Introduction to Leigh: Concise History from Prehistoric Times to the Present Day

Leigh – The Parish

Leigh (spelled various different ways including Lye or Lyghe and meaning a ‘meadow in forest’) lies in the Weald of Kent to the south of the Sevenoaks Ridge and north of the River Medway. It is a village in a rural environment close to a major London commuter railway and to the built up areas comprising Sevenoaks, Hildenborough and Tonbridge. It is, however, still physically separated from all of these towns by open farmland and woods and retains a strong sense of its own separate identity.

The civil parish of Leigh also includes the hamlets of Charcott and Moorden to the west and Powder Mills to the east. The village itself still has a Post Office/General Stores which provides a wide range of vital goods and services, and also a hairdressers, a public house and a garden machinery shop. The parish also includes the Environment Agency office for the South East including the organisation for the Leigh Barrage. Charcott has its own public house and, along with Moorden, is served by a Post Office/General Stores at Chiddingstone Causeway.

There has always been a well developed community spirit in the parish and in 2004 Leigh was awarded the Large Villages winner in the Community Life category, runner up in the Older People category and highly commended in the Business category in the Kent Village of the Year Awards.  The village continues to grow and thrive offering many clubs and other activities for its residents.

Prehistoric/Pre-Roman times

(See also Leigh: Early History)

The name ‘Leigh’, which is spelled more than seventeen different ways in historic documents is derived from the Jutish word for a ‘meadow in forest.’ Amid the marshy surrounds of the Medway to the South and Bid Brook to the North, there were presumably gaps in the forest.  However, there is no evidence of a settlement in those years in Leigh which, if it was used for little more than seasonable grazing, would have had a very scattered and tiny population.   A bronze age arrowhead was found at Coppins Brooker, but it was probably dropped in a hunt and does not indicate a settlement.

The area had several track ways.  The oldest, dating from the Iron Age, ran from Cowden to Oldbury Hill via Charcott and Watts Cross.  Another ran east/west from Tonbridge to Edenbridge, originally the sites of fords and then bridges over waterways.

Roman Times AD 43-410

Similarly, there is no evidence of Roman remains although the area was served by a small connecting trackway between the minor Roman route from London to Tonbridge and the main Roman road from Chichester through Edenbridge to London.  There were iron workings at Cinder Hill which were either Roman or medieval (views differ).

The Jutish and Anglo Saxon Period, 5th to 11th century

Hengist, a Jute and traditionally considered the first king of Kent, arrived 449 AD and died 488 AD.  Under his descendant Ethelbert, 551-616AD, a great law maker, Kent became the most civilized part of Britain and remained so for 200 years.  The Jutes divided their kingdom into strips running north/south with the main towns in the north.  Leigh was generally part of the district overseen by the Darenth lord based at Sutton at Hone.  Each of these districts ran up to and included some land in the Thames valley, on which cows were kept, and some downland to graze sheep and provide timber. Our area was used for what later became known as ‘pannage’, the grazing of pigs on acorns and beech mast in autumn and for this a Jutish trackway ran down from the Darenth valley through Weald and Charcott.  The Jutes generally settled in self-sufficient farms rather than villages. Jutish records mention Ramhurst, a farm for sheep, and Hawden which was sited in the Powder Mills area.

These were times of change as first one and then another tribal group dominated parts of Britain including West Kent.  The name Tonbridge is Anglo Saxon and it is suggested that the area may well have seen ‘a mix of ‘indigenous’ Briton, Saxon, from the Thames valley and Jute from the east via the Medway’. But, in any case, over the years, away from the coast and not being strategically important, it seems likely that patterns of life and land use altered little in the area that would become Leigh.

Norman Conquest to 1550

After the conquest, William gave the lands in the Tonbridge area to his half-brother, Richard fitzGilbert.  The Doomsday book does not mention Leigh specifically but does mention a few large farms/estates in South West Kent.  Various territorial rows about ownership of the Leigh area between Richard’s family (the Clares) and the Archbishop of Canterbury resulted, in 1279, in a perambulation of the perimeter of the Lowy of Tonbridge, including Leigh, by 24 nobles to reach agreement on the position of the boundary.

It is possible that a stone church was built in Leigh on the current site in the 12th century but the earliest record of the appointment of a Rector is dated 1215; the last Rector was appointed in 1351.   In 1354, a Vicar was appointed and a Vicarage built. The current stone church was re-built in the 13th century as certain features date from that period. A moated farmhouse behind Great Barnetts was built between 1270 and 1320. This must have been one of the last moated farmhouses built as these went out of fashion soon after.  The farm buildings probably moved to the present site of Great Barnetts.  It is possible that a village was growing up around the Church at this time, It could have provided a base for tradesmen: leather workers; metal workers including tinsmiths and blacksmiths; a butcher and providers of food and drink. However, there is little written evidence of development before 1550.

To the east of Leigh village, Charcott, where important trackways crossed, has two houses, Jessups and Little Keepers, known to date from the 14th/15th centuries and two more that are thought to have origins in the same period.  Charcott was on a direct route from Penshurst, via Weald, originally to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Otford Palace and subsequently when Penshurst Place was built by Sir John de Pulteney in 1341 to Sevenoaks and London.

1550-1780 – Not the best of times

In 1553 the Sidney family were granted estates in Leigh as well as Penshurst.  The association of Leigh with the family can be seen in the crests on various houses in the village.  Their land and houses in Leigh remained virtually unaltered until 1911.  In the sixteenth century Henry VIII gave the Hall Place estate to William Waller of Groombridge Place and it was owned by various branches of the family for around 100 years.  One of the first maps to mention Leigh was published in 1629.

