Place Name
A reference to the Kentish manor of Bedgebury, which was most likely suggested by the principle developer Alfred J Styles. Styles, born sometime around 1879, spent his formative years in the village of Goudhurst, Kent, but moved with his father, a bricklayer, to Wimbledon sometime as a youth. He too trained as a bricklayer but went on to become a developer and subsequently designed many houses in the area between and after the wars. Although he made Wimbledon his home he never lost his admiration for the types of houses that he had grown up around and he specialised in an English Revival style that was popular with middle class house buyers at the time – and even today. In the 1950s he began work on Bedgebury Gardens but completed only two of the intended ten detached houses on what was to be known as the Ambleside Estate. As for the name Bedgebury, it was first mentioned in a deed of Coenwulf, the Anglo-Saxon king of Mercia, in AD814 is derived from the Old English for pasture by the bend [of a river].
