The Story of Biggin Hill

Early history

The first mention of Biggin Hill as a place in this area occurs in 1499 when it is mentioned in an ancient deed. Reputedly of Middle English origin, it most likely means “The hill next to the farm or dwelling place”, but it may also relate to the personal name Bygge.

The area now called Biggin Hill was historically in the parish of Cudham, now a small village two miles to the east. Originally based on the manor of Codeham it was divided in 1215 into three parts, the manors of Apuldre, Bertray and Cowdham. Modern day Biggin Hill is contained mostly within the areas of the first two of these.

The name Bertray first appears about 1100 and means a small clearing. It survives in the name of the present day hamlet “Berry’s Green”. From Tudor times the manor was based around Cudham Lodge a house last rebuilt in the 18th century and demolished in 1935 when the main airfield runway was built.

Apuldre, later Aperfield is first mentioned in about 1242 and appears to mean “the field with the apple trees". In Tudor times it was in the possession of the Dacre family. Later owners and occupiers included the Gearys and the Christys, the latter building: Aperfield Court. It was this house that was bought in 1898 by Frederick H. Dougal, the founder of Biggin Hill.

By 1900 Biggin Hill was a small settlement of approximately 500 people clustered by the side of the Westerham Road and based around the junction with Jail Lane by the Black Horse Inn. It was surrounded entirely by farmland including that of Biggin Hill Farm itself, after which the town was named. With the exception of two cottages, the valley was uninhabited.

The Sale of the Aperfield Estate

Frederick Dougal, (c 1849 - 1904) was an Irish Law Agent who lived in Wandsworth and ran an unclaimed money office at 453 Strand in London. He seems to have treated Aperfield as a country retreat, retaining his home in Wandsworth after the purchase. He kept both the house and the surrounding park for his own use but quickly began to sell the surrounding farmland as building plots at a cost of £10, claiming them to be the “cheapest plots near London”. Even though he required a deposit of just £1, the plots sold slowly. Biggin Hill was remote and as the name suggests, hilly, so the cost of transporting building materials from the nearest station was prohibitive. Dougal and his agents worked hard though, meeting prospective buyers at Orpington or Bromley stations, transporting them by motor taxi to the estate and showing them round on arrival.

After Dougal’s death the plot sales continued and soon small bungalows began to appear in the valley, most used as weekend homes for suburban dwellers. Many used the cheapest and lightest materials they could; wood, brieze blocks, asbestos and corrugated iron being especially popular. Home ownership was still comparatively rare and some purchasers were happy just to have some land of their own, visiting at weekends simply to picnic in their little piece of countryside.

The first decade of the 20th century saw the development of the Garden City Movement which made the move from the city fashionable. The growth of Biggin Hill was part of the exodus but completely different in execution from the carefully planned developments at Letchworth and Welwyn. Biggin Hill was part of a different trend, albeit one that used the fashionable Garden City concept as a marketing ploy. It was part of what became known as the Plotlands.

The Plotlands

There were plotlands on the fringe of most of England’s major cities, but it was in the hinterlands of London that they became most popular. Utilising cheap land, the result of poor soil, poor communications or being prone to frequent flooding. South Essex, the Thames estuary, the Isle of Sheppey and parts of the Sussex Coast soon filled with this type of development. Biggin Hill was part of the North Downs developments stretching from Walderslade, near Chatham to Effingham near Leatherhead.

The almost total lack of national planning regulations meant once you had paid your deposit it was up to you what you built and the early sales catalogues were full of pictures of houses of every shape, size and style. This was very popular with the plot owners but less so with other town dwellers who saw the countryside they had once visited gradually fill with houses, some little more than shacks, in a very haphazard way. Access was via unsufaced tracks, described in the brochures, as “private roads". Water and drainage facilities were poor too. The plots were designed for occasional and weekend living. The pipes could cope with this but as more people made Biggin Hill their permanent home the inadequacies of the mains became apparent. Soon local authorities, in Biggin Hill’s case Bromley RDC, were pressing for powers to prevent this blight. The result was the planning laws and green belt policies we have today. Before this could happen however, in 1920 Aperfield Court was demolished and the remaining part of the estate was divided into yet further plots.

