framed with brick infill and weatherboarding above
Sources
Osborne. Defending London
The flows north towards the Thames
Post to the west Esher Road
Post to the north Sandown
Broom Close
The 175th most expensive street in Britain
Milestone. This stands outside a house called ‘Milestone’. It was originally in Claremont Lane
Church Street
Christ Church. A Victorian Gothic building with a tower and tall stone spire. It was built to replace the original parish church, St George's and accommodate a growing population. It has a Walker organ and a peal of eight bells. It was designed in 1853-4 by Benjamin Ferrey and built of buff rubble stone. Inside is whitewashed with a painted wooden gallery. There is a marble statue of Leopold King of the Belgians brought here from Windsor and a bust of the Duke of Albany, youngest son of Queen Victoria. There is also an Elizabethan monument of Sir Richard Drake from the old church – he was a cousin of Sir Francis Drake and went with him to the West Indies.
Claremont Lane
3 Friends Meeting House. 1797 very simple in yellow stock brick and with Central double doors
Alstonfield. Sheltered housing scheme of 1959 by Roger G Simmons Memorial Housing Association set up in the memory of his daughter. On the site of a house built 1909
Clive Road
The road name refers to Robert Clive who moved to Claremont in 1769
Dawes Court
A lone survivor of courts and passages which led off the High Street pre-20th., Weather boarded cottages
Esher
Esher, this is pronounced 'Ee-sher', and is generally a very very posh area. The place name is generally thought to derive from ash trees but the Kingston Zodiac points out that Alfred’s Welsh bishop and biographer had a palace here.
There are tunnels underneath much of the village from which fine sand was quarried
Esher Close
Broomhill Court, care home. The building is locally listed
Sentosa. House built in 1934 by Easton & Robertson for the Erhardt family. Brick with artificial stone dressings and cantilevered steel joists over the corner windows. There is a shelter on roof for outdoor sleeping.
Esher Green
Part of the road is called Cato’s hill
Fire Engine House, built in 1980s on ground from Sandown Park Racing Club, to whom they paid 1/-year rent. In the 1930s the station moved to as new station house. He old building is now a private house.
War memorial
Wheatsheaf on the Green pub 18th building
Toll bar.
Lammas, the 18th Rectory, brown brick house
19 Esher Green Adult learning centre in Esher Church Schools 1859 built on the site of the workhouse.
28 -34 row of cottages called Encott, Westeria, The Cottage and
Force Cottage. Late 18th in red and blue brick with brown brick centre.
St. George. The old Parish Church built in 1540 with a chapel of 1725-6, probably by Vanbrugh, and another chapel from 1812. It is built of stone with flint and tile in a chequerboard pattern. There is a shingled bell turret under a wood and copper weathervane – this turret is an important example of Surrey woodwork. It has the original roof beams and a clock, perhaps Tudor, with cannon balls for weights. There is also a mass dial from an earlier church. Inside it an open timber roof. There is a special ‘Newcastle’ chamber pew with posh columns and decoration from 1725 which was divided into two so it could be shared between the Duke and his brother, Henry Pelham, also a Prime Minister. Each section has its own fireplace and high box pews for servants. You can only get into this from outside the church, and it was used by Queen Victoria.. The gallery was a gift of Sir Thomas Lynch; Governor of Jamaica- a third gallery was removed. There is an 18th three-decker pulpit and lots of posh Monuments – including one to Leopold and Princess Charlotte showing Prince them tending the poor and another showing her death and him accepting the Crown of Belgium. There is an altar painting by Sir Robert Ker Porter, historical painter to the Tsar Alexander I of Russia and another by A. W. Devis of the Apotheosis of Princess Charlotte.
Esher Place
Esher Place had been a Norman abbey but taken over by the Bishopric of Winchester in the 13th with a grand house built in the mid-15th. It was loaned to Cardinal Wolsey and it is where he was held under house arrest after his fall as Chancellor. It then became Crown property – although briefly returned to Winchester under Mary – and was acquired by the Drake family, and three Spanish admirals were imprisoned here. It passed through a number of hands and was owned by Henry Pelham, Duke of Newcastle, some times Prime Minister, in the 18th. He commissioned work here by William Kent as a rococo landscape and included part of the house built for Bishop Wayneflete of Winchester in 1478. The centre of this house is Wayneflete's Tower, which survives with a grotto, an urn and the lodges. It is a three storey brick building with octagonal turrets and accessed by a water gate. In the early 19th the house was rebuilt for John Spice by Lapidge. In the late 19th it was owned by Money Wigram and then by D’Abernon, who once again had the house rebuilt – and included a private theatre, a Real Tennis Court and a sunken garden by Lutyens. In the 1930s D’Abernon sold much of the estate for housing and the house itself to the Shaftesbury Society, and it became a girls’ home. In the 1950s it was sold to the Electrical Trades Union and is now used as a training college and conference centre by Unite.
Tulip tree oldest in England and planted in 1684 in memory of Sir Thomas Lynch, a Jamaican colonist, by his daughter.
