Place Name
This was once a quiet backwater known as Wandsworth Plain, gentile enough for royal mistress Elizabeth “Jane” Shore, one of the many paramours of the Yorkist King Edward IV to call home. By the late 18thCentury, Elizabeth Shore’s property was still standing but had long since been abandoned and the grounds were now being used to store weapons of the Loyal Wandsworth Volunteers, who called it Armoury Yard. This militia had been reformed in 1794 in response to the events following the French Revolution. One Lord Midleton subscribed to the corps of about 250 men and contributed two weapons. They were active until 1810, when threats of a French invasion had sufficiently receded. There is also the suggestion that the yard was also used to hold armaments made at James Henckell’s iron works, which was close by, on Garratt Lane. In 1792 the mill and forge, was using water-powered tilt hammers to produce wrought iron and cast shot, shells and cannon, weapons which were employed at the battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar. That works closed in 1832 and four years later the Mill was converted to papermaking by Thomas Creswick “paper and card maker to His Majesty”. At around the same time a boys’ reformatory (an early youth custody centre and boys’ home) was opened on the plain. In the late 1930s plans were afoot to improve traffic in the area, by now the reformatory was a school and it had been joined by two others nearby. The Second World War interrupted the improvements but Armoury Way was eventually laid out as a trunk road, forming the A3 bridge over the River Wandle, in the late 1940s, covering the site of the former Middle Mills, flour mill.