The Lee Manor Society was set up to care for the conservation area which was established in 1976. Government legislation passed in 1967 had given local authorities the power to designate such areas. This was at a time when large swathes of Victorian housing were being demolished to make way for modern estates. Consisting of local residents who donate their time and energy freely, the society seeks to preserve the character of the conservation area and its surroundings.
But it does not just preserve, it works to improve the quality of life in Lee and to ensure that change takes place in a sympathetic fashion. It lobbies the council and other organisations, raises funds for small-scale improvements and undertakes direct action to remove graffiti and care for street trees. We take part in consultation on planning matters. Members have met once a month for many years to co-ordinate these activities.
When the society was founded new council estates were being built on Burnt Ash Road and Burnt Ash Hill in red brick unsympathetic to the local use of yellow ‘London stock’ brick. Brindishe School and the Handen Road Health Centre took further bites out of what is now the Lee Manor conservation area.
But residents also had other concerns including the removal of the swan-necked lamp posts then in place and commuter rat-running through local streets. Creating the conservation area brought a halt to demolition but the lamp posts could not be saved and it took another seven years for the traffic issues to be resolved.
The council officially created the Lee Manor Conservation Area in 1976. But other dates have an equal – some might say better – claim. As early as 1974, the council put forward plans for a smaller conservation area based on the French mansard-style houses in Micheldever Road (see article below). In February 1975 a steering group of local residents held their first meeting to consider these plans. This group, led by Leslie Silk, a local resident and a Lewisham councillor, pressed from the outset for the conservation area to be extended to roughly its present scope. This was agreed but a proposal to extend the area to the north and west was rejected by the Greater London Council. The GLC said it did “not consider the (wider) area particularly worthy of conservation from an historic buildings point of view.”
Apart from demolition and traffic, other subjects that concerned the society in 1975 included misbehaviour in Manor House Gardens and vandalism in Leegate shopping centre. Plans were underway to extend Northbrook School which would have involved demolishing houses in Hedgley Street and Brightfield Road but the GLC ran out of money.
Among the society’s early projects were the restoration of the ice house in Manor House Gardens and of Boone’s Chapel in Lee High Road. After many ups and downs the ice house and gardens were restored in 2000 and the chapel was refurbished in 2007.
Unlike some other conservation areas in Lewisham, Lee Manor has few sites available for large-scale development but just beyond our boundaries commercial developments were happening. In 1980 the Chiltonian biscuit factory shut down and was later demolished to make way for industrial units while in 1983 Sainsbury applied to build a supermarket near the Lee Green junction.
In October 1987 the Great Storm brought down seventeen limes in Micheldever Road while British Rail announced plans to demolish Lee Station ticket hall.
In 1989 the conservation area was extended to include Lee station and the postal sorting office in Woodyates Road (since converted into homes). In 1992 the French mansard houses in Micheldever Road were given strengthened protection against change under under what is known as an Article 4 direction.
Over the years the society has achieved greater protection for other landmarks including Grade ll listing for the houses at 56-62 Burnt Ash Road and for the K2 telephone box in front of the library in Old Road. It also prompted the installation (in 1984) of a GLC blue plaque at 13 Handen Road commemorating the birthplace of Stanley Unwin (1884-1968), publisher and founder of George Allen & Unwin. In 1993 we launched what has become an annual campaign to persuade the council to plant more street trees.
During the mid -1990s we were involved in protests to keep open the Manor House library and we backed plans by the Manor House Gardens User Group to restore the park. In 1999 we protested successfully against plans to demolish the vicarage of the Church of the Good Shepherd in Handen Road
In the same year work started on refurbishing the Gardens and ice house which both attracted huge crowds on the official reopening day in June of the Millennium Year 2000.
In 2002 the Society launched a programme to plant off-street trees on areas of local greenery. In the same year the society was awarded a ‘mention’ by the Civic Trust for the ice house restoration. In 2005 we set up a team of graffiti busters to meet monthly to clean off ‘tags.’ We contributed to consultation on plans to demolish and rebuild Northbrook School to expand pupil numbers. Ice house visitor numbers since reopening reached nearly eight thousand.
After years of deliberation plans were submitted in 2007 for the refurbishment of the Manor House and its library. The Society had been involved from the outset in the discussions. Early proposals had included an unsuitable side addition but the final plans were for a more sensible extension and an upgrade of the interior including a new staircase and lift to the upper floors. Also, we surveyed the large number of front garden limes planted in the conservation area. A prominent feature of Victorian planting schemes, they were used to form a screen between the garden and the street. Micheldever Road has fine examples.
The following year sees the extension of the Lee Manor conservation area to include Brightfield Road, Lampmead Road, the west side of Manor Lane and, after lobbying by the Society, Hedgley Street. Northbrook School is to be demolished and replaced while work to restore Boone’s Chapel, on Lee High Road, a project the Society was involved in, is completed.
In 2009 the Manor House reopens after completion of the refurbishment. We hold a social evening in the Stark Gallery (since relocated) on Lee High Road to broaden the Society’s appeal in the neighbourhood. Controls on street parking are to be introduced and we argue, successfully, for the hours to be limited to 10am to noon to deter commuters but minimise inconvenience to residents.
The rebuilding of Northbrook School, renamed Trinity, is completed in 2010. Plans for the school’s glass frontage to include a large cross are dropped after we argue this was unnecessary on a school as opposed to a church building. We install a heritage panel at the Lee Green crossroads detailing the history of the original village of Lee. St Modwen, then developer of the Leegate site, approached large supermarket groups to find a tenant.
