From The Archives
From The Archives
As a well known and established building company we are often asked for information about the history of the buildings in the local area.
We do have an interest in this as we often advise on historic buildings. Part of this work is to compile reports on the history of the buildings. For this we need background material and above all we need to know where to find it.
We have put these pages together to share some of the knowledge that we have accumulated, over the decades, as well as some of the documents and where you can find more information if you want it.
Our intention is to guide users to interesting and good quality primary source materials in well run archives.
The main local archives are:-
London Archives [formerly London Metropolitan Archives]
Northamptonshire Archives and Heritage Service
East Sussex Archives
Warwickshire County Archives
Westminster Archives
Some of the pages are works in progress and contain notes as to future avenues of research. We have outlined future pages that are being working on.
If you want to be notified of updates to these pages then please sign up by send us an email and you will add you to the mailing list. This is a sign up for the archives pages ONLY.
For schools access to password protected areas or other enquiries please email.
We have also used:-
Buckinghamshire Archives – Lord Carrington’s letters to Thomas Cubitt and their pivotal financial dealings.
Camden Archives – Calthorpe Estate
Hampshire Archives – Calthorpe Estate & Sloane Stanley Estate
ING / Barings – Thomas Read Kemp
Magdalen College, Oxford Archives – for materials relating to Sophia Sheppard and Magdalen College’s stewardship of the lands of Old Farthing Manor.
Staffordshire County Archives – for material relating to the Duke of Sutherland
RIBA Archives – for materials concerning Charles Augustus[in] Busby
The Keep, Brighton – Thomas Read Kemp and Kemps Town
West Sussex Archives – for materials concerning John Smith MP & Oswald Smith
Westminster Archives – Thomas Read Kemp, The Wise Estate, Grosvenor Estate and other materials
Wolverhampton Archives – William Cubitt material
Lloyds Group, NatWest, Hoares and Coutts Archives for Cubitt related banking data.
Wimbledon
The Wimbledon Park Estate and The West Hill Estate
The West Hill Estate and The Wimbledon Park Estates – Part I – John Augustus Beaumont
The District Line Crossing Wimbledon Park – Part III – John Augustus Beaumont
The Creation of Wimbldeon Park Road – Part IV – John Augustus Beaumont
Epilogue – Part VI – John Augustus Beaumont
Wimbledon Park – Through Early Photographs – From Before the Start of the AELTC Era
Other Wimbledon Estate Developments
Wandsworth
Wandsworth Common, The Toast Rack and Magdalen Estates
This section is in the process of being reorganised.
The Manors of All Farthing, Wandsworth and Battersea: Wandsworth Common
Sophia Sheppard’s ownership of All Farthing Lands
Wandsworth Common: from the manor to the people
The planning by l’Anson and building of The Toast Rack with Mr Kynock
The planning and building of The Magdalen Estate with Holloway Bros
Wandsworth Common from WWII to the present
Deeds records in Magdalen College Archives
Deeds records in Wandsworth Heritage Service
The Heaver Estates
The Fulham Park Estate – we are researching this – coming soon
King George’s Park and the aqueduct
King George’s Park, nearly was, The Down Estate
A Riddle in a Puzzle of Ownerships – How to Decipher Who Owned What Land?
Hyde Park
The Porchester Estate – Porchester Terrace
The Campden Charities: Butts Fields – Kensington Gate and Hyde Park Gate
Thomas Cubitt
The Thomas Cubitt project is our most ambitious yet and we are stunned at the amount of previously unseen primary source materials that we are finding: some of which are significantly changing the accepted history.
There is such are large and growing group of pages on this subject that it is best to firstly go to the folder that contains all of the Cubitt related pages:-
The OLBC Thomas Cubitt project
Available pages:-
General history of Thomas Cubitt and Cubitt & Co [with links to various sources]
Lewis Cubitt [his brother]
The Russell Institution & Thomas Cubitt [~1808]
The Calthorpe Estate [1811 – 1960’s]
Thomas Cubitt & The London Institution [1816-1819]
Robert Smith – 1st Lord Carrington’s correspondence with Thomas Cubitt & Others [1819-1835]
Thomas Cubitt, Samuel Ware & Highgate School Chapel rebuild that never was [1818]
Thomas Read Kemp and Kemps TownBrighton [1826-1855]
Queen Victoria’s Diary Entries Mentioning Thomas Cubitt [1845-1855]
Cubbit’s brick, lime & cement making [1851-1870]
First Codicil to Thomas Cubitts will of 1855
Second Codicil to Thomas Cubitts will of 1855
Third Codicil to Thomas Cubitts will of 1855
Fourth Codicil to Thomas Cubitts will of 1855
The Surviving Record of Cubitt & Co
Some of the pages are password protected until we have agreed the image rights with the respective archives.
This is also a rapidly evolving project as we find and assimilate the huge quantity of primary source data that has, in a lot of cases, never been catalogued never mind written about. We are focused on areas where there is significant unpublished primary source material that can shed new light on Cubitt’s activities.
For other Cubitt related subjects that we have not covered, Hermione Hobhouses’s book remain the go-to source of information.
Once most of the pages are publicly available we will update this with a structured page list and an overarching series of timelines.
Searchable database of The Minutes of Proceedings if the Metropolitan Board of Works
We are in the process of building a fully searchable database of most of the minutes from 1855 to 1889.
We have 43 of the [we think] 52 volumes fully digitised. The reason that this is not 100% clear is that in the early years there was one volume per year. Then it went to two volumes per year in about 1864. There is only one 1889 volume, as this was the final year before MBW became LCC.
This section is password protected as there are rights issues with giving open access. However, schools will be given a password simply by emailing us.
Researchers can find 23 volumes of the minutes freely downloadable from Google Books as searchable PDF’s.
Copyright
You should assume that all of the images and text on these pages are copyright, so they should not be reproduced for commercial use.
If you need to use images for commercial use please ask us and we will do our best to put you in touch with the original rights holders. Alternatively follow the links provided to contact the rights holders yourselves.
Some of the images and documents have been provided to us, by our former clients, for this project and we are very grateful for their allowing them to be used here.
Other items are from the OLBC Collection – this is not available to researchers – all of the items we have accumulated are fully digitised in these pages.
If you see an image in here that you believe is copyright and that you hold the copyright for: please do get in contact with us so that we can resolve this promptly. We do not intend to breach copyright and can in most cases simply swap the image out for another image without issue.