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Looking Back with Eddie Menday: Changing places in West London.

Eddie Menday takes a look at how geographical names of local places have changed over the years.

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Newsopinion

15:18, 15 AUG 2014
Updated15:43, 21 APR 2015

Scrattage Lane, or Jersey Road as it is now known, in Osterley. It ran along the south side of Osterley Park starting at Wood Lane and eventually meeting Lampton Road and Kingsley Road. Picture courtesy of Hounslow Local Studies department

I have been studying a map of 1804 published by C Smith of the Strand in London and comparing the place names of then with now, and seeing how many have changed over the years.

The postal address of the main Staines Road at Bedfont is referred to as Bedfont Lane, which we know as the road between Feltham town and Bedfont.

A little south of the main road towards the Powder Mills and Babe Bridge is Buda Hills. I assume the ‘r’ is missing. There is a slight dip in the Hounslow Road but nothing to resemble a hill. The railway bridge is much higher.

South of Heston is Butchers Grove and at Osterley there was a little hamlet called Scrattage.

This hamlet, according to GE Bate in his book, So Build a City Here, tells us the farmlands at Scrattage were at first destroyed by the brickfields developed by Messrs Brown, Micklebery and Brown.

Then the District railway and after the building of the Great West Road, Scrattage disappeared completely. Shown as New Brentford in 1802 the area west of the canal bridge on today’s maps is referred to as Brentford End and the ‘Old’ part of Old Brentford has been dropped.

There was a Shaftsbury Hill at Cranford and a Fern Hill but I do not recall any rising ground that would have impeded the present airport at Heath Row, the original name for the little hamlet with Kings Arbour close by.

West Bedfont was a small village on the way to Stanwell from East Bedfont on the Staines Road, which we refer to as Bedfont. Both are mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086. The Underground station reminds us of the hamlet of Hatton.

The one little footnote tells us the parts marked in green are parks and gentlemen’s houses.

I have left Sutton to last as we had two in the present borough, one in Chiswick and the other now disappeared was south of Heston.

We have Sutton Lane to remind us and the now badly damaged Hermitage, which had a fine thatched roof and was Grade II listed. English Heritage lists the building as probably 15th century and represented on Glovers’ map of 1635, with 19th century additions in a T-shaped plan. It has two storeys with an attic and is rendered in rough cast cement. The entrance porch on the west side has an imported medieval carved door.

I am indebted to reader Mrs MC Bull of Heston who has loaned me her notes on the Hermitage on which she has researched quite deeply. She writes that the first occupant was a yeoman named Beales, and the house was owned by the Earl of Jersey.

It would appear that the house was occupied by a succession of military men from Hounslow Barracks. Other occupants were the first Bishop of Kensington, The Reverend Frederick Edwards, Janus Ostrowski, a known engineer, and Einar Benediktsson, an Icelandic poet and lawyer who translated Ibsen’s Peer Gynt into his native language.