Richard Jefferies in Tolworth & Radio Swindon broadcast
Broadcast recorded in Tolworth
“The beauty of the hill is spoiled, not by nature, but by man’s neglect. The very ground seems sick.”— Richard Jefferies, diary
Mid-century Surbiton presented a contradiction: a rapidly developing suburb marketed for its beauty, yet one whose sanitary arrangements were dangerously inadequate. The 1854 General Board of Health report—rediscovered by Bob Philips and published in The Story of Tolworth—records in stark detail how many of Surbiton’s new roads and houses relied entirely on cesspools, often left until “the ground around is all saturated.” Westfield Road was singled out as especially alarming, its back-garden pits receiving “all the filth, without any proper drainage away from the premises.”
The Minutes of Inspection confirm that twenty-five newly built houses in West-field Road, valued at £25–£40 a year, were constructed “without pretension to any drainage,” despite standing little more than a hundred feet from the river. The only obstacle to proper drainage into the Thames was the sewer owned by the water company—and the owners’ reluctance to pay for access.
Even the rising, picturesque district of Surbiton Hill was said to be “ruined with houses with no drainage system.” The inspector described its so-called drainage as “a system of cesspools of the very worst and most deadly character,” warning of the slow but certain “saturating with filth and excrement a site so beautiful as Surbiton-hill.”
Philips notes that decades later, this situation still carried real consequences. On page 57 of The Story of Tolworth he records Justice Straight’s struggle to get Woodview—the villa rented by Richard Jefferies—connected to the sewage system, a fight emblematic of Surbiton’s long and reluctant transition from cesspools to modern sanitation. more to follow
The Drove, Tolworth Court Farm
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