Harefield, Hampshire

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Harefield is a housing estate near Bitterne in the city of Southampton, United Kingdom. The entire area is council housing estate built around 1960 on the 238 acre estate of Harefield House—a country house of Elizabethan style built in 1834 for Sir Edward Butler, chairman of the Southampton and Salisbury Railway Company, in what are now the grounds of Harefield Infant and Junior Schools on Yeovil Chase. Edwin Jones, the Southampton draper whose store ultimately became part of Debenhams bought the house in 1887 and it burnt to destruction in 1915 while occupied by his widow. The Jones family sold the estate in 1917 and there was some building in the 1920s but it was not developed in earnest until after the Second World War.

The street names on the western edge of the estate are all named after Somerset place names by the private housing developers active in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The later council housing extended these streets and added more to the west that are named after Hampshire villages.

The development of the housing estate included two public houses (the Exford Arms and the Hare and Hounds), two shopping parades, two primary schools (Harefield and Moorhill, each consisting of infant and junior schools), and Moorhill Secondary School (named after Moorhill House, which stood just outside the estate in West End). The Moorhill schools and the Exford Avenue shopping parade were constructed in 1964-65. Until that time there was a Post Office in a Nissen hut opposite the Exford Arms.

Moorhill Secondary School was demolished in 2001 and rebuilt as Woodlands Community School.

Districts and suburbs of the City of Southampton