In 1927, my father Clifford Dick Chapman built his first nursery in Paynes Lane, Nazeing, on two acres of his father’s farm land.
The first known nurserymen in Nazeing were Olof Hansen and Sidney Rich, who were listed in the 1910 Kelly’s directory.
In the 1911 Census, Olof Hansen was listed as born in Denmark and living in Keysers Lane, working on his own account.
He was one of many nurserymen who came from Scandinavia early in the 20th century, because of the fertile soil and proximity to London markets.
The only other nurseryman who appears in a directory before 1920 was Victor Maynard, who was described as a tomato grower.
On a map published in 1923, most of Nazeing was still agricultural land.
Apart from Maynard’s, the only glasshouse was the Enfield Highway Cooperative Society’s at Rusheymead, named after fields next to the River Lea which were part of Payne’s Farm.
Between the 1926 and 1929 editions of Kelly’s, 15 new nurseries were listed, and by 1937 a further nine.
In some cases, nurserymen who lived elsewhere built nurseries in Nazeing and later moved closer or into the village.
They were probably encouraged by government intervention to help agriculture and Epping Rural District Council’s policy of expanding the glasshouse industry in Nazeing.
Nursery development in Nazeing began in the Keysers Lane area and spread from there.
In a 1946 map of Nazeing there were nurseries of varying sizes on Nazeing Road, Nursery Road, Hoe Lane and Paynes Lane.
Most were named after the fields they were built on. These names went back hundreds of years.
In September 1927, Clifford Chapman built his first nursery on farmland and called it Langridge Nursery.
His father George Chapman loaned him £909, and he had a Midland Bank loan of £1,000. The cost of construction was £2,116.
The following year, he added more greenhouses at a cost of £107.
The other nursery in Paynes Lane before 1930 was Dovecroft Nursery.
It was owned by Percy James (‘Jim’) Butterfield and named after one of the Payne’s Farm fields.
By 1929, electoral rolls showed 25 nurseries in Lower Nazeing.
Local businesses benefitted from the nursery industry with repairs and maintenance.
Painting the wooden greenhouses would have been an annual expense, done during the autumn and winter, and would have included replacing rotten wood, and broken glass.
In 1945 glass repair at one of Cliff Chapman’s nurseries cost £83 12s 6d, which would be over £3,600 now.
Charles William Payne built Blacklands Nursery in Nursery Road.
The field name Blacklands goes back at least to 1824 and is probably much older than that.
‘Lands’ in a field name, refers to cultivated land.
In 1975 John Payne, son of Charles William, discovered a black streak in the ground, later shown to be a silted ditch.
An archaeological dig revealed two churches and a burial ground containing almost 200 graves, which belonged to a Saxon nunnery.
In the 1939 Register for Nazeing, there were 60 residents working in nurseries.
At the beginning of the Second World War, the Ministry of Agriculture insisted that growers should reduce the production of flowers and cucumbers, which had little nutritional value, and increase the growing of edible crops.
Therefore, nurserymen growing flowers or bedding plants were encouraged to switch to tomatoes.
Because of the importance of producing food, growers were allowed petrol and oil for their vehicles and engines.
The first bombs fell on Nazeing on July 26, 1940, and many bombs fell before the last bombings in 1944.
On April 19, bombs fell on Langridge Nursery.
Greenhouses were flimsy structures and repairs would have taken weeks, with loss of income from ruined crops.
We know from diaries, that the plants would be several feet high by then, and the damage was considerable.
Italian prisoners of war were brought to Britain from July 1941.
The war had left a shortage of labour in both the agriculture and horticulture industries.
Although in 1939, 17 Nazeing women were working in nurseries, as well as the Women’s Land Army, POWs were used to ease the labour problem.
By the time my father retired, the industry he’d known had changed beyond recognition.
His first nursery is now called Valley Grown Salads and is a truly 21st century concern.
Joy Tizard is a member of Nazeing History Workshop. For more information: nazeinghistory.org/ or find on Facebook.
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