Coney Hall
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Coney Hall is a suburban district, centred on the Coney Hill Estate, part of West Wickham in the London Borough of Bromley, England.
The typical architecture comprises two-storey houses with polygonal bay windows and half-timbered gables.
One of many owner-occupied estates arising during the inter-War housing boom, it was built in the 1930s on hilly farmland south of West Wickham bought by the developers, Morrell Brothers, from Coney Hall Farm. In the previous decade, opposition to road developments adjacent to West Wickham Common and Hayes Common had left the area accessible only by steep and narrow lanes. In Coney Hall's early days. London Transport refused to provide a bus service, and a free private coach service connected the estate to the nearest railway station, Hayes.
The estate achieved minor national prominence in the late 1930s via the legal disputes involving Jim and Elsy Borders, residents who headed a 1937 'mortgage strike' , withholding repayments in protest at the poor building quality. Although they ultimately lost, their case exposed abuses of the building society system and was one of the factors leading to its regulation by an amendment in 1939 to the Building Societies Act, 1874.
[edit] References
- Site of Coney Hall Estate, West Wickham, c. 1931 Suburbia in focus site
- Birch Tree Avenue, Coney Hall
- "Road Widening In Kent Approaches To Hayes Common", B.M. Goodwin, Letters, The Times, Aug 20, 1931.
- "Can pay, won't pay". Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times, July 21, 2001
- "The Mortgage Strikes (Elsy and Jim Borders 1939 battle against the building societies)", Andrew McCulloch, History Today, June, 2001.
- The working-class owner-occupied house of the 1930s Alan Crisp, M.Litt Oxford Thesis 1998.
