History of the Area
The Great Austins Area occupies a plateau one mile to the south of Farnham town centre. This is heathland, with Scots pines and oaks, sand and gravel, rising to the Greenhill Ridge with views north and south: Tennyson contemplated building his house here rather than by Blackdown near Haslemere. The corresponding northern slopes and plateau, with Farnham Park and the Castle, enjoyed the patronage of the Bishops of Winchester, while this southern area remained undeveloped, even after the railway came to Farnham in 1849. There were cottages on the edge of the Bourne village on the south side of the Greenhill Ridge, with the first St Thomas’s church built on the top of the hill in 1861, on land generously donated by the Reverend John Martyr Ward
The impetus to development around 1900 came from several sources. A cholera epidemic in the Bourne in the 1890s led T.W. Sidebotham, vicar of the parish, to persuade the Water Company to lay piped water to the area: the Victoria reservoir can still be found at the junction of Frensham Road and Old Farnham Lane. The land upon which the Great Austins Conservation Area was to be built, all derives from a single unified ownership. John Martyr Ward, a vicar living at East Dereham in Norfolk, inherited the Fir Grove Estate in the 1850s, which extended from Bourne Grove in the south to just beyond Great Austins in the north, westward on the Ridgway and eastward to the Tilford Road.
At some point in the last two decades of the 19th century, the Farnham Flint Gravel and Sand Co. acquired from the Ward family, the land that was to become the eastern half of the Conservation Area – from Mavins Road through to the Tilford Road. The Chairman and owner of that company, Tom Mitchell, built his own house, called The Lindens, (since demolished and replaced by flats), on the corner between Tilford Road and what would become Great Austins, while his company extracted sand and gravel from the remainder of the site. At the turn of the century – and presumably after all sand and gravel had been extracted – the whole site was divided into plots for sale, generally ranging in size between half and two-and-a-half acres, with the sole exception of the plots on the south side of Greenhill Road, which were larger still. The area was to be called the Great Austins Estate and two local architects, Harold Falkner and Arthur Stedman, bought up several plots for development: Falkner often did so in partnership with his cousin, Charles Borelli. The first house on the Estate was completed in 1903.
While Mitchell was developing the eastern half, a local gravel merchant named Thomas Patterson acquired from John Martyr Ward in May 1906, a three-and-a-quarter acre strip fronting a continuation of Great Austins between Mavins Road and Swingate Road. In September the following year he acquired a further fourteen acres, extending southwards back to a continuation of Greenhill Road. This combined parcel of land, which now forms the western half of the Conservation Area, was named Cobbett Park. The continuation of Great Austins was initially named Cromwell Avenue, while what is now Swingate Road was to be named Lyell Road, both reportedly a reflection of Patterson’s republican leanings. The road names that we know today were finally agreed in 1912, probably at the point that they were adopted by the Council.
Across both estates, the various developers worked with similar planning guidelines on size of each plot, build distances of at least forty or fifty feet from the road and minimal property values. The garden suburb movement (flowing on from the garden village and garden city philosophies, as seen in Bournville, Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City) exercised a considerable influence. There were restrictions on house height, bye-laws over road-widths, drainage, churches, shops and pubs, while the prevalence of gardens, hedges, trees and lawns gave an enduring rural flavour to the residential development.
As the estates developed and the population of the Bourne expanded, so the burgeoning congregation outgrew the existing St Thomas’ Church on Vicarage Hill and Church Lane. In 1907 the Reverend John Martyr Ward once again gave land for the construction of a new and larger church, at its current site on the west side of Swingate Road. The Revd. Sidebottom died that year and Ward in 1908, while construction of the new church was underway. Once complete, the altar from the old church was walked round to it and the new church consecrated. The old church remained standing until its demolition in 1925, when masonry was salvaged and incorporated into the walls of the new side chapel and later the north wall, while the original site allowed the graveyard to extend to meet demand. The Old Church Lane Conservation Area contains the old churchyard and abuts the Great Austins Conservation Area on the northern end of Vicarage Hill.
Mitchell also owned Costley’s Farm to the south of the Greenhill Ridge and contemporaneously with the developments above, he created plots for sale on his land fronting Leigh Lane and The Packway. Falkner and Borelli acquired several plots here for speculative development, much as they had done on the other two estates. The common origins of land ownership, development history and agency form a strong affinity between this and the other two estates, despite it not being included within the designation of the Great Austins Conservation Area. Instead, it forms a valued part of the GAAPG.
The Great Austins Area Preservation Group was formed in 1982, prompted by a development of flats at the corner of Tilford and Greenhill Roads on the site of Tom Mitchell’s former home, the Lindens, (going ahead after several planning applications and despite strong local opposition). Waverley Borough Council formally granted Conservation Area status in 1993 and representations by the Group helped to avoid a planned reduction of the Area in a 2022 review. The Group is committed to conserving the character of this area of special historical and architectural importance.
The aim of the GAAPG Street History Project is to enhance residents’ appreciation of the Great Austins Area and its social and development history. From historical research, street directories have been compiled for each road in the Conservation Area, capturing the house names and their occupants as existed a century ago, in 1923. A corresponding plan of the area has been produced that shows each of the plots with street numbering and house names, which reveals that more than half the designated plots were built and occupied by that date.