Honeywood - a brief history

Honeywood is the the London Borough of Sutton's Museum. It stands at the end of Honeywood Walk, Carshalton on the west bank of Carshalton Ponds.

The earliest surviving part of Honeywood is a small chalk and flint chequer-work building which is incorporated into the centre of the present house. It consists of the present shop and first tea-room, the hall and the tiny kitchen to the rear of the tea-room. This building probably dates from the mid-17th century. An early 17th century map of Carshalton shows the house site crossed by streams flowing from a line of springs along the edge of Pound Street, just within the present garden. Houses are not usually built in streams, and it is possible that the original building was originally a cold bath or a mill.

Chalk and flint chequer-work is now rare but appears to have been a fairly common building method in this area in the 16th and 17th centuries. There were two chequer-work buildings in Cheam High Street until they were demolished between the wars. Chequer-work can still be seen in the garden wall of Nonsuch Mansion, and in 1989 the remains of a chequer-work building were found in Sutton High Street.

The chalk-and-flint ‘Honeywood’ was 'L'-shaped in plan. A bay window had been added to the front by 1848, and a new two-storey extension was built at the back, in the angle of the 'L’, between 1848 and 1868. The existing staircase is also 19th century.

The deeds to Honeywood show that by 1779 there were two houses standing side by side at the west end of the ponds. Our building was the northernmost of the two, and in the mid-19th century it was called 'Wandle Cottage'. The other house stood between our building and Pound Street and was then called 'Honeywood'.

In 1883 the freehold of both properties came into the hands of a man called John Pattinson Kirk, who had already acquired leases on both of them. Very little is known about Kirk. He was born at Alston in Cumberland around 1836 and his wife Leah was born in Birmingham in 1856. In the 1881 census he is described as a merchant, but we do not know what goods he dealt in.

Kirk had a town house in Soho Square, London and probably used Honeywood as a country retreat. He demolished the original Honeywood around 1883/4 and c.1895 he transferred the name to our building, which has been called 'Honeywood' ever since.

Early photographs show that in the 1870s and 1880s our Honeywood had a weather boarded extension against the north side. In 1896 Kirk had this demolished and replaced by the present brick north wing. This appears to have been built as a service area. There was a scullery at the back of the ground floor, while the front (now the second tea-room) appears to have been a store. This was perhaps a substitute for a cellar since one could not be excavated because of the high water-table.

In 1903, Kirk made a major addition to Honeywood by adding the large Edwardian wing to the south end. This was pebbledashed and decorated in mock Tudor style.

By great good fortune a photocopy of the plans has survived in the collections of the Beddington, Carshalton and Wallington Archaeological Society. The plans are dated February 1902, and are marked 'H. Wakeford & Sons, 167 Clapham Road, London'. They show the use of the rooms in the extension and the adjacent parts of the house.

The ground floor of the extension contained a magnificent Billiards room and drawing room, while the first floor had extra bedrooms and a nursery. This extension turned Honeywood into a well-appointed upper middle-class house. The extension includes a large nursery. As Kirk was about 67 in 1903 it is likely that Honeywood was being turned into a family home for his adopted daughter Lily and her husband, Henry Edwards.

John Pattinson Kirk died in 1913. The adopted daughter, Lily Kirk Edwards, outlived her husband and in 1939 she sold the house to Carshalton Urban District Council, who used it for various social and community purposes.

During 1989-90 it was converted into a Heritage Centre, which opened on 6 December 1990.

In 1999-2000 the interior was repainted following the 1903 decorative scheme as closely as possible. The original colour scheme was recovered by carefully scraping back the paint in a series of small sample areas.

October 2007 saw Honeywood accredited by the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (the MLA) with Museum status.