Richmond

ESTATE HISTORY

Courtlands stands on an eleven-acre site on the corner of Queens Road and Sheen Road.   Sheen Road used to be called Marshgate and skirted an area of boggy land at the edge of the Common which was known “to be very full of bogs and founderous places whereby the cattle feeding and depasturing upon the Common are thereon much indangered and sometimes destroyed by sinking into these spungy places out of which they cannot at some times be gotten forth …”.   As a remedy the area was closed and granted out.   Several of the springs which caused the problem still flow into the lake in the gardens of Courtlands.

In 1770 Edward Starkie Esq was assessed for the original house which stood on the site and it passed to his sister Elizabeth in 1775.   She died in 1780 and the property passed to Lloyd Kenyon and became known as Kenyon House (Right).   Lloyd Kenyon was a politician and barrister and became Lord Chief Justice and the first Lord Kenyon.   He enjoyed the friendship of George III who often visited him from Kew;  his biographer states: “Here the King would come without any notice and stay for several hours, walking up and down the little garden with the Chief Justice.”

The Hon. Heneage Legge, a younger son of the third Earl of Dartmouth, purchased the property in 1829 and after a few years demolished the old house and built a new one on elevated ground at the south of the site.   He called it Stawell House (pronounced as in ‘shawl’) and the Tithe Appointment map of 1839 shows the new layout.   Between the east front and the paddock was a terrace walk about 200 yards long which was flanked by balustrading from Old London Bridge dating from 1757-62.   At each end of the walk were two alcoves or “porters’ rests”.   Legge died in 1844 and eventually, in 1868 his trustees sold the estate to Sir Henry Watson Parker who lived there till his death in 1881.

He left the estate to his niece, Emma Jane Vaughan Arbuckle, for her life and thereafter to her son, Major Charles Lionel Vaughan Arbuckle.  Emma Jane died in 1936 and Charles the following year.

The property, advertised as “ripe for development”, was sold on 18^th June 1935.   On 14^th July 1936 it was sold again.   Early in 1937 Stawell House was demolished and the building of the first blocks of flats (Arundel, Buckingham, Kent, Marlborough, Norfolk and Runnymede Houses) together with garages was completed in 1938.   During the development the balustrading along the terrace and the alcove or porters’ rest at the north end disappeared, but the porters’ rest at the south end did not interfere with the new buildings and remains to this day among the trees along the southern boundary of the estate.   Fortunately other alcoves survive, one of the most accessible standing in the quadrangle at Guy’s Hospital, not far from the bridge.   There were plans to convert the ornamental lake into a swimming pool for residents but this did not happen and, surrounded as it is by mature trees and lawns, the area is little changed from the time of Stawell House.   One of the oldest trees, the Tulip tree, is registered as a Champion Tree because it has the largest single stem girth in Greater London.

On 20^th September 1940 a landmine fell on Runnymede House partly demolishing it.   Fortunately no-one was injured or killed and the house was reconstructed at the end of the war.

Picture credits : Richmond Library

In the 1960s the ‘new blocks’ (Carisbrooke, Gloucester, Osbourne, Sandringham and York Houses) were built, together with a multi-storey garage and the estate as it is today was complete.

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