Morden, United Kingdom

The manor and village remained abbey property until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in Henry VIII's reign when the manor was sold to Lionel Ducket and Edward Whitchurch. Together, they sold it on the following year to Sir Richard Garth who became Lord of the manor. The Garth family owned the land and maintained their connection with the parish for the next four centuries, living at Morden Hall Park until the manor was sold by another Sir Richard Garth in 1872.

The prominence of the Garth family is recorded locally in the name of Garth Road, Lower Morden and the former Garth School. The two lions included in the present civic arms of the London Borough of Merton are adopted from the arms of Sir Richard.

Despite the rapid suburban development of nearby Wimbledon occasioned by the arrival of the new railways constructed in the mid 19th century, Morden remained a rural parish throughout the 19th century. While the population of Wimbledon grew hugely from 1,591 in 1801 to 41,652 in 1901, the population of Morden was 512 in 1801 and, one hundred years later, had grown to just 960.

In 1871, the area of the parish of Morden was 1,474.926 acres (596.881 ha) with the small village clustered around St Lawrence's church at the top of the hill on the road from London to Epsom (now London Road/Epsom Road). Approximately 1⁄2 mile (0.80 km) to the west of the main village and the grounds of Morden Park stood the hamlet of Lower Morden.

Close to the church were the George Inn, a 17th-century coaching inn (now modernised and part of a national pub restaurant chain), the estate of Morden Park and a school.

The other main public house in the village was the Crown Inn, located to the north east of the village with a small cluster of cottages on Crown Road. The rest of what is now the commercial centre of Morden was fields.

In the late 19th century the principal industry remained agriculture, although some industrial activity did exist along the River Wandle where watermills ground tobacco to snuff and a varnish works existed close to the site of Poplar Primary School. By 1898, the varnish works had gone and there was a brickworks on the site of Mostyn Gardens in Martin Way (then called Green Lane).

Under the Local Government Act, 1894, the parish of Morden formed part of the Croydon Rural District of Surrey. The first two decades of the 20th century saw little change in the village, with industry still mainly agricultural in nature; however, development in the parish of Merton to the north led to that area being removed from the rural district to form the Merton Urban District in 1907. Morden was merged with the Merton Urban District in 1913 to form the Merton and Morden Urban District. It was not until 1926, when Morden Underground station opened as the terminus of a new extension (from Clapham Common) of the City & South London Railway (now part of the London Underground's Northern Line), that the fast and direct route to Central London opened up the village for residential development.

To complement the new tube station, a garage was constructed on the other side of London Road, adjacent to the railway cutting and, in 1932, Morden Cinema was built next to it on the corner of Aberconway Road. Around the station, which, itself, had several shops built into the building, a new adjacent commercial centre grew quickly as shops sprang up along London Road and Crown Lane, including a rebuilt and enlarged Crown Inn public house (opened in 1932) and a large Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society (RACS) department store (opened in 1940).

Away from the new commercial centre of Morden, the existing rural roads were widened and rebuilt and the fields were rapidly divided into building plots and laid out for new housing. Further transport improvements came with the construction of a new Southern Railway branch line from Wimbledon to Sutton via stations at South Merton and Morden South (so named to differentiate it from Morden Underground Station and Morden Road (now Morden Road tram stop), although it was actually North-East of the original village centre). The new line opened between January 1930 and 1933. As a result of the new train and bus links, the population of Morden increased rapidly, from 1,355 in 1921 to 12,618 in 1931. In the next fifteen years, the population continued to grow, as most of the parish was covered in new suburban homes.