Before development took over (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

Before development took over

10:00am Tuesday 8th August 2006 in Features By Guardian-series

A FASCINATING photograph has been sent to us by Monica Ricketts, who remembers visits to the house that is featured, Webb Lodge, Higham Hill Road, Walthamstow.

She believes the picture was taken around 1905.

Mrs Ricketts, who now lives in Epping, told the Guardian: "It was the home of my maternal grandparents, Mr and Mrs Walter Andrews, some years before the street became the busy road it is today with terraced houses either side.

"Those were the days of coaches and horses and there was a dairy down the lane, Hitchman's, and a Doctor Dasta. Part of Webb Lodge became a factory, AS Andrews, making surgical appliances.

"My memories are of a large garden with an orchard in the 1920s. I moved away in 1925, but visited there until 1931."

A little extra research about Hitchman Dairies reveals that in 1906, about the time the Webb Lodge photograph was taken, there were 46 dairymen in Walthamstow, three of them keeping their own cows.

One of the latter was John Hitchman, of Wadham Farm, who also leased the Clay Street Farm on part of what is now Forest Road. He began the direct sales of milk to the public in the 1880s. In 1918, John Hitchman and Sons was bought out by DA Davies of another Walthamstow firm, Davies and Williams.

Still continuing to trade as Hitchman Dairies, the firm then moved to a purpose-built milk processing plant in Walthamstow Avenue in 1938, on the side of what is now the A406 North Circular Road.

The lovely art deco building still stands. In the time in between it has been part of the Unigate group and the St Ivel factory and it is now part of the Express by Holiday Inn hotel group.