Place Name
Preserves the field name. This street was developed on land that was previously the common field known as Westonfield, which before building work had begun in the middle of the 19thCentury, covered an area from the High Street to Priest’s Bridge. The area later became known as Westfields after it was bought by Walter Whittingham of the British Land Company in 1865 for £1,296. Mary Grimwade and Charles Hailstone on Highways and Byways of Barnes explain: “The West Field was one of the enormous open fields of mediaeval Barnes in which a system of husbandry was practised to manorial rule… In Tudor times, when Westfields was probably four hundred years old, it was called Westonfield and more familiarly Weston or Westoney. Sweep away all the roads, houses and railways from White Hart Lane to the back of the High Street and Station Road and from The Terrace to Beverley Brook. Replace them with arable strips and pieces, with meadows by the brook, and you have the West Field in its fully-developed form.”
