An 1695 map by Travers shows a street on the exact line of Ashburnham Place. The age of this street is confirmed by subsequent old maps. Only one nearby building is marked on the 1695 map – a ‘Hospital’. This is the 1575 Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital (also known as Almshouses or College). It was rebuilt in 1819.
John Ashburnham – who came from a Sussex family of “stupendous antiquity” – acquired the land here as part of a substantial inheritance in 1755. His new set of possessions included the Chocolate House, which stood on the brow of Blackheath and had gained its name from tastings of drinking chocolate held there when the beverage first came into fashion. The Chocolate House was unimaginatively renamed Ashburnham House in 1820. From around this time the family laid out more streets and housing to the north-west of South Street, with the scheme gaining full momentum nearer the middle of the 19th century. The area between Blackheath Road, Greenwich High Road and Greenwich South Street (once “Lime Kiln Lane”) is now called the Ashburnham Triangle.
Ashburnham Place was named after the family. In the way of many London streets, it had another name in the nineteenth century – Ashburnham Road.
In the 1880s the family began to sell off the estate in stages and even Ashburnham House was demolished to make way for further development.