Site of Oxhey Place farm
Drag the round handle to slide between the old map (left) and today (right). On a phone, tap the map once to move it.
Then
The estate's home farm stood between the old walled garden and Oxhey Chapel. In 1872 the holding, which included Ranger's Farm and Pond Wood, came to 383 acres. It had a four-bedroom farmhouse, big barns, a granary on stone piers and six cottages, one of which had once been a dove cote. Thomas Blackwell rented it in 1872, five years before he bought the estate. In October 1877 Canon Gee told the Watford Natural History Society about the Grimston Oak, which grew beside Mr Blackwell's farmhouse fence. About 1881 J. E. Cussans found the chapel alone in a meadow east of the farm, and in 1889 H. J. Foley passed a pretty farmhouse and a huge barn. Walter Blackwell's will, which took effect when he died in 1912, told his trustees to let the estate's farm and the rest of its land. The 1935 Ordnance Survey shows the farmhouse about 130 metres west of the chapel. The London County Council's compulsory purchase order of 1943 lists the farmhouse and its garden as let to a tenant who lived there, and he objected to the order.5,18,20,35,53,57,72,73,90,98,165,295,296,297
Now
By the 1960s the site was under the houses of Lincoln Drive and Matlock Crescent, which still cover it, and we found no date for when the farm came down. Pond Wood, once part of the farm, still stands at Northwick Road and Seacroft Gardens.
Mentioned in
- Farms and fields: The field names Before the Estate
- The old woods: Pond Wood and the smaller woods Before the Estate
- Oxhey Chapel: Ivy and a chapel of ease Before the Estate
- Churches: Oxhey Chapel, 1612 Life on the Estate
- The heart of the estate Walk
- Farms and lost houses Walk
Position from old Ordnance Survey maps and OpenStreetMap. See Sources and method.