Place Name
This street which were laid by 1880 took its name from Chislehurst Lodge and Chislehurst Villas which were recorded in the rate books for Mount Ararat Road from 1865. Chislehurst Lodge was owned by the Selwyn family who held much of the land on which this street was built. The name itself came from one of their other holdings, Scadbury Manor an estate of more than 2,000 acres in Kent which had been owned by the Betenson family. In 1681, William Selwyn, from Matson, near Gloucester, married Albinia Betenson. Their son Major-General Charles Selwyn, a veteran of the Marlborough Wars, established himself in Richmond in the early 18thCentury. He had inherited his father’s fortune in 1702 and Selwyn, a MP moved to the area as one of the inner circle of the Prince of Wales – later George II. As a result he took lodgings near the Old Deer Park and by 1720 had begun to buy up land, on which more than 50 new roads were later built – making up some one in five of all of Richmond’s street names. The estates passed down the family line to the Major-General’s grandson, George Augustus Selwyn, a friend of Horace Walpole, and a member of the Hellfire Club. When he died in 1791 the Matson and Chislehurst estates went to descendants of his sister, Albinia Selwyn, who had married Thomas Townshend in 1730. Their son went on to become Viscount Sydney in 1789 and her great-grandson Earl Sydney in 1874. The name Chislehurst means a wooded hill where the ground is gravelly.
