Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Marlborough Cottage Green Lanes - Home of the Founder of the British Rubber Industry
Marlborough Cottage was home to Thomas Hancock, a self-taught manufacturing engineer who is credited with founding the British rubber industry. His house was on the east side of Green Lanes about 200 yards south from the junction with Seven Sister's Road.
After Hancock's death in 1865, apparently his eldest daughter and three of his nieces continued to occupy the house. In 1879, the following advert was placed in the Gardener's Chronicle:
WANTED, a hard-working, experienced GARDENER and COACHMAN. who can Milk, to live on the premises. A middle-aged, married man without family preferred ; another man kept. — Apply by letter to Miss HANCOCK, Marlborough Cottage, Green Lanes, Stoke Newington, London.
After Thomas’ death, three of his nieces and his eldest daughter remained in residence until the last of them died in 1909.
Marlborough Cottage was bought by the Brownswood Bowling Club in 1913*. Here's a snippet about them:
Articles of incorporation of The Brownswood Club Green Lanes and part of 'Silvermere', Woodberry Down and to adapt them to become a social club. The originators were the Brownswood Bowling Club.
and the photo below was entitled "the Middlesex County Bowling Association holding its championship meeting at the Brownswood Club in Green Lanes".
and this snippet from The Standard on April 28 1913:
The house was demolished in 1945, after which London County Council built a block of flats on the site named Banstead Court, since demolished as part of the Woodberry Down redevelopment.
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Comment by Roy aka Smiffy on June 18, 2021 at 14:27
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Correct me if I’m wrong but I’m guessing that the present Marlborough House, on the south east corner of the junction of Green Lanes and Seven Sisters Road, was built near the site and adopted the name.
Childhood memories, Pearks Dairies, the grocer’s shop, I often visited for my mother. Empty jam-jars could be returned and earned a me few pennies. Sugar was sold loose in blue bags and cheese cut with a deadly wire!
Sadly. I cannot find an old picture of the shops.
When was the present Marlborough House built?
There was a bakery in the row of shops where my mother worked for several years. Later she worked for Maynard’s and then Gestetner.
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Comment by Hugh on December 1, 2022 at 0:08
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Sorry, Roy, only just remembered your question having just come across it again whilst digging deeper into an unrelated piece I posted many years back. In connection with that, I half-remembered that I'd written about a Marlborough House, or Marlborough something and came again upon this thread.
It turns out that the other topic I'm researching has provided some information relevant to your question on the Marlborough House at the corner of Green Lanes: the subject of my other research moved there in 1937, having previously lived in your old stomping ground, at Woodbury Grove, number 71.
As to the etymology of the building, Marlborough Cottage would still have been standing when Marlborough House was built. There was also a villa called Marlborough House around the corner, on the west side of Lordship Road, three houses north of the junction with Lordship Park. That was demolished at around the time that the Green Lanes flats were completed, but possibly a year or so later. Building work on the Bearstead Memorial Hospital, which replaced it didn't start until 1939. So, I don't know about the name: it could have been related to either of the other two local Marlboroughs or even to the better known central London home of the Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra. However, the most likley suspect is Marlborough House that used to stand on the site of the new flats.
Built by Stoke Newington builder Thomas Widdows, who also built the first Manor House Tavern, you can see the front wall with its porticoed entrance here.
Shortly after the turn if the century the house became the base for a succession of businesses.
1904 Phillips Moreton & Son, Solicitors / Charles Morpeth & Co, Carriage proprietors
1921 T Pryor & Sons, Builders Decorators & House agents
1929 Fred Varley AuctioneerMorpeth jobmasters weer still there in 1910.
(Contiuned in next comment).
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Continuing last comment in new reply as I hit the limit in the previous!
One of the first occupants, perhaps the first, was a George Searle (libed there at least 1878 - 1887). I can fins nothing more on him.
The last family to live there was that of Builder Charles D Lavington. They moved out in 1902, after which it was vacant for a couple of years.
Lavington was a “Sanitary Engineer” and separately as an “Appraiser and Valuer” and again as “Contractor”. Another listing showed him as a “building contractor and Sanitary engineer”.
Before moving to Woodberry Down, in the 1890s he'd lived at 332 Green lanes on the corner of Woodberry Grove.
Also of note for Harringay local, he owned the still-standing (and I think skated for preservation) “Mayfield House”, now at the front of the recently-former St Ann's Hospital grounds He sold it to the North Eastern Hospital, as it was then styled, in 1893.
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