Place Name
Takes its name from the Hampshire manor of Arnewood, near Lymington, which never quite formed a village of the same name – Arnewood Court, Manor and House are still in open countryside. The name was mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Ernemude. It is thought that this derives from Earnawuda, an old English place name which translates as eagles wood. In 1951 the architect’s department at the London County Council selected this area of Roehampton as the site for one of the largest and most radical housing developments ever undertaken in London – the Alton Estate. At the time of its completion in 1958, Alton West was considered by many British architects to be the crowning glory of post-World War II social housing. The estate itself takes its name from Alton Lodge, an early-19th-century villa on the Kingston Road, occupied by Dr Thomas Hake from around 1854 until 1872. Seizing on this as a naming opportunity, the local government chose to name almost all of the other roads on the Alton Estate after places in Hampshire.
