Eltham, United Kingdom

By the 1880s the lathes and hundreds of Kent had become obsolete, with the civil parishes and other districts assuming modern governmental functions.

Eltham was a civil parish of Kent until 1889 when it became part of the County of London and from 1900 formed part of the Metropolitan Borough of Woolwich. On 31 March 1930 the parish was abolished to form Borough of Woolwich. At the 1921 census (the last before the abolition of the parish), Eltham St John the Baptist had a population of 28,308. The metropolitan borough was abolished in 1965 and Eltham then became part of the then London (now Royal) Borough of Greenwich.

Eltham today is one of the largest suburban developments in the borough with a population of almost 88,000 people.

Eltham lies on a high, sandy plateau which gave it a strategic significance. That, and the fact of its position close to the main route to the English Channel ports in Kent, led to the creation of the moated medieval Eltham Palace, still its most notable landmark. Daniel Lysons described its origins.

The Kings of England had a palace at Eltham at a very early period ... Henry the Third, in the year 1270, kept a public Christmas at his palace of Eltham, being accompanied by the Queen, and all the great men of the realm. Anthony Bec, Bishop of Durham, and Patriarch of Jerusalem, bestowed great cost, we are told, on the buildings at this place, and died there on the 28th of March 1311, having, as it is said, some time before given Eltham-house to Edward the Second, or, as some say, to Queen Isabel.... Edward frequently resided here. In 1315, his Queen was brought to bed of a son in this palace, called, from that circumstance, John of Eltham. Edward the Third held a Parliament at Eltham in 1329, and again in 1375.

The nearby manor of Well Hall was home to Sir John Pulteney, four times Lord Mayor of London, and later to wealthy Catholic William Roper and his wife Margaret (daughter of Sir Thomas More, known to Catholics as Saint Thomas More, Chancellor to King Henry VIII). In 1733 Sir Gregory Page bought this estate for £19,000 and demolished Roper House, building Page House – later known as Well Hall House – on the site. Until its demolition in 1931, Well Hall House variously served as a home to watchmaker John Arnold, and later to socialist Hubert Bland and author Edith Nesbit.

Also of note is Avery Hill Park and its former mansion, accessed from Bexley Road and at various points along the three miles (5 km) of other streets that surround the park. Avery Hill was the home of Colonel North, who made his fortune working in the Chilean nitrate industry. A hothouse is still open to the public and contains temperate and tropical plants. There are also remnants of the formal gardens in the public park. The mansion was part of the University of Greenwich, which had a significant presence on two sites in the area. However, in 2014 the university announced its intentions to withdraw from the site and has now done so.

The village streets adjacent to the Palace, and the surrounding land, remained rural until Archibald Cameron Corbett bought the Eltham Park Estate and developed it with well-built suburban housing between 1900 and 1914. The Bexley Heath Railway (see below) had opened what came to be known as the Bexleyheath Line in 1895. Suburban development of the district accelerated when the Government, through His Majesty's Office of Works, built the Progress Estate in Well Hall and large estates of temporary hutments in 1915, to house the vastly increased numbers of wartime workers in the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich. In the early years it was called, rather pretentiously, "Well Hall Garden City". Its name was changed to "Progress Estate" when it was purchased by the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society in 1925. It compares well with later groups of municipal housing in south London – which is surprising given the fact that it was constructed rapidly between February and December 1915 and is sub-divided by the South Circular Road and (until about 1988) by the even busier A2 Trunk Road. The Progress Estate was made a Conservation Area in 2007.