Place Name
Takes its name from the former estate of Bickley Hall, a classical house designed by Robert Mylne, for John Wells, a shipbuilder, in 1780. His brother William, also a shipbuilder and a director of Greenwich Hospital, inherited the estate, and his son John commissioned additions by Robert Smirke in 1810. The house was knocked down in 1963. The name Bickley was first recorded in 1297, and is most likely named after a former owner of the woodland or ley, hence Bica’s Wood. But others have suggested that Bic in Old English means pointed one so it could mean a pointed wood or even, with a lot of imagination, “a wood that is inhabited by wild bees”.
