Development and destruction. This view shows the scale of work necessary to lay the infrastructure that precedes house building.
Embryonic roads, in this case, Martens Grove, are grooved with deep trenches to
take drains and emerging houses are cocooned with scaffolding.
The building of the estate was preceded by the felling of ancient woodlands, part of
the grounds of Martens Grove house.
The estate was built by Ayling, one of a number of builders active at the time.
Source: Ideal Homes
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence
Martens Avenue, Barnehurst (1934)
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Martens Avenue, DA7 Martens Avenue was built on the site of Springfield House in the immediate post-war era. Oakwood Drive, DA7 Oakwood Drive was formed as part of the ’Mayplace Farm’ estate built by W H Wedlock Ltd. Park Grove, DA7 Park Grove is part of the Martens Grove Estate, build in the 1930s.
The name of Barnehurst is derived from the name of the landowner family and the Saxon word for woodland: ’hurst’.In 1745, Miles Barne the son of a wealthy London merchant married Elizabeth Elwick the heiress to May Place and inherited the estate in 1750. The family owned May Place until 1938 when it was sold to the local council.
The name Barnehurst came into being once a station had been proposed in Conduit Wood for the Bexley Heath Railway Company on their 1895 railway. It crossed the May Place Estate, then owned by Colonel Frederick Barne. At that time the area now known as Barnehurst was part of the Parish of Crayford, consisting of a mix of farmland and market gardens, with cherry, apple and plum orchards, with wood and parkland belonging to the estates of May Place, Martens Grove and Oakwood. The small population was concentrated along and to the south of Mayplace Road.
At first, the railway failed to attract large scale house developers - passenger numbers were small only boosted at weekends by golfers travelling to the new Barnehurst Golf Course opened in 1903. Its club house the old mansion of May Place was destroyed by fire in 1959. The electrification of the Bexleyheath Line in 1926 signalled the start of the large housing developments of the 1920s and 1930s.
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