Esher Place Avenue
East & West Lodges. Late 18th standing 8 feet apart in red brick. All that remains of the Esher Place estate
High Street
Drinking Fountain and surrounding railings from 1877. This has a Marble bowl with bronze lion's head spout above and it says:"Presented to the Parish of Esher by Queen Victoria ".
77 18th House, now office and ‘restored‘ in 1970's. Built in brick with 20th extension
Statue of Britannia from 1897. A red marble plinth with a 20ft high copper figure which carries a spear. An inscription says it commemorates the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria
79 & 79a Grapes Cottage & Grapes House. 17th house, partly used for offices. Timber framed with rendered front
82 Albert Arms
83 18th House with shop front below in whitewashed brick and with a carriage entrance at the end.
85 18th House, now a shop in colourwashed render
99 -103 18th row of red brick houses now with shop fronts and used as offices.
136 -138 late 17th house, now shops. It is timber framed with plate glass shop fronts
Letter box outside 21
Cannon Cinema – this was the Embassy Cinema. Built 1936-1937 by John Evelyn Nye for the Shipman and King circuit, forming part of a parade of shops - The street facade here needed to be traditional to get approval. It is in Brown brick with artificial stone dressings. "EMBASSY" appears on the cornice. There are 5 double doors in late 20th aluminium and original terrazzo steps in black, white, red and buff to the foyer with its original fibrous plaster domed lighting. the auditorium still has its circle and stalls with an unusual double rake - From the rear wall the floor sloped to about half-way down then it rose at towards the front so that the front audience would need to lean their heads backwards. This was because of the underlying ground levels and was a money saving device. The auditorium decoration was by Mollo & Egan and the walls have patterned grilles illuminated from the rear which are ventilations and organ chamber openings. The circle walls have designs of tropical plants. There was a first floor café later converted to a second screen. It was opened on 23rd August by the novelist Ruby M. Ayres, with an address by actress, Frances Day.
71 Bear Hotel. An old coaching inn, once guarded by two stone bears. The inn might have been once a 15th hunting lodge for the Earl of Warwick whose sign is the bear and ragged staff. In the 16th the sign was reduced to just the bear. The building dates from the early 18th with a 19th century façade. It was then second stop on the route from London to Portsmouth with stabling for 100 horses. For years a pair of jackboots belonging to Louis Philipp’s post boy were displayed in the bar. In the 18th the pub was known as the Brown Bear. It became part of the Young’s group in 1888.
Pump. It is cast iron, 6 feet tall with an octagonal plinth above and an octagonal pump shaft which is decorated. It was previously in Sandown Park and marked the wedding of the Comte de Paris to H.R.H. Infanta Maria Isabella in 1864. Parish Pump. Cast iron over the public well. Money used given by the Compte de Paris in 1864.Cast by Dickie. Taken to Sandown Park because the water was bad in 1876 and returned in 1961. Trough not returned. Same as one at Hampton Court
Lammas Lane
Lammas Hill
The Kingston Zodiac says that Esher concerns the god of light and that Lammas is the summer festival
More Lane
7 Garden Reach Cottage. 18th in red brick. Said to have been the gardener's cottage in the 1830s when Esher Place was done up by William Kent. North of the house are the remains of the old kitchen garden.
Orangery - east of Garden Reach Cottage. 18th Red brick
Walls and gate from the 18th also associated with William Kent’s work at Esher Place for Henry Pelham in the 1730s. The roadside wall and gates and part of the east-west section of wall are in plum brick. The boundary wall is taller and with the gateway in soft red brick. The wall has buttresses and the gate piers have 18th Coade stone pineapples. There is another gateway with a round arch. These walls bound a triangular area once the kitchen gardens of Esher Place. Until the 1950s the gardens were run commercially.
Park Road
Esher Green Baptist Church opened in on 1983. The original church had been closed for six years due to lack of support. In 1852 the members met in the Friends' Meeting House but the site in Park Road developed. By 187 the church had about 80 members, and grew in the early 20th. its last service was held in May 1977, the property was then being leased to ABC Music of Esher as showrooms.
Pelham’s Walk
36 folly temple in the garden, 18TH in ashlar and flint with brick dressings. It is, built into a hill side with a retaining wall.
Portsmouth Road
1 – 4 Myrtle Cottages. Early 19th Red brick mile
Hillside Place
Lodge to Moore Place. Built 1905 by Sir Ernest George and Yates in Yellow brick
Moore Place . 17th house on the site Of a farm owned by a Gilbert de la More in 1263. In 1840 Lady Byron, widow of the poet, lived here as did the Duchess of Orleans.
Moore Place golf course. opened in 1926 by Harry Vardon,
Edward VIII Pillar box, opposite Moore Place
Clive House. 18th red brick house . the home of William Neville, the surgeon to Princess Charlotte
West End Lane
Princess Alice Hospice
Clover Way, pair of cottages now one house. 17c Timber framed with brick infill and weatherboarding above
Sources
Osborne. Defending London
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