Letter: Memories of Woodbridge Park House and 1950s Guildford

Published on: 21 Nov, 2024
Updated on: 22 Nov, 2024

Woodbridge Park House beside the River Wey at Woodbridge in Guildford in about the 1870s.

From Elizabeth Sach

I have just found your February 2012 article From Woodbridge Park To Western Australia.

I have been trying to locate any information about this house and was very excited to see your article as I used to live there!

My parents moved in shortly before my birth in St Luke’s Hospital in 1952 and we stayed until I was five years old.

Following World War 2, there was an acute shortage of housing to rent in Guildford, and my parents were struggling to find anywhere to live.

By this time the house was divided into flats, owned by Ingram Perkins, the sawmill next door, where my grandfather worked. Fortunately he was able to negotiate for us my parents to move in.

We lived in Flat no. 1, entered via a long drive and colonnade at the front of the house. I remember the sub-divided garden at the back, reaching down to the River Wey. The view of the house from the back is just how I remember it.

Although very grand in its heyday, our flat was small and on the ground floor, to the right side of the photograph (from the back).

I can remember the layout – we had a large sitting room with high ceilings, a kitchen and one large bedroom, which I shared with my parents until I was five and we moved to Farnham, when my father joined the police.

The bathroom was down a corridor and shared with other families. I used to enjoy sitting on a stool under cover in the colonnade at the front of the house, watching the comings and goings of the other residents.

I also looked out for my grandfather, who used to call round most days during his lunch break from the sawmill, usually bringing me a packet of Smiths crisps with their soggy salt packet, or in the summer, an ice cream from the transport café opposite.

Woodbridge Road has changed a lot from the 1950s. On Saturday mornings my grandfather would pick me up and we would walk into town. Just beyond the sawmill was a bus depot, containing a lot of double-decker buses.

Carrying on towards town we would stop at a bakers on the opposite side of the road, where I would choose an iced bun, which grandad chatted to the ladies he knew from his younger days when he grew up in Drummond Road.

It was then on to the high point of my day, a visit to the cattle market! Here I would watch with a mixture of fascination and terror, the bulls being unloaded from lorries and into their pens.

Sometimes we would go into the auction house and watch the animals coming into the ring and the auctioneer talking very fast in what sounded like a foreign language. In the spring there were chicks and rabbits to look at and sometimes stroke.

Then it was on to the market in North Street. We would look at different foods and I remember trying some Edam cheese which seemed incredibly exotic, having not tasted much cheese apart from cheddar! Neither my parents nor grandparents needed to buy vegetables as these were grown in the garden of their council house in Hillspur Road, Westborough.

Occasionally we would stop off for fish and chips on the way home – another special treat.

A watercolour painting of Woodbridge Park by an unknown artist but dated 1885. Chris Quinn collection.

The watercolour of the view from the garden of Woodbridge Park House also triggered another memory, as we would sometimes climb up and walk along a footpath at the top. We also walked underneath one of the arches and past The Wooden Bridge Pub, where my parents had held their wedding reception.

Continuing down a lane to the right we would arrive in Stoughton, where I started school. However, I only remained there for a term until we moved to Farnham. By this time my sister had been born and the bedroom was becoming very crowded with double and single beds as well as a her cot.

When we moved to Farnham I missed my grandparents a lot but still have very happy memories of Woodbridge Park House.