Place name
This road once led to Bedford Park, a Georgian villa that was built by John Bedford in 1793. Bedford, along with his brother Thomas Tubb, had bought two 12-acre plots the previous year. The reason for the brothers’ different surnames was that in 1785, John Tubb had changed his at the bidding of an uncle, such requests were not unusual in an age when maintaining the family name down the line was all important. Bedford House was one of a trio of properties, built by the developer brothers, the others being the smaller Melbourne and Sydney. According to the Brentford and Chiswick Local History Society Bedford, née Tubb, and his brother did not name the houses themselves. Fast forward to 1866, when Hamilton Henry Fulton, a celebrated railway and canal engineer, acquired the property by auction as a family home and it was he who named it, in the autumn of that year, Bedford House. In 1875 Fulton’s son-in-law Jonathan Carr began buying up land in the local area with an eye to development. Perhaps aware of his plans Fulton put the house up for sale in 1869, but whether he changed his mind or simply couldn’t find a buyer, he continued to live at the property until his death on August 10, 1886. During that time Carr had been busy with his own plans amassing some 113 acres in pursuit of his building ambitions. By 1893 the original nucleus of Bedford Park streets had been developed.