Despite the unfashionable nature of this early development, Biggin Hill can boast one famous early resident: the composer, Ivor Novello. Around 1914, he spent his summers living in a Romany caravan in the garden of his mother’s bungalow in St. Mary’s Grove, where she had set up an artistic community.

Railways

Biggin Hill’s major drawback has always been its poor transport links: one road in and one road out. Set on the top of the North Downs it was never going to be a candidate for a main line railway. It was this remoteness that resulted in the low land prices that enabled Frederick Dougal to offer his plots so cheaply. Even so, he realised that Biggin Hill would benefit greatly from a railway and supported the plans for the Tatsfield Light Railway which were developed in 1898.

By this date most of the accessible parts of the country were within easy reach of a railway, but some areas, especially in hilly regions, were prohibitively expensive to serve. The Light Railways Act of 1896 changed this, allowing lower cost railways to be built in return for lower maximum running speeds. The Tatsfield Light was to run from Orpington station via Green Street Green, Cudham and Biggin Hill to Tatsfield. Following a public enquiry it gained approval to proceed but the company was unable to raise the £70 000 required and the idea was quietly dropped.

This, however, was not the end of the story. In 1925 a grander scheme was proposed, supported by the Southern Railway. A similar route was planned from Orpington to Tatsfield but it was then to be extended to form a loop, joining the Oxted line at Sanderstead. Instead of being steam hauled, the trains would be electric but there would still only be one track. The engineer was to have been Colonel Holman Stephens, the famous builder of many light railways, who had been involved with the earlier project too. The cost was estimated at £634 000.

As with the Tatsfield Light, in 1929 the scheme was approved and the route even appeared on Southern Railway maps. But the death of the enthusiastic Colonel Stephens in 1931 meant raising the money became difficult and despite a final attempt to revive the scheme after the Second World War, this railway too, never got beyond the planning stage.

Recently the building of the Croydon Tramlink to New Addington has encouraged talk of an extension to Biggin Hill. But for now, the inaccessibility that spawned the town remains one of its most distinctive features.

RAF Biggin Hill

By 1914 most of the Aperfield estate had been sold of and developed, but the Cudham Lodge estate to the north was still traditionally farmed. Owned by the Stanhope family of Chevening and occupied by John Westacott, a farmer, the First World War caused a sudden change in its fortunes.

By 1916, it was becoming clear that radio communications could play an important role in modern warfare and the Royal Flying Corp were on the lookout for a site for testing. The site needed to be high, fog free and flat. Cudham Lodge was all of these and contained a huge undivided field, ideal for aircraft.

By 1917 the wireless testers had arrived and had requisitioned Koonowla, a local house previously used as a children’s hospital, as their headquarters.

Soon the station had another use. The Germans had begun to send planes across the channel to bomb south London so to defend the area, aircraft based north of the river at Hornchurch were sent south to Biggin Hill. When the Royal Air Force was formed in 1918, the large field at Cudham Lodge had been transformed into RAF Biggin Hill.

Over the next 20 years the airfield developed into one of the country’s foremost air bases, playing a crucial role in defending the capital during the Battle of Britain in 1940. This had an inevitable effect on the village. The little plotlands settlement had now expanded to create the necessary infrastructure for the base and by the end of the Second World War was famous throughout the country. Many of the administrative, engineering and technical staff at the base came from the village.

In 1958 the station ceased to be an active base and became primarily a civil airfield, taken over by Bromley Council in 1973, the RAF finally moving out in 1992. A new passenger terminal now allows large passenger charter planes to land and it has been renamed London Biggin Hill Airport.

Post War Developments

Following the war, town planning legislation was the dominant factor in suburban development. The point at which building had ceased on the outbreak of war became the permanent edge as the Green Belt appeared, putting an end to the thirties pattern of ribbon and sprawl development.

Although officially part of the green belt, Biggin Hill was already built up, albeit in a different style and less densely than most of its neighbours, the RAF base adding to its distinctiveness.

