The first reference to a settlement in Kingswood is contained in the Domesday Book, where a passage in the entry for Ewell states that `2 hides and 1 virgate were removed from this manor; they were there before 1066, but reeves lent them to their friends’. Historians agree that this refers to Kingswood, which had obviously gone missing from the Manor of Ewell in somewhat mysterious circumstances. We know that it was returned to its rightful owner, the Crown, some time before 1158, when Henry II gave Ewell and its Sub-Manors of Batailles, Ruxley and Kingswood to the Canons of Merton Priory.
At the Dissolution of the monasteries Kingswood reverted once more to the Crown and became part of the Honour of Hampton Court, Henry VIII’s vast hunting domain.
KINGSWOOD
Recent archaeological finds in Kingswood have revealed that early Stone Age man was active in the area some 350,000 years ago.
A Brief History
In 1564 Elizabeth I granted the Manor of Kingswood to William Howard of Effingham, the Lord Chamberlain of her Household. William was succeeded as Lord of the Manor of Kingswood by his son Charles, the future Lord High Admiral of England, who successfully led the English fleet against the Spanish Armada.
The Howard line became extinct with the death of Charles’s son in 1642 and for the next 200 yeayears Kingswood passed through the hands of a succession of absentee Lords of the Manor. The most notable amongst them was undoubtedly Sir Thomas Bludworth, who took over the Manor of Kingswood in 1660 and was elected Lord Mayor of London in 1665. Samuel Pepys had taken an instant dislike to the man and reviled him on several occasions in his famous diary for his inept handling of the Great Fire of London, which took place during Sir Thomas’s term of office.
In 1835 Thomas Alcock bought the Kingswood manorial estate from Col. Hylton Jolliffe, of Merstham, and became the first Lord of the Manor to reside in Kingswood and to take an active interest in the welfare of its residents. He set himself two main tasks: the first was to extend and bring up to date the old house in the Warren, in order to turn it into a country seat worthy of his new position. The second of these tasks was to provide the inhabitants of Kingswood, who still had to walk some 6 miles to Ewell to attend church, with their own place of worship. A chapel was built by subscription and consecrated in 1836. In 1838 Kingswood finally cut its century-old ties with the parish of Ewell to become an independent ecclesiastical district. The chapel soon proved to be too small and Thomas Alcock decided to erect a new church, this time completely at his own expense. The Church of St. Andrew, designed by the architect Benjamin Ferrey and modelled on the 14th century Church of St. John the Baptist at Shottesbrooke, in Berkshire, took four years to build and was consecrated in September 1852.
Our Past
After the death of Thomas Alcock in 1866 the Kingswood Warren estate was sold by his executors to Sir John Cradock-Hartopp, who, as Lord of the Manors of not only Kingswood, but also Banstead, became embroiled in a bitter legal battle over Banstead Commons. The dispute finally bankrupted him and forced him to sell the Kingswood Warren estate, which was bought in 1885 by Henry Cosmo Orme Bonsor, a City financier, Governor of the Bank of England and partner in a brewery firm.
He was the prime mover behind the construction of the Chipstead Valley Railway line, which officially opened as far as Kingswood in November 1897. Cosmo Bonsor also made available the land required by Dr. Edwin Freshfield to build his remarkable neo-Byzantine Church of the Wisdom of God (completed in 1892) in Lower Kingswood. He was a most kind and generous man and, unlike his predecessor, was loved by all in the local community.
Our Present
In 1906 rising maintenance costs decided Cosmo Bonsor to put the Kingswood Warren estate on the market. The estate failed to sell in one lot at auction and was later broken up and disposed of in smaller lots. In 1911 the Walton Heath Land Company, set up by Cosmo Bonsor, acquired the mansion and some 640 acres of land. In 1912 the mansion together with 102 acres were sold on to the mill owner Joseph Rank while the Walton Heath Land Company retained the rest of the land for development purposes. After World War I the Walton Heath Land Company was taken over by Costains, a Liverpool-based building firm looking to expand its business down in the South: the modern expansion of Kingswood had truly begun.
Become a Member