We commented on Lewisham’s Local Plan, which set out development plans for the next decade, at a public hearing before an inspector in 2011. The draft environmental section made no mention of street trees but we succeeded in getting them written into the document, alongside parks and other green spaces. We supported the opening of a community garden in an unused back garden flanking the end of Micheldever Road.
St Modwen signed up Asda as an anchor tenant for its Leegate redevelopment in 2012 and unveiled its plans for the site. We felt it represented an overdevelopment with large apartment blocks and a tiny ‘square’ that was, in fact, only a wider stretch of pavement along the busy and polluted Burnt Ash Road. We fought these proposals for more than a decade. The Emmanuel Pentecostal Church announced plans for an ambitious redevelopment of their site on the corner of Lampmead Road. We thought they were unsuitable for the site and object. The council’s planners agreed and three years later the application was turned down. But neither we nor the council could prevent demolition of the 19th century alms houses. We installed a wooden bench on the corner of Wantage and Taunton Roads. Refurbishment of the long neglected Lord Northbrook pub starts.
In 2013 Affinity Sutton, the housing association responsible for the Leybridge Court Estate consulted the Society over its refurbishment plans. We suggested adding to the proposed landscaping scheme with a row of trees along Eltham Road just outside the estate boundary. These would hide the road, dampen traffic noise and absorb pollution more effectively than trees planted closer to the apartment blocks. Affinity Sutton agreed. The council’s highways department earned our ‘Brickbat of the Year’ for removing the stub of a parish boundary stone in Handen Road on the grounds it constituted a trip hazard. We disagreed.
We notched up 20,000 visitors to the Ice House in 2014, 14 years after we restored the underground structure and created public access for the first time from Manor House Gardens. Our initial fears that public interest would wane after a few months have been dispelled. Newcomers to the neighbourhood, visiting friends and family members, and a surprisingly large number of locals who ‘didn’t realise when we opened’ make for a steady stream of visitors. Opening times are displayed on the surrounding railings.
We replaced the Handen Road boundary stone in 2015 with a newly carved replica. The original stones, tracing the parish boundary running north to south across the east-west orientation of the streets, recorded St M L for St Margaret’s, Lee on one side and CC L for Christ Church, Lee on the other. We researched the mystery Christ Church which appears to have disappeared from local memory. Until severe damage wrought by German bombers in late 1940 the church had stood on a large plot of land between Lee Road and Lee Park. Apart from a low stone wall and a set of gate pillars half-way up Lee Park nothing remains of a church built in 1853 for more than 1,000 worshippers. Plans to rebuild it were dropped and the site and its surroundings were given over to housing in the 1970s.
In 2016 the council canceled its amenity societies’ panel, a fortnightly meeting between planners and local conservation groups to discuss planning applications. The reason given was cost. But we lost a valuable forum for sharing local knowledge with the planners and other societies to inform council planning decisions. Cost was also the reason for the council withdrawing from direct management of the Manor House Library and turning it into a (subsequently successful) community library.
St Modwen, then the owner of the Leegate site, won approval from the council for its plans in 2017. Our calls for a more modest scheme with a more attractive central square were ignored.
But all was not lost for in the following year Asda withdrew as the anchor tenant in the Leegate redevelopment. St Modwen was forced to redesign the scheme with a smaller food store and larger and more centrally located square, further away from the noise and pollution of busy local roads. These changes owed everything to the changes underway in retail markets where large superstores had fallen out of favour and nothing to the intervention of Lewisham’s planners who appeared to lack any sense of what was appropriate in a given context.
In 2019 the Leegate plans were bogged down in arguments between the council and St Modwen over the amount of affordable housing to be included in the scheme. Lewisham wanted at least 35 per cent while St Modwen wanted to limit it to 20 per cent. A much smaller housing development, of the former St Winifred’s school in Effingham Road, won our backing after talks with the developer. We objected, alongside others, to plans for an academy school on the Bowring sports field – protected as metropolitan open land – on the Greenwich corner of the Lee Green crossroads. It was later dropped. Lewisham unveiled plans for a Healthy Neighbourhood Scheme – otherwise known as a Low Traffic Neighbourhood – across much of Lee. It was introduced a year or so later, modified but still controversial. We staged our first tree walk, introducing residents to the wide variety of trees in Manor House Gardens and local streets.
The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement created a growing awareness of Britain’s colonial past and the contribution of slavery to the wealth of many grand 18th century families. This prompted the council in 2020 to cover up the brown plaque commemorating the Baring family’s ownership of the Manor House. The Society was not directly involved but members believed unsavoury aspects of history should be explained rather than suppressed. They supported the installation of explanatory material and urge the uncovering of the plaque.
After more than a decade pursuing the redevelopment of Leegate, St Modwen threw in the towel and sold the site to Galliard Homes, a London developer, in 2021. Galliard retained the design of the central square and linking pedestrian walkways but wanted to increase the height of the corner block to 15 storeys with other elements rising to 13 storeys. We thought this too high and too overbearing for a crossroads that otherwise consists of three and four-storey buildings.
In 2022 the Ice House welcomed its 30,000th visitor and the Manor House celebrated its 250th anniversary.
The council finally approved Galliard Homes’ application for the redevelopment Leegate in 2023. The views of the Society – and most local community organisations – have been largely ignored by a council seemingly bent on housing numbers at the cost of all other considerations. The Society has from the outset called for more homes to be built on the site but feels any redevelopment must respect of the context of a largely low-level residential neighbourhood.