When I go for walks I have two options, to drive somewhere and walk, or to go out of my front door and see where the pavement takes me. I tend to do both in equal measures; sometimes I am treated to the wild rushing sea and views from our seafront, where the pavement is level and I can get a reasonable pace going; on other days I wander around the neighbourhood, peering at gardens, wondering about who lived here in past times, what this space looked like. Every so often something catches the eye and one thinks, hmmmm, where did that come from?
In this case, it is a rather lovely line of trees, Scots pine on one side, chestnut and other natives on the other. They are big trees, as you can see, much older than the surrounding houses and obviously planted, but by whom and what for?
They sit in a long green open space, called Ashcombe Park, between several modern developments. Folk walk along here with their dogs, conkers litter the ground in Autumn
So I did a little digging about and found a rather wonderful thing called "Bexhill Open Street Map" which has an amazing range of overlays on a standard map of the town. From this I can see that at one stage this space was open fields, belonging to Birchington Farm
and within a very short space of time, it becomes Effingham House School, run by Miss Ismay, who applied to the district council for a temporary gymnasium in April 1919, and shown here on a 1955 OS map. By 1911 the school had 37 boarders, aged 11 - 16 from as far afield as India, Holland and Argentina as well as the more predictable London, Yorkshire and Somerset. There were 5 academic staff, two matrons and 9 general staff.
Here you can see the line of trees in the aerial photo from 1967, angling across the middle of the image,
You can find pictures of both the school and their uniform in this Bexhill Museum publication from an exhibition they had about Bexhill's schools
And finally, to my delight, I found this 1954 advert for "Girl Golfers" at Effingham House School. You can see those lovely trees in the background.
Isn't it amazing how much history we can find, just by looking in different places
You've managed to find out a lot, haven't you!
ReplyDeleteProbably partly because running a local studies and reference library formed part of working life - the best part at that, though working in a children's library came close second
DeleteThanks for writing a post about my mapping website, it's always nice to find someone enjoying using it as much as I do making it :)
ReplyDeleteHello Alex, you are very welcome, it has given me huge pleasure, I could spend hours just browsing the various layers looking at what has survived from the past, both man made and natural. The internet is such a wonderful place for bringing things to life in this way. Many congratulations for creating such a marvelous resource
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