Place Name
Originally Cleveland Gardens Road. Named after the “gracious” 18thCentury Cleveland House which stood on the Green, north of the Methodist Church. For a time from 1800 until the mid-19thCentury it had served as a boys’ boarding school, Cleveland House Academy run by Dr John Palin, who should be owed a debt of gratitude since it was he who managed to stop plans to have Barnes Pond filled in. It was demolished in 1927 having gone from being a family home to serving as the Barnes and District Steam Laundry between 1903 and 1920, and afterwards a small chocolate factory, Zeeta’s. Maisie Brown in Barnes and Mortlake Past with East Sheen was moved to write that it was replaced with “an extremely ugly building for a larger chocolate, ice-cream and cake factory and the smell of chocolate wafted across Barnes Green for 25 years. In 1958 the building became the Postal Sorting Office for Barnes.”
