Tag Archives: Willow Lane

Carshalton Road

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Road that is the start of the A237 and runs south from the junction with Commonside West, Cedars Avenue and Croydon Road, heading towards Carshalton.

On the west side there is a junction with Cranmer Road and Willow Lane, and on the right just after this is the entrance road to Mitcham Junction railway station and the Mitcham Golf Club. The road goes over the railway and tram lines on a bridge that was rebuilt and widened in the mid 1950s. On the west side of the road and part of the southern slope of the bridge is an access road leading to Aspen Gardens. Further south from here, and set back from the western side of the road is a line of houses that were originally called Rumbold Villas and Tramway Terrace. They are separated by two roads Drake Road and Arney’s Lane. At Beddington Corner is the Goat pub on the corner with Goat Road.

After Beddington Corner, the road is now called London Road and the A237 continues to the A23 at Coulsdon.

Carshalton Road at junction with Croydon Road. The house was one of the Blue Houses. From a Percy Mayhew postcard, from Merton Memories, photo reference Mit_19_1-19

The guide post (marked G.P.) that is on the south side of the tram line in this 1910 OS map is the one seen in the photo.

1910 OS map

The junction with Croydon Road was changed to a roundabout in 1955.

From the Mitcham News & Mercury, 24th February 1955

ROUNDABOUT

Work is to start soon on making a traffic roundabout at the busy junction of Croydon Road with Carshalton Road, on Mitcham Common.

The Transport Minister has approved a grant of up to £4,427 towards the cost of the roundabout. Coun. D.J. Hempstead, Highways Committee chairman, said last week that it was hoped that work would be speedily undertaken.

The bridge over the railway line was widened at the same time, the work having been started in 1939 but was interrupted by the war.

On the east side of Carshalton Road, south of the railway station, was a WW2 anti-aircraft gun site. It was cleared in the early 1960s.

1955 OS map showing the Gun Site.

From the Mitcham News & Mercury, 13th July 1962:

At last – Gunsite is to go

One of Mitcham’s biggest eyesores, the Gun Site, Carshalton Road, Mitcham Common, is at last to be cleared at a cost of about £13,000.

Work on clearing the site is expected to start in about two months time.

The Ministry have approved a tender of £10,800 submitted to them from the Conservators and have further agreed to bear the cost of replacing trees on the site.

WELCOMED

A further cost of £2,000 fees will be included in the work.

This news is welcomed not only by the Conservators but by Mitcham Council and the public.

The Gun Site is one of the few remaining war relics in Mitcham and local people have been pressing for years to clear it.

The conservators hope to replace it with a grass landscape with trees.

WW2 Civilian Casualties

20th October 1940

16 Carshalton Road
Winifred Mabel LARBY, aged 35

Maps are reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

Arney & Co., gelatine manufacturer

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In the 1851 directory listed Arney & Co., as patent gelatine makers, Common, Upper Mitcham.

In the 1846 Repertory of Patent Inventions, Gerard Andrew Arney is listed as a gentelman, living at Mare Street, Hackney, and his patent for …

Improvements in the preparation of gelatine, and Improvements in finig or clarifying liquids. Sealed January 20, 1846.

The London Gazette, Publication date:23 April 1852 Issue:21312 Page:1163 says that the firm was a partnership name Hammond, Arney and Co. and that this partnership was dissolved:

WE hereby give notice, that the Partnership heretofore subsisting between us the undersigned, under the firm of Hammond, Arney,and Co. Gelatine Manufacturers, of Mitcham Common, Surrey, was, on the 26th day of March last, dissolved by mutual consent.

— Dated this 17th day of April 1852. Edward Hammond, Gerard Andrew Arney.

In the London Gazette later that year, the Patents Act published the patent as number 375 awarded to:

Gerard Andrew Arney, of Mitcham, in the county of Surrey, Gelatine Manufacturer, for the invention of improvements in coating or enamelling pictures, prints, paper, and other surfaces.

London Gazette, Publication date:29 October 1852 Issue:21374 Page:2843

Eric Montague, in his Mitcham Histories: 13 Willow Lane and Beddington Corner, page 98, said:

The gelatin works, remembered by Cecil Cox from his childhood in the 1840s and 50s, were leased from Cox by Gerard Arney, who, with his mother, Mrs Maria Arney, lived at Willow Lodge at the end of what today is now Arney’s Lane. The factory in 1853 had a wheel developing six hp driven by water conducted from the Wandle at Beddington Corner. Frederick Braithwaite, who visited the premises in the early 1850s, described the arrangements for supplying water to the factory as commencing with two small culverts passing underground before flowing into broad ditches to the north of a triangular island used as an osier bed. There was a fall of 18 inches which, with surface water draining from adjoining land, supplied the mill head. Arney and Company, patent gelatine makers do not seem to have lasted beyond the early 1860s, and the OS map of 1867 marks merely Willow Cottage and what appear to be two small cottages at the end of the lane from the Carshalton Road. All had disappeared completely by the 1970s, when the site was occupied in part by MJ Gleeson Ltd, builders, and partly by C Barber and Sons, haulage contractors.