History of Kemnal Road

Kemnal Road is both new and old. New, because it was first developed for housing only 150 years ago; old, because it follows the route of a very old track which for centuries has crossed the area called Woodheath on which Kemnal Road was built.

The earliest records featuring Chislehurst date from about 974 and there is evidence that it had been a community much earlier than that, though it does not feature in the Domesday Book. According to Bushell this is because it was an outlying part of the Royal Manor of Dartford, and there was therefore no need to collect information about its tax capacity, which was the purpose of the compilation of the Domesday Book.

Kemnal Road took its name from Kemnal Manor, one of the earliest houses in this area. First mentioned in deeds in 1250 it was then referred to as the home of Alexander of Chomehole. Throughout its history the name has evolved: Chomehole, Cunehale, Kimehole, Kimenhale, Kymenhole, Kemenhole, Keminghole and Keming Hall. Locally the name had been contracted to Kemnal, and this contracted name was given to the last house built on the site in the 1870s. It was a large though unremarkable residence, but it is now gone, destroyed by fire in 1964.

The old footpath was used for the collection and transport of timber and charcoal from the ancient woodland which largely covered the area, and in later times, even before the development of the land on either side of the road, it provided a short-cut to the Maidstone Road (now the A20) and was regarded as ‘one of the prettiest walks in the neighbourhood’. Canon Murray, rector of St Nicholas for much of the 19th Century, was one of those who would use this path to walk to the Maidstone Road to catch the ‘coach and four’ which ran daily from Maidstone to London. This was before the building of the railway station at Chislehurst in 1865. The extension of the railway to Chislehurst enabled relatively easy daily travel from Chislehurst to London, whilst allowing families to live in the countryside, and inevitably led to increased demand for housing in the area.

The development of Kemnal Road started when Samuel Asser bought the freehold of the Kemnal Estate in 1871 from New College, Oxford. A right of way had existed from Kemnal Manor to the south, over the Woodheath footpath, since at least 1607, when there had been a dispute over its use, settled in favour of the owners of Kemnal Manor. In December 1873 Asser purchased the right of way from Earl Sydney of Frognal, and at the same time he made a new road northwards to the Maidstone Road, thereby creating the full length of Kemnal Road. An indenture sets out the details of agreed usage of the road. In 1874, Asser sold 57 acres of his newly acquired land to Henry Tiarks, a wealthy London banker, for the building of a new house at Foxbury, and provided him with rights of way from the north and the south. At the same time Earl Sydney carved out and sold individual plots of the land on Woodheath on both sides of the newly created road.

The initial development of the road was completed within ten years. It turned the southern part of the footpath into a distinguished private road with large fine houses, ‘whose beautiful grounds owe much of their charm to the retention of their woodland character’ (Webb, The History of Chislehurst).

By 1884 there were 13 large houses in Kemnal Road. In these houses, according to the 1891 census, 21 adults and 39 children were looked after by 84 servants. In addition there were 14 other households in the lodges, cottages and stables, and here there were another 20 (usually male) servants, their wives and 37 children. In all 210 people were living in the Road at this time. The census information provides details of where residents were born, and the data for Kemnal Road show just how much movement there had been from country to town: in particular the servants and their families came from just about every corner of the United Kingdom. 

In 1875, when the first houses were being built, there were of course no motor vehicles, so most houses of the size here had stables and areas for the grazing of their horses. The houses required large numbers of domestic servants to keep them going, and there was a plentiful supply from all over the United Kingdom, as people continued to move from the countryside to the towns. Great Britain was indeed great; this must have been the height of its financial and military dominance in the world, and the middle classes who moved here were generally quite prosperous. The British class system was also at its height, and the conventions of the day would be difficult for us to imagine now.

The consequences of two world wars changed all this, so that by 1950 owners and residents were no longer able to maintain the houses as they previously could. At least two houses were badly damaged by bombing in the Second World War. The economic and social changes meant that all the large houses had become expensive and difficult to maintain while there was an increased demand for housing in this area. As Tom Bushell notes: ‘For the first time the value of the land exceeded the value of the houses built on the land.’ As a result, seven of the houses were sold for development and were demolished over the 30 years following the end of the war, to be replaced by apartment blocks, or streets of smaller houses. Today, only three of the original large houses remain. All the lodges and stables were also sold off with their own land; five of these have retained their original exteriors.

This, then, is the life story of one unique road in Chislehurst.