50 years on, the mostly cheaply built plotlands bungalows, many of which had been permanently occupied from the outbreak of war onwards, were at the end of their useful lives and owners were keen to replace them with more modern and robust dwellings. Developers bought many plots with the specific aim of rebuilding. From 1951 there was a huge influx of new people, mainly in the younger age groups, keen like previous generations to “move to the country”. From 1958 this influx became a flood.

It became clear that the town needed a plan and in 1964, just before Biggin Hill’s incorporation into Greater London, Kent County Council produced the “Biggin Hill Town Map” (revised by the GLC in 1971) which gave details of how the town would be developed in the future. The rough tracks, worn out by years of overuse were to be resurfaced becoming proper roads, allowing the first bus service to the valley community to be introduced in the 1960s. The two main access roads into the valley, Polesteeple and Stock Hills, were realigned and resurfaced, later becoming the access roads for buses. Developments on unsurfaced roads were strongly discouraged. A few such roads remain today, but these are mainly at the wishes of residents who fear the increase in through traffic that would result from the making up.

The small shops that lined the main road before the war have been supplemented by parades in the valley and a large Safeways supermarket that attracts shoppers from miles around. Charles Darwin Secondary School opened in 1974, meaning children from the age of eleven no longer have to travel to Hayes.

Industry was encouraged too, in order to try to give more employment to the resident population and reduce the need to travel out of this isolated community. This became mainly concentrated around the airfield.

The period 1961 to 1981 resulted in a 161%an increase in housing, the plan allowing infill development which replaced the low density plotlands bungalows with higher density modern estates. Developed at first mainly by local firms such as the prolific B.W. Brazier, who first built Valley View, then Springholm and Bankside Closes and surrounds and later, Filey, Bridlington and Flamborough Closes. Soon larger national developers were joining in too. The long established New Ideal Homesteads, known mainly for their pre war developments, built Magnolia Drive in around 1970, and Bovis were responsible for Rushdene Walk around the same time. Almost all were private, owner occupied buildings. There has never been a tradition of public or private rented housing in the town. By the end of this period, 52% of the population were recent arrivals.

Churches

The first church, St. Mark’s was built as early as 1904, a small iron tabernacle, ideally suited to the village of the time. By 1951, however, when Rev. Vivian Symons arrived from the Midlands to take up the post of Perpetual Curate of Biggin Hill, St Mark's was totally inadequate. Two years earlier Biggin Hill had become a Peal District, making it administratively independent of Cudham parish for the first time. Rev. Symons was determined to build a church of which the residents would be proud, but enquiries quickly revealed a complete lack of funds for such a project.

Symons, however, had a highly original idea. While Biggin Hill had no proper church, the inner cities where the population had declined had a surplus. Why not take one of the churches no longer needed and transport it to Biggin Hill?

Gaining the support of the local diocese, he traveled about South London until he found what he was looking for, All Saints in North Peckham, a church due to be demolished as it was in the path of the rapidly expanding North Peckham estate. Symonds embarked on an incredible project. Needing the bricks, stone, wood and tiles intact for reuse, the usual demolition methods could not be used and having no funds he had to rely on volunteer labour and gifts of the necessary equipment. Over the next three years he spent every spare moment on the project, one which modern heath and safety considerations and insurance requirements would have made impossible. Many professional builders believed it couldn’t be done and much of the manual labour he carried out himself, often working alone.

The original intention was to rebuild the church much as the original but the plans could not be found, so it was easier to come up with a new design. The result looked more like a typical product of the time than the original Victorian structure, but it has now served the community successfully for more than 40 years.

Biggin Hill also has a Roman Catholic Church, a Baptist Chapel and the Biggin Hill Memorial Chapel at the airport.

Conclusion

By 1981 the infilling was almost complete and with a determination from planners that there should be no encroachment onto the green belt that hems the town in on all sides, recent developments have been limited. Steeple Heights Drive, built by Wimpy in 1989, was one of the largest and the departure of the RAF has opened up development opportunities around the airport.

The change from urban Biggin Hill to rural Tatsfield at the bottom of Sunningvale Avenue is very sudden, marking the absolute edge of development. Biggin Hill remains a strange mixture of suburb and small provincial town high up on the downs but still within the boundaries of Greater London.