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, so 2026 will be the 50th anniversary of the Lee Manor Society. 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. 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 Hedgely 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 offstreet 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.
Some of the problems we tackled when we were first established have faded. We no longer face the prospect of badly neglected houses crumbling away. But the extensive demolition of large Victorian houses in surrounding streets that do not enjoy conservation area protection shows what can happen when developers see an opportunity. What we now find ourselves dealing with are the problems of affluence with applications for sometimes unsympathetic extensions. Other challenges include changing retail patterns that lead to declining shopping parades while traffic and parking pressures remain strong.
A FRENCH PUZZLE IN LEE
By David Atwell
Until a few months ago I lived on the other side of Blackheath and my clearest visual recollection of Lee Manor Conservation Area was the curious group of “Frenchified” houses in Micheldever Road.
Since last June, living in the heart of the area, I have been more than ever struck by this odd outbreak of Francophilia in what is otherwise so very typically a late Victorian and Edwardian suburb. For once the local history collections are no help for there are no papers or other records relating specifically to this group of houses, although there are photographs of their most distinctive internal feature: the moveable partition that can be raised or lowered rather like a portcullis to divide the main through room on the ground floor.
Whilst this homage to the domestic styles of northern France may be rare in south-east London, there are precedents dating from earlier in the Victorian era, especially in relation to the handsome scale of these houses. As H. J. Dyos revealed in his study of Camberwell, one can identify the different levels of social class from the types of tree that were planted on the streets of the emergent suburban way of life. Limes and horse chestnuts were the mark of roads lived in by the well-to-do, acacias and laburnums were for those of middle incomes and bare pavements were for the working class however heightened were their social aspirations.
We find the first serious outbreaks In London of the sort of bastardised French Renaissance that led to Micheldever Road in 1860. The Grosvenor Hotel by Victoria Station, and Grosvenor Gardens and Place, display a multitude of pavilion roofs, mansards and dormers, seemingly barbaric relics of an imperfect memory following a whistle-stop tour of the Loire chateaux. The architect James Knowles Junior practised for these with “The Cedars”, a pair of identical five-storey blocks completed in 1860 on the north side of Clapham Common. For all their quasi-French skyline, the detailing is decidedly crude, wholly tasteless, and grossly un-French, as were later terraces in Mayfair and Maida Vale.
The fondness for French chateaux became a country house craze: Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild imported it authentically, if incongruously, to Buckinghamshire in 1874 in the shape of Waddesdon Manor, the achievement of Parisian architect Hippolyte Destailleur. It was a style that suffered a heavy casualty rate: Normanhurst in Sussex (1867 by Habershon, Brock and Webb) was demolished in 1951; Newnham Paddox, Warwickshire (T. H. Wyatt 1875) was pulled down in 1952; And St. Leonards Hill, Berkshire (C. H. Howell 1875) has long been a ruin. One that does survive is the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle, Durham, designed by J E. Watson in 1869. North of the border it became “Scottish Baronial” which, as R. Furneaux Jordan remarked “satisfied starved minds hungry for romance.”
The line to Micheldever Road is stylistically clear though not so frequently trodden as authentic stone gave way to humbler brick. As the new suburbs were built for the parvenu merchants, manufacturers, bankers and brokers, so the better houses had to be a little bit different. On one hand was the fight against urban squalor and the reaction against “sham” Regency stucco. On the other was the inevitable result: a headlong descent into “revivals” and an ever coarsening stylistic vulgarity.
There was still-mercifully- a long way to go before the sordid excesses of stockbrokers’ Tudor. So the Micheldever Road houses are anything but dreary: indeed they are refreshingly unconventional for their time, a cross between a provincial French town hall and the more prosperous housing of northern France or the Brussels suburbs. It is no co-incidence to find that a major housebuilder of the time, W. G. Tarrant Sons and Co., was of Byfleet AND CALAIS. The continuity of these fascinating houses is important in itself: they have survived remarkably unscathed with slated pavilion roofs and dormers.
They are not “Iistable” by the current criteria of the Department of the Environment. Being in a Conservation Area protects them from the worst of the home ”improvements” industry, but one wonders whether the local authority should act more positively. Conservation Areas should be subject to development policy guidelines which actively seek not only to enhance but also to control alterations by means of “Directions” scheduling features for the purpose of retention and eventually, one hopes, for the availability of grant aid for repair and restoration.
© 1988 DAVID ATWELL