Modern Age
Industrialisation
The Ridgeway was bisected by the building of the Great Western Railway in 1838, the Staines and West Drayton Railway in 1882/3 and the canal in 1883. These events were the first to break the old insularity and thrust the old manor inexorably into the outside world.
Iver lay on the eastern edge of the Slough-Langley Brickfield which produced 14 million bricks per annum in 1908 serviced by the Slough branch of the canal. Canal side wharves and a gravel pit (on the site of the current Thorney Business Park) gave rise to Mead’s brickworks on land now farmed by Wingroves at Shredding Green Farm.
Mead’s Cottages can be found on Mansion Lane and Mead’s Bridge (built in 1883) over the canal is just behind the present Bison site. There was also Ridgeway Tileworks incorporating a gravel pit (on the site of the current Ridgeway Trading Estate) and Reed’s or Iver Lower Brickworks (east of Thorney Lane on the site of Iver Waterworks) where work only ceased in 1920 and the kilns were still present until after the war. Railway sidings at Iver also serviced these industries and exported gravel.
Then came the second world war and further pressure on a rural community. With planning processes not robust and the green belt not in place, arguments such as ‘requesting a temporary concession’ or claiming a customary usage were accepted and some are still in place today.
The Hawker Aircraft factory arrived (which then became Fords and is now a housing estate and a business park including a Royal Mail depot) and Parlaunt Farm on the west of Richings Park was lost.
The Ridgeway Industrial Estate grew up soon after the war as a planned development on the site of the old tileworks and centred on the pre-war Britannic Cable factory. This became Faberge, then TNT and is now Ceva. The post-war economy had to be made to succeed and industrial
development was the name of the game. There was plenty of space in the Metropolitan Green Belt – how little things change!
Land North of Iver Station
The land between the railway and the canal was originally brickworks and was acquired by the Great Western Railway, by Act of Parliament in 1922 – 23. The railway already had a siding into an early, disused, shallow gravel dig at the western end.
The BR Properties Board sold land to the east of Thorney Lane to Three Valleys for the waterworks and the land around Court Farm went to Boyer.
The rest of the land, apart from a cherry orchard which was left untended, was farmed as tenants by the Wingroves of Shredding Farm who were already working the former Mead’s brickfields. A cart track used to lead from Mead’s bridge, round the old gravel pit to the farm track at Dog Kennel Bridge.
Starting around 1952, Hall Aggregates worked out the whole area for gravel, extending westwards behind Bison/Tarmac to Hollow Hill Lane.
Restoration was by rubbish infill and soil (certainly not the original top soil) over the top and was not completed until 1979. More recently there has been a problem of methane being generated by the waste and flares have had to be installed.
The Wingroves were not given the opportunity to re-occupy the land and Rayner of Horton (who also farms other Hall Aggregate land) used it for hay crops after much application of manure.
In 1982 there was a ‘gypsy invasion’ onto this land and following this BR put in, at narrow intervals, iron girders deep set in concrete to bar access. This did not prove effective as the girders were regularly pulled out. Eventually in 1989 BR put up a large earth bund incorporating the girders and an official gypsy site established off Mansion Lane.
Some trees were planted on the rest of the land but it was mostly left derelict. It was proposed that the area should be landscaped and incorporated into the Colne Valley Park and managed as a public access area. However, proposals were made by BR in February 1984 to use it for a ‘park and ride’ scheme with a Heathrow interchange. This led, in July that year, to a proposal to establish a motorway service station on the site as a joint venture with BR.
These plans were withdrawn in Nov 1989, since which time nothing has happened to this site although proposals abound. In the 1970s the Mansion Lane site was the subject of a proposal for a national transhipment depot. This was rejected but there are still plans afoot for such a development to be sited there.
In 1948 the railway granted a lease on the western end of the land, on the site of the old gravel pit, to Holland & Hannen and Cubitts and manufacture of pre-stressed concrete began. It is a moot point as to whether this ought to have been allowed to happen as this was not an area scheduled for such activity as was the Ridgeway Estate.
By 1962 the site had expanded and was occupied by Bison and Tarmac and an increasing number of others with a range of activities. High rise cranes came and the noise of reversing machinery and bright lights at night as well as early morning noise from trucks bumping down the access road has continued to provide annoyance for residents.
The companies remained leaseholders from the railway until they sold it off recently. It has now become a business park which seems to be a storage facility for a large number of commercial HGVs and the school buses.