Little is known about day by day life in the village but in 1664 the parish, which had a population of about 400, was said to be ‘well above average poverty’. It was sufficiently large to have a ‘Batt and Ball’ pub in 1753, pre-dating the foundation of the Duke cricket ball workshop at Redleaf.  By about 1750, it is possible that basic education was available from Sunday Schools and charitable establishments for some village children.  There was a charity school on the Green in 1826, and probably earlier.  Grammar schools in Sevenoaks and Tonbridge provided education for the boys from wealthier families.

Hasted’s History of Kent in 1778 said that “The Village hath nothing worth notice in it”.  Almost certainly this was true; Leigh seems to have been a poor village, the centre for a number of largish, for the time, tenanted farms owned by gentry who lived elsewhere.  Hasted explained at length about the noble and gentlemen’s families associated with the village.  It may or may not be symptomatic that in 1776 Leigh had a workhouse while Penshurst and Edenbridge did not.  In fact, records show that there was a poor house in Leigh as early as 1730.

1780-1870 – a period of growth

Robert Burgess was given Hall Place estate in 1753 and in 1780 pulled down the rambling Jacobean Hall Place and erected a new rather beautiful Georgian house in its place.  The Burgess family sold the estate to Farmer Baily in 1820.  The family was rich.  Farmer, his actual Christian name, took an active interest in the village.  However, he died in 1828 when his son, Thomas Farmer Baily, was only four years old and the estate was managed by William Smith, who had become his step-father on his mother’s remarriage in 1832.   Thomas Farmer Baily inherited the estate when he came of age in 1845 and set about improving the estate. Quite a number of the houses in the centre of the village were put up by the Baily and designed by his second cousin, Charles Baily.  In 1861 the Church was completely rebuilt, again with Charles Baily responsible for the redesigned nave, built by George Bodley, and the new tower organized by the then Rector, Lord de Lisle.

In those days, before local government as we now understand it, the ‘Church Vestry’ had wide-ranging powers locally, levying local taxes to cover law and order, roads, health, poor house/workhouse etc. The church was clearly important but was not the only religious institution; in 1851, two thirds of village people were said to be Church of England but a third were non-conformist. In about 1830 a National School was established in Powder Mill Lane: as mentioned, there had already been a charity school on the Green since at least 1826 and these two schools formed the National School.  Also sited on or by The Green were a lock-up, a pound for stray animals and a toll house to gather funds for the maintenance of the road. The first dedicated doctor to live in Leigh, from the late 1820s to 1879, was Dr Gregory.  He was followed by Dr Fraser who served the village from the 1880s to 1940.

This was a period when the village was growing and thriving.  The population was 740 in 1801. Over 400 acres of hops were grown in the area in 1821, the peak of production.  As well as cricket ball manufacture, the Gunpowder Works at Powder Mills (1811-1934) and the Brick Works between Lower Green and Kiln Lane (1841-1913) provided employment.   Many people were also employed by the Hall Place estate. In 1806, the shipbuilder, William Wells, bought the Redleaf Estate and owned seven farms in Leigh around Charcott.  Relative prosperity may be the reason that the ‘swing’ riots, that elsewhere marked protests by agricultural workers against mechanisation and harsh working conditions, are not known to have affected Leigh.

In the early 1840s the London and South East railway was built and ran through Leigh, but it did not stop there until 1911 when a village station, Lyghe Halt, was built.  The railway company was scathing about the village in a guide provided in the carriages: “The village of Leigh lies so contiguous to the railway that it illustrates itself.  Indeed, it looks better from the railway than on the spot”.  The guide did, however, say that the Church had some ‘good things’ including the brasses.  It was not until 1868 that the tunnel under Sevenoaks provided a more direct route from Tonbridge to London and a station at Hildenborough.

1870 onward – the making of today’s Leigh

 In 1870 Samuel Morley, at that time the richest commoner in the country, bought the Hall Place Estate, pulled down the house and rebuilt itusing the architect, George Devey and, to plan the gardens, Robert Marnock.  A lifelong Congregationalist, Morley established a non-conformist chapel in the village, re-using the materials from the Baronial Hall from Hall Place and between 1870-1939 an increasing number of parishioners went to the chapel rather than St Mary’s.  The population grew by three quarters from 1801 to 1,320 in 1901. The Estate owned most of the houses in the village and many of the surrounding farms although, apart from Home Farm, these were rented out.  Sir Ernest George and Peto were the architects for The Square, and Forge Square in the 1880s/1890s. In 1870s the government introduced national education and a new school building was built which in due course replaced the National School in Powder Mill Lane.

There is more evidence of sporting and other social activities in the 20th century. The Village Institute ran from the early 1900s.  The Women’s Institute began in 1919. The number of pubs grew; there were five in the parish and three others in walking distance until the second world war and there is evidence of consequent drunkenness.  Cycling became a popular activity as well as an important mode of transport from 1890. Other pastimes included fishing and swimming in the river, shooting and poaching on the estates, and the working of allotments to augment domestic gardening.  During the first world war the Village Hall was used as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) hospital for various non-military treatments. In the second world war the villagers housed many evacuees from London.

Post-World War Two the village became less self-contained, and the number of houses and people increased considerably, initially around and behind The Green and along the Penshurst Road but later south west of The Green towards the station. One sign of social and economic change is the fact that the average number of occupants per dwelling declined from 6.0 in 1801 to 3.5 in 2000.  Many more residents commuted to work in London and more also had cars.  The number of children attending the village school increased while the number of shops and pubs decreased.  Between 1950-1965 the Hope-Morley family sold many of the houses they owned and finally sold Hall Place and the remains of the Estate in 2017. In 1991 the population had grown to 1,518. Dependence on the owners of Hall Place for livelihood and social leadership which, for good or ill, had been a feature for about 800 years, was over.

(updated March 2024)