Epsom, Meadway 1927

Photo ref: 79668

More about this scene

Each day at dawn, strings of racehorses would pass gracefully up the hill, as they had 100 years earlier. But the view from the Downs had changed since then; fields were giving way to housing everywhere between Epsom and London. Harry and Frank Roll built up Hookfield, where Basil Braithwaite had held his garden parties, and Ron and John Harwood developed ten roads in the old grounds of Woodcote House. But the real profits were to be made in Ewell, which had remained a village surrounded by farmland until 1930. Now it was ringed by new estates, most of them focussed on the commuter station of Stoneleigh. It was the same throughout north-east Surrey, and the Rural District could no longer cope. It was broken up in 1933 and became part of Epsom Urban District, as had the former parishes of Ewell and Cuddington, immediately increasing its population by 50%. The rateable value went up in proportion, and this may have persuaded the councillors to commission a Town Hall in the Parade. Previously they had met in rooms upstairs at the Public Hall, or in Bromley Hurst, a private house sold to them by Edmund Wilson the town clerk. Now Bromley Hurst was pulled down, and on its site the council built a new fire station. This was designed by the same architects, Pite Son & Fairweather, but in a functionally modernist style rather than the neo-Georgian chosen for the town hall.