Place Name
First mentioned in 1273, Putney Park was a 248 acre area of parkland used by the Archbishop of Canterbury to supply his Mortlake manor house with venison, there was a lodge at the bend on this road. To give some idea of its scale its boundary ran from Upper Richmond Road in the north, the Dover House Estate to the west, Putney Heath to the south, and Larpent Avenue to the east. When the manor of Wimbledon was granted to Sir Thomas Cecil in 1590, following the Dissolution of the Monasteries the Crown reserved as a Royal Park “all that park or land enclosed with pailings commonly called or known by the name of Mortlack Parke otherwise Putney Parke” In 1626 Charles I sold it, it was acquired by Sir Abraham Dawes who removed the deer and converted the estate to arable and pasture fields. By 1725, when this street name first appeared in the records, the lodge had became a great house and the lane, its private drive to the heath. It was only later that it was extended northwards to Upper Richmond Road. The estate was divided in the mid-18thCentury. The surrounding land was redeveloped in the 1920s by the London County Council as the Roehampton Estate, inspired by the Garden City Movement. The most common explanation behind the name of Putney is that it is of Anglo-Saxon origin and means Putta’s quay or landing place, although an alternative suggestion is that it may be from the Anglo Saxon word pyttel (hawk) meaning the hawks’ landing place, alluding to birds attracted to the river’s fish. Caroline Taggart in The Book of London Place Names writes that it may have been a nickname saying: “More likely… Putta or his father or grandfather was given this nickname because he kept hawks, looked after hawks for the local lord or, equally plausible, had a hawk-like nose.” Whatever the case it was first recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086 written as Putelei, this spelling says John Field in Place-Names of Greater London “exhibits a number of Norman peculiarities, including the confusion of l and n, and an insensitivity to certain other consonant sounds” but having taken the country by conquest the Normans were perhaps less interested in native sensitivities. The name featured again in 1279 written as Puttenhuthe and Putneth in 1474. The first time the contemporary spelling came about was in 1639 when it was recorded as Putney al. Puttenheath. Gerhold writes: “The standard explanation is that Putelei simply reflected the inability of the Normans to spell English place-names, and that Puttenhythe combined references to the Anglo-Saxon personal name Putta and the hythe or landing place, which would have been the settlements most distinctive feature. Unfortunately this does not mean that a landing place must have existed since the Anglo-Saxons arrived, for place names continued to change until the eleventh or twelfth centuries, indeed it has been suggested that Putney may once have been called Baston (the ‘tun’ or settlement of Bass or Bassa), the name of the field east of the High Street. Not does it entail us to regard Putta, whoever he was, as the founder of Putney. Another theory is that Putelei in 1086 was not an error but the survival of the name of the Romano-British settlement, derived from the Latin word puteal, meaning the stone kerb or enclosure around a well or spring. This theory has itself been challenged on linguistic grounds.”
