Ewell - the Ewell walking trail






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The Ewell walking trail

This page is part of the Bourne Hall Outreach Programme, an informal partnership between the Bourne Hall Museum and Epsom and Ewell on the Internet.

The Bourne Hall Museum mounts exhibitions each year on aspects of our local history. These exhibitions are fascinating - and much appreciated by those who see them. They take considerable care and trouble to assemble, and it is a great pity that, until now, the material in these exhibitions has been inaccessible to the general public after the exhibitions have closed. The Bourne Hall Outreach Programme will put the text from all the exhibitions back to 1992 on the Internet, thus giving you a mine of information about local history. We hope you will find it useful.

The Museum has a permanent collection and also mounts exhibitions on specific aspects of life in the past. They welcome enquiries about places in the Borough, which should be addressed to the Curator, Bourne Hall Museum, Ewell, KT17 1UF.

The Ewell walking trail

The Ewell Village Trail begins at Sainsbury's Homebase, built in the deep pits left behind when chalk was quarried for buildings and fertiliser in the middle ages. Cross the Reigate Road and continue down Mongers Lane, an old bridleway which was once the main route from the village of Cuddington to Epsom. Where the bridleway joins the Epsom Road, you pass by a building on the left - this is the Old House of 1800, which housed Monger's Academy, a private school for the children of Nonconformists.

Map of the Ewell walking trail - get the paper copy from the Bourne Hall Library. [List of what the numbers mean coming soon!]

Cross the road, and turn right. As you come downhill, you will pass a turning marked 'Tayles Hill', and it is worth stepping aside to see this fine early nineteenth-century building, which until 1960 was the home of James Chuter Ede, the creator of Labour's post-war education policy and perhaps the most important person to have been born in this Borough. After some shops, you come to a green space lined with trees on your left - this is the Grove. Turn down here into West Street, passing by the playground of Ewell Grove school on your right and, on the left, the Victorian lodge to Ewell House. The house itself is now gone, but the lodge and servants' buildings behind it are an attractive attempt at Tudor decoration. Ewell Grove school was originally built for the girls' section of the village school, and if you turn right down West Street you will soon come to the village school itself built in 1861 out of charitable funds, supplemented by Sir George Glyn the vicar. It is now owned by Surrey County Council. A little further on, to your left, is an archway with metal tramlines running through it - this is where the heavy machinery for Jamesons Light Engineering Works was wheeled in and out. The building on the corner to your left looks as if it was brick-built, but is in fact clad with mathematical tiles.

Turn left here, and you soon come to Mary Wallis House, a seventeenth-century farmhouse improved with a slight bay window. It was occupied by members of the Stone family, but is named after their servant girl - Wallis was a remarkable woman who saved enough money from her wages to build a chapel in West Street. Now the footpath narrows as it runs past a long brick building, the granary where the Stones stored their grain supply. On your right is a run of fine seventeenth-century cottages, ending in no.9 (Booths Antiques), formerly an inn called the Red Lyon.

Carry on past the shops to cross busy Spring Street, and then enter through the impressive Dog Gate into the grounds of Bourne Hall. The Dog Gate was built in the 1820s by Hersey Barritt, whose coat of arms is displayed on it. He also built the artificial bridge which skirts the lake, but the white lodge building to your left is a little later, about 1860. The old Bourne Hall which they served was last in the 1960s, the present community centre having opened in 1970. Carry on beside the lake, and you will come to an arch for an ornamental waterwheel, flanked by two Coade stone statues which represent Wine and Water. Just past this there is a paved area with an old stone seat where you can rest and contemplate the wildfowl on the Horsepond.

Leaving Bourne Hall park through the gate, cross over Chessington Road and make a slight detour to the left if you want to see Ewell's oldest building - the house called Fitznells, a medieval hall. Then continue downstream with the river, which will take you to the Upper Mill, a reconstruction of the original building made in 1984. The mill supplied stone ground floor until the 1930s, and claimed to have served Queen Victoria. Hall and Davidson also ran the Lower Mill, whose ruins can be explored further downstream: but to return to the village, cross Kingston Road and look for Mill Lane leading up to the left of the Wheatsheaf. This contains many weatherboarded cottages, some of the early nineteenth century while others mask medieval houses behind the white boards. There are also workers' cottages built more substantially in flint and brick.

Mill Lane leads you to the busy London Road, and on the other side of this is the parish church of St. Mary's. Crossing the road and entering through the lychgate, you can see that St. Mary's is a Victorian church - in fact it was built in 1848 to replace the original medieval building. Continue through the churchyard until you can see the houses of Church Street on your left, and set back behind them, an old wooden barn. This is all that is left of Rectory Farm, home to the relatives of Holman Hunt the pre-Raphaelite artist. Ahead of you is the original section of the churchyard, containing the fifteenth-century tower which is all that remains of Ewell's original church. Leave the tower on your right, and come out of the churchyard into Church Street, where you will be facing a long building with stucco battlements in early nineteenth-century style: this is Ewell Castle, an early work of Ewell's neglected architect Henry Kitchen. As you turn right, going down the street, you pass a house with a bay window - originally a coaching inn, the Kings Head - and on the other side of the road the Well House, and early example of a semi-detached plan. After that come another house with mathematical tiles, set back from the road; then the old malthouse, where barley was processed for local brewers, now the spiritualist church of St. Michael. After two more buildings with mathematical tiles comes the village Watch House. This has two doors, one on the left with bars for a temporary lock-up , and one on the right for the Ewell fire engine, which can be seen today at Bourne Hall Museum.

Turn left past the French restaurant... and so back to the Homebase car park.


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