It is also not entirely clear by what permissions, if any, Court Lane Estate came into being. There is a view that a breaker’s yard set up business and was able to claim de-facto recognition when planning decisions became more carefully defined and rigorously enforced (!). Court Lane now has a new owner and further changes are in-train for this area of land.
Gravel Extraction
The ancient Thorney Farm lies to the east of Thorney Lane. Post war it had become defunct, being badly degraded by a poorly restored gravel dig in the 1950s and by the coming of the M25.
The farmer, Mr Smith found the land to be wet and provided poor pasture; it had gone from Grade I to Grade III agricultural land and so it was bought by Grundon’s for a rubbish tip.
The County Planning office indicated at the time that, on the completion of the tip and after restoration, the agreement with Grundon’s was that the land should be incorporated into the Colne Valley Park. It seems that this agreement did not stand and in 1988 Grundons launched a plan for a national sports centre on the site including a 100 bed hotel.
This plan did not succeed and a golf course was built. The latest proposal for this area is the construction of a massive hub station/terminal 6 for Heathrow.
Following the war, Tan House Farm on
the Colnbrook margin of Richings Park was dug for gravel by Costains. The area between South Iver sewage works and the old Main Drive then became a tip (Tan House Pits) which was poorly supervised, overfilled and contaminated with cadmium. The drainage was not restored stagnant water frequently contaminated the local streams and the ColnBrook.
Bucks County Council restored a large portion of the area but a sizeable portion was retained by Costains who put in a proposal to build a 1 million square foot shopping/ sports/ entertainment complex in the site in 1989 to be called Richings Place.
This was withdrawn when a proposal for a similar development by ARC at Wraysbury was comprehensively rejected by Mr Ridley the then Secretary of State for the Environment.
Following this, the area beyond the old Main Drive to Sutton Lane and the Colnbrook by-pass was opened up for a gravel dig and this continues today.
Lakeside Industrial Estate
The Lakeside Industrial Estate at Poyle was admitted to have been a mistake, perhaps before his time, by Mr Schoon the Bucks County Planning Officer when he was giving a talk on the area at the public launch of the Colne Valley Park in the Civic Centre in Uxbridge in 1983.
This estate housed the site of the Grundon’s rubbish baling plant, servicing their tip, before an industrial waste incinerator was built on the site in 1990. This incinerator, with a 100 ft chimney, was to also take hospital waste including radioactive waste.
Today it is still operating, having recently been modernised and expanded. A much larger energy from waste incinerator was built on adjacent land despite huge local opposition.
Bardons
The Bardons stone crushing/recycling plant on the eastern side of Richings Park at Thorney crept in in the early 1980s with temporary permission on the remains of an old depot.
Successive later permanent permissions were subsequently granted under pressure to provide road metal material for western London and then the M40 repairs and widening.
This sizeable installation has grown over the years and with it the lorry traffic on our local roads, all of which has to come via Richings Park since Hillingdon imposed a road narrowing on Mill Bridge in West Drayton.
When John Moore was Secretary of State for Transport (1986?) the rail sidings at Thorney on the mineral line from West Drayton were enlarged with an official celebration which included a special celebratory train from the quarries in Leicester to Thorney.
In his speech, John Moore made great play of the fact that this took traffic off the roads – he omitted to mention that the finished product has to leave in lorries and that more stone in means more lorries out on our local roads.
Sewage Works
South Iver sewage works began life as a facility for the treatment of local effluent, but became the site of a much enlarged sewage processing facility following the move of the Perry Oaks sewage works to here to allow for the expansion of Heathrow.
Improvements to the area round the shops
These were first mooted in 1982 and a site meeting took place on 27th Oct 1983 attended by the County and District Councillors, the County engineer, officials from South Bucks, representatives from BR Estates Office, local BR management, the local police and Richings Park Residents Association.
Discussions with South Bucks District Council continued through 1992, were still on-going in 1998 and work finally was completed in the summer of 1999. Initially this was a wide ranging scheme and aimed to include the track approaching the station and the area of grass outside the shops at the top end of Wellesley Avenue. The lack of ownership prevented any action with regard to the station approach and the lack of any response from the shop owners, including Alfred King, effectively excluded this area from the plan. The lines of blue bricks in the new paving represent the division between the private shop forecourts and the public pavement.
Shawcroft Models
The story of Shawcroft Models is told here.
