Womersley House, Crouch End

1. Womersley House depicted in a photo that I suspect that this photo comes from a sales brochure from 1900 in which year it was sold for £4,500 (The Measuring Worth inflation calculator gives a range of current values, the median of which is a modest £4M ).

Womersley House was built in the early/mid 1860s in 1¾ acres by famous Oxford Street retailer Peter Robinson and named after his birthplace Womersley Yorkshire. The site is today at the truncated eastern end of Dickenson Road where Saxon Court flats are. He had moved his family from a property at 70 Avenue Road (also called Womersley House) near today's Swiss Cottage,

2. Extract from Ordnance Survey map, 1869.

It was described briefly in a sales advertisement in 1900,

"It comprises a handsome family residence of pleasing elevation, in white brick, approached by a carriage drive with lodge at entrance, and contains ten bed and dressing rooms, bath room, entrance and spacious inner halls, noble drawing room, about 40ft. (including bay), by l7ft., communicating with balcony, and handsome conservatory, capital dining room, about 23ft. by 17ft. (including bay), library, breakfast room, housekeeper's room, ample domestic offices, and cellarage, stabling for two horses, and coach-house. Beautifully timbered grounds, laid out in tastefully-arranged lawns, flower beds, terrace walks, ete. Large and productive kitchen garden, the whole covering an area of nearly two acres. The property has an important frontage of about 135ft. to Elm-grove, as well as frontages to Womersley-road and Dicken-son-road." (Hornsey & Finsbury Park Journal 23 June 1900).

Robinson died in 1874 and his wife about a decade later. It was then apparently home to local land owner Charles Turner who had up from Stapleton Hall. Turner died in 1892 and by 1900 the house had embarked on a very different career. For most of the period up to the Second World War, it served as boarding house of varying sorts. It began with  a few years as a "settlement for Christian gentlemen.

3. Advert in Hornsey and Finsbury Park Journal, 27 April 1901.

By 1902 however, it had turned to ladies and served as the London Hostel, a residential home for women. The Lady's Pictorial, described it as follows,

"A New hostel for women has been opened at Crouch Hill, which, to some extent, differs from anything yet attempted in this direction. The majority of existing homes and hostels are either for girls and women engaged in business pursuits, or for those who wish to devote their time to systemised work among the poor. The aim of the "London Hostel," however, is to provide a refined, sympathetic home for gentlewomen who are alone in the world, and whose means are too small to admit of anything better than dreary suburban boarding houses, or, equally, deadly, "lodgings".' A life of isolation is always undesirable for women, more especially in a large city; to reside in a congenial community is healthier for the body, as well as for the mind. The hostel is a large, well-appointed a mansion, stabnding in its own ground within easy access of the Ciy and West-end. Special autention is paid the cuisine; meals are served as follows:-Breakfast, 8.30; lunch, 1.0; tea, 5.0; dinner, 7.0; light supper, 9.30. The lady superintendent, who give(sic.) her services to the work, is in personal touch with everyone, and, though absolute freedom is the keynote to the management, by her tactfulness she succeeds in maintaining a harmonious community. - Particulars as to terms of residence can be obtained from the secretary, " The London Hostel," Womersley House, Crouch Hill"

I have attached below copies of the 1901 and 1911 censuses showing the range of occuoants in residence.

Within a decade it had become partial board residence and then for another decade from the early 1920s till around 1933 a school, before returning to service providing residential accommodation as the Womersley House Lodge.

I then rather lose track of its fate, bur we can see from the Ordnance Survey Map of 1954 that it had been demolished by that time.

Its grounds have since served as the site for various guises of flats.

See also a piece I did last year about two nearby houses.