Green View Avenue/Lealands Avenue

GREEN VIEW/LEALANDS PROJECT

There is currently a project being undertaken to write the history of the development of Green View Avenue and Lealands Avenue.

 

From the Penshurst Sales Particulars 1921, there is detail of this land before the development.    The land to the south of Elizabeth Cottage (which extends down today’s Green View to the gate to the field and also along Lealands beyond to behind Old Chimneys orchard and I suppose back of Barnetts and Garden Cottages) was thought to have been the farmland belonging to Elizabeth Cottage (which was the farmhouse).   This land to the south, also formerly Children land, was also bought by John Shelley Sidney of Penshurst in 1816 (according to Biddle) and therefore is also included in the sale of Penshurst Estate Leigh holdings in 1921.   It was called ‘Muscombs’.  and is described as an ‘Enclosure of Grass and Arable Land’, close to Leigh Village and very suitable for a building site, extending to an area of about 14 acres and 15 perches.  It had the benefit of a right of way for all agriculturist purposes over the accommodation road No. 366 between the points A and C on the plan – that is Green Lane today.   This would be the land on which the houses in Green View Avenue and Lealands would eventually be built.  In 1921, the majority of the land was tenanted by Mr Charles Friend (arable and pasture), by Mr H Maskell (a small area of ‘garden ground’ next to Elizabeth Cottage) and also a part ‘allotment garden’ tenanted by the Kent Cottage Company.   It says the purchaser of this lot ‘shall erect a fence between points E and D’ – i.e. that would be between the point where the road at the Green starts along what is Elizabeth Cottage’s boundary along Green View today (or perhaps a little further). The footpath drawn on the map, which is today’s Green View Avenue, would eventually be widened.

 

Joyce Field (Nov 2018)