Wormwood Scrubs

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Little Wormwood scrubs

Du Cane Road

Hammersmith and Queen Charlotte hospitals.

Royal Hammersmith Hospital, Wolfson Institute– 1910 Halsden the Mission set up large teaching hospital to teach medicine on academic principles, Not until 1925 was something done. Next door teaching hospital, would not help and Hammersmith Hospital had to do it. Hammersmith Hospital designed in an A & C building called the Paupers Paradise. Nice building by Wolfson. Transferred to London County Council from Hammersmith Board of Guardians. West London Renal Building Ansell and Bailey 2005.  radiotherapy department with art works.

Wormwood Scrubs Prison.  built with prison labour. Statues of Elizabeth Fry, wearing a toque hat, and Howard over the door – he objected to being sculpted. Built by Duncane and every cell is accessible to the sun – described as a 'new military prison' . 

Primula Street

St Katherine

Rosewood Square

Delightful addition, sheltered housing for old people, 1984 by Orr, T. Ryland, and M. Lister of the Borough's Architecture and Building Department.  Two-storey terraces around a little square, lovingly designed with pretty trellis balconies, tile decoration, and other playful details.  In the centre a gazebo- cum-laundry with tiled roof, set lozenge-wise on an octagonal plinth.

Scrubs Lane

United Dairies Boilers

Westway Cloverleaf

Wormwood Scrubs

‘Wormhold Scrubbs’. Meaning  'brushwood-covered land by Wormholt’ means  snake-infested wood'. Wormholt seems to have been misheard as 'Wormwood'; alternatively, the modern name may be merely thecontraction of the unnecessarily long form ‘Wormeholte’ c1195,  ‘Wormoltwode’ 1437, ‘Wormewood’ 1654, ‘Wormwood Scrubbs’ c.1865. Marked as ‘Wormholt Scrubbs’ on Greenwood's map of 1819, and as The Scrubs on the Ordnance Survey map of 1822. from Old English ‘wyrm’ and ‘holt’  with the later addition of scrub 'low stunted tree, brushwood'. The original form of the name still appears on the Ordnance Survey map of 1822 as Wormholt Farm and survives as Wormholt Park. The prison here, built 1874-90 by the prisoners themselves, is known locally and colloquially as simply -The Scrubs'.

 Made up of 153 acres from the Manor of Fulham, Wormholt Common or Scrubs, woodland, Government lease to exercise the Life Guards and copyholders could keep on grazing, Land offered free to Metropolitan Board of Works 1876 if kept as a common, drained 1886, 1909 Daily Mail airship was there, Graham White air pioneer small piece called Scrubs Wood along the railway line for nature conservation 194 acres, purchased in December 1876 by the Government for over £52,000. Formerly called Wormholt Common or Scrubs it was originally a wood and consisted of two hundred acres, of which about sixty were enclosed. In 1812 a lease of this common was taken by the Government for a term of twenty-one years at a rental of £100 per annum, for the purpose of exercising the two regiments of the Life Guards. The money was to be divided equally between Fulham and Hammersmith, but the copyholders were to continue to enjoy the usual privilege of turning out their cattle to graze. In 1876 the Government offered the land free of cost to the Metropolitan Board of Works.  This handsome offer was gladly accepted, but the Government stipulated that Wormwood Scrubs should be preserved as an open space for the benefit of the public under the Commons Act and not be converted into a park.

Flying connection from 1909 when the Daily Mail had an airship shed built here for the Frenchman Alphonse Clement who was sponsored by the paper to bring his airship to London.  Grahame-White used the shed to repair his aeroplane between his first and second attempts to win the London-Manchester prize and took off from here on his second attempt. The site belonged to the War Department and other airships used the shed.  In 1914 the RNSA took it over and until the end of World War I it was an airship station but then reverted to peaceful duties.  All that now remains is a section of the perimeter wall which now forms the west boundary of the West London Stadium.

Stamford Brook rising stream widened and more weirs


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