Happy New Year everyone! It’s the first blog of 2024 and we are continuing on the history bus. You’ll need your creative brains on for this one as Clive Orton, accompanied by Andrew Skelton (local historian and archaeologist) describe Carshalton Grotto and Canal whilst travelling along from ‘The Windsor Castle’ to Wallington. Over to you Clive.
Episode Five: ‘The Windsor Castle’ to Wallington
We’re now ready to leave The Windsor Castle and we have a choice of routes. We could turn left down Pound Street and past the Ponds (the route of the 407 and SL7 buses) or right up Park Hill towards Carshalton Beeches (the route of the 154 bus) but we choose the original tram route, straight ahead into Beynon Road, then Carshalton Park Road, and finally Ruskin Road. Little of this route existed until the 20th century. Until the early 20th century, the land south of Carshalton village had been the grounds of Carshalton Park.
When the tramline was built in 1906, the decision was made to avoid Carshalton village altogether. A new route was cut through the Park: along what is now Beynon Road, joining up with a stretch of Carshalton Park Road, and then the straight run of Ruskin Road to join up with Park Lane on the Carshalton / Wallington boundary. Ruskin Road was built by Carshalton Urban District Council (CUDC) to provide a route for the British Electric Traction Company (later SouthMet) to lay their tram route. CUDC charget BET some £1 per foot for providing the road, plus £200 for the bridge. “Bridge? What bridge?” asks a passenger. The bridge is the one over the Canal that runs down (when it runs at all) to the High Street.
Fortunately, one of our passengers is Andrew Skelton, a local historian and archaeologist, who kindly provided the following explanation (I paraphrase his account):
“The Grotto and Canal in Carshalton Park are much neglected and misunderstood historic features. They are fragments from a major early but unfinished landscape project apparently designed by the Park owner, Thomas Scawen, and constructed about 1724. It was a formal forerunner of the later great grottoes such as Stourhead, Goldney, and Painshill. The grotto lies at the south end of a formal canal, fed by springs further south. At the north end of the canal, a large mansion was begun but not completed. The Scawen family lived across the High Street in an early 18th century mansion called Stone Court (demolished c.1800), the Park and Grotto remained separate until George Taylor built a house called Carshalton Park on the road called Brookside on the other side of Ruskin Road (demolished 1926). The Orangery with pedimented portico still stands on the corner with the Square. In 1913, the Grotto and the present, much reduced park passed into public ownership. The building was then stripped of its decoration, and the facades almost totally rebuilt; only limited records of the decoration were made. Excavations took place around the grotto in the 1980s, and a limited investigation in 2005 cleaned up the interior to allow limited access for the public.
The Grotto and Canal are set in a geological dry valley. Behind and under it, culverts run about 20m south, channelling water from natural chalk and filling the pool and canal in front of it. As seen externally, the grotto facade brickwork is essentially 20th-century. A few of the decorative large flints, which completely studded this facade, still survive set low down; the rest were removed in 1914. Early references suggest that lead statues stood on the piers or podiums on the facade, and in the wide niches to each side of the entrance arch. This large archway was filled with a fine wrought iron gate and surround bearing the Scawen arms; it leads through a delicately vaulted vestibule area flanked by small arched compartments into a large Octagonal room described in 1895 as having “… a domed roof and walls fantastically covered with flints, scraps of Ironstone, shells and the like, and has a tesselled floor of black and white marble”. Regrettably this decoration was scraped off the fine brickwork of the walls and vault in 1914; but enough fragments survive to show the substance of this decoration, if not its arrangement. The brick floor provided bedding for an Ornate marble floor of “fictive cube” design. It is studded with the remains of iron staples, which held the decoration in place. In the vault centre is a Portland stone skylight or “oculi”, repaired in the late 18th century but now infilled. Central to the room, opposite the entrance, is a wide shallow niche in which lay a large carved red Marble shell, part of an ornamental water feature supplied by piped water from a spring elsewhere in the park.
Although currently in a pitiful state, the Grotto is a most important structure in the development of Grottoes in this country, being an early example of the formal type. Research on its history is continuing.
The Canal has a most sinuous, decorative cross-section, providing two distinct grass levels at its south end which converge further north as the surface slopes down. Just past the Grotto pool, the remains of two brick culverts entering the canal on each side can be seen; these were once a single culvert pre-dating 1724 which ran diagonally across the park but was cut when the canal was dug, and the exposed ends backfilled and sealed with clay. Further north, by the Ruskin Road bridge, there is the remains of a sluice gate allowing water to be drawn off from the Grotto canal to augment the water flow from the north-east corner of the Hog Pit.”
As built, Ruskin Road ran through open countryside, but it soon began to be built up. The first house on the north (left-hand) side was Ruskin House, built in 1908; by the 1920s, most of this side had been built up. The south side was slower to be built up, and some remains as the frontage to the present Carshalton Park.
At the corner of Ruskin Road and Park Lane, we pause to remember those who died in the tram crash that happened here on Easter Monday, 1907; the first, and as far as I can tell, the only fatal accident on this route. A tram car coming down Park Lane failed to make the curve into Ruskin Road, and overturned. Almost all the 65 people on board suffered some injury; 36 had to be treated in hospital, where two died. The fatalities were Wilhelmina Suhr of Croydon and Charles Henry Collins of Sutton. The driver, David Woodley, of Waterloo Road, Sutton, was slightly injured; the conductor, Mr Linney, was more seriously hurt. An inquiry was set up under Major J. W. Pringle, R.E., Inspector for the Board of Trade, who visited the site and met representatives of the tram company on Wednesday 3rd April. His report was published on 3rd July. There were also inquests on Mrs Suhr and Mr Collins.
The report concluded that there were two main causes: (i) the car was moving too fast when it reached the corner, which would have caused derailment; (ii) the sudden application of the rear brakes by the conductor made the wheels lock, causing the car to turn over. The errors were put down to the inexperience of the driver and conductor, who had been insufficiently trained and had not worked regularly on this route. There were contributory factors: the road had recently been watered, so the rails were wet; the car was overcrowded; the track on the curve had insufficient ‘super-elevation’ (the ‘leaning-in’ that we can observe on a train journey). Major Pringle made recommendations about training, preventing over-crowding (especially standing on the upper deck), and improving the super-elevation of this curve. The event and the report received much attention from the press. They were covered in detail by the Croydon Express, and reported from as far afield as Dundee, Guernsey and Londonderry.
After this excitement, we turn into Park Lane, which runs along the boundary between Carshalton and Wallington, which when the trams arrived had been built up as far as the railway bridge (built by BET). Beyond the railway lies Boundary Road, which was built up in the 1920s (west or Carshalton side) and the 1930s (east or Wallington side). At the top of Boundary Road, we turn left into Stanley Park Road, which leads us into Wallington. Here we stop and look around for a while before making the last stage of our journey, past Croydon Airport to West Croydon station.
The Past on Glass & Other Stories... 