Place Name
Like West Park Avenue this road was laid out over the grounds of an old manor house, West Park, a substantial 18thCentury property which was inherited in 1837 by Edward William Leyborne Popham whose cousin Elizabeth Taylor was the last in the direct line of an old Mortlake family to hold the manor of East Sheen and Westhall. Leyborne Popham, a Major General, did not live there instead between 1841 and 1852 it was leased to Sir William Hooker, the director of the Botanical Gardens at Kew. When the general died six years after inheriting it, the property passed to his son and eventually on to Francis William Leyborne Popham who began to develop the Leyborne Popham residential estate, cashing in on the residential property boom. Maisie Brown in Barnes and Mortlake Past with East Sheen explains: “To the west of the village of Mortlake was an estate called Westhall, which was linked with East Sheen, so that the small sub-manor was always known as the manor of East Sheen and Westhall. About 1500, the estate became freehold when the lords of the manor, the Welbecks, secured their independence from Mortlake. In modern terms, the realty Manor House was situated on the west side of Sheen Lane…but was superseded by West Park, a house in Westhall.”
