New Bedford Park Book - A Definitive Development History

David Budworth unveils the most detailed history of area ever published

Years of research have gone into a book about Jonathan Carr and the development of Bedford Park, the garden suburb he founded in 1875.

Published by the Bedford Park Society, Jonathan Carr’s Bedford Park by David Budworth, a local historian and Society committee member, was launched at the Bedford Park Festival.

The book shows that the Bedford Park Carr built was rather more extensive than the area nowadays associated with him. It also explains how he went about creating the estate. David comments that: “Carr seems to me to have shown a steely determination to achieve his aim, together with a remarkable flexibility in the methods which he was prepared to employ in its pursuit.”



As well as describing Carr’s approach to the development, David defines Bedford Park’s boundaries and traces the sequence of construction during and after Carr’s involvement. This includes untangling some complicated house numbering and street name changes. The foundation of the book is a database compiled from records of the Middlesex Deeds Register – a forerunner of the Land Registry – plus information gathered mainly from archives of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners and documents held by the boroughs of Ealing and Hounslow.

Although the first part is a very readable narrative, the second tabulates references so you can check the building history of an individual property. Among the author’s discoveries is references to two houses in Flanders Road which, although leased and mortgaged, never seem to have existed. David says: “I have documented the history in more detail and, I hope, with more accuracy, than has been done before.”
Illustrations include photographs and two specially-drawn maps, one showing the boundaries of the various pieces of land over which Carr acquired rights of one sort or another, and the other showing the houses which can be attributed to him.

David, who has lived in Bedford Park for 40 years, has researched the history of the garden suburb extensively, publishing many of his findings in the Brentford & Chiswick Local History Society Journal.

July 25, 2012