Place Name
Laid out over agricultural land belonging to Hundred Acres Farm, which was originally part of the much larger Hillingdon Court Estate. This road and much of the rest of the estate was developed shortly before the Second World War. But who was it named after? There are at least two contenders and even these may be unsatisfactory. Most likely it could be a reference to William Page Edwards (born 1863), the first chairman of Ruislip-Northwood Urban District Council when it was formed in 1904. He went on to hold the position a further two terms in 1910-1911 and 1916-1917. Alternatively, it could be James Edwards (1757 – January 2, 1816) bought the Manor of Harrow Rectory alias Harrow-on-the-Hill including 121 acres from Lord Northwick in 1807. Edwards was a recently retired bookseller and bibliographer whose shop in Pall Mall was famed throughout Georgian London, a few years earlier he had married Katharine, the only daughter of the Reverend Edward Bromhead, rector of Reepham, in Norfolk. Despite the fact that Northwick had held on to some of the original estate, as a result of an on-going dispute (these parts of the estate later became Harrow Park), Edwards’s holdings still made him the largest landowner in the area. However, the apostrophe in the name begs the question, was it a grocer’s apostrophe or named after someone called Edward?
