|
An expansive and expensive suburb running into open countryside west of Brockley Hill and east of Harrow Weald. The name was
first recorded in Domesday Book as Stanmere, a stony pool. It was later known as Great Stanmore, to distinguish it from the
separate settlement of Little Stanmore, which lay to the south-east. In the Middle Ages the village is thought to have clustered
around the manor house and church, which stood near the present-day junction of Wolverton Road with Old Church Lane. An Augustinian
priory was founded a mile and a half to the north-west, probably in the early 13th century. Elsewhere, the surroundings were
mostly empty heathland, later known as Stanmore Common. Perhaps because of the Black Death, the old village was abandoned
and a new settlement grew up to the north, on the Uxbridge road, where the Church of St John the Evangelist was consecrated
in 1632 by Archbishop Laud. Beginning with Stanmore Park in the 1720s, several very grand houses were either newly built or
greatly enlarged from existing properties. Bentley Priory was built in the 1766 on the site of the Augustinian priory, and
remodelled in the 1790s by Sir John Soane for the eccentric James Hamilton, later the Marquess of Abercorn. Public houses
were licensed in various locations across the parish, including the Abercorn Arms in 1803. The village itself remained little
changed until the 1820s, when substantial villas began to cluster around the church and manor house. Meanwhile, the rebuilding
of mansions continued, notably Stanmore Hall in the late 1840s, when a new St John’s Church was built in the same churchyard
as its namesake. In the 1880s Frederick Gordon converted Bentley Priory into a grand but not very successful hotel, and established
a railway company that built a line to Stanmore. More villas followed and Stanmore Golf Club was founded in 1893. In 1925
the Air Ministry bought Bentley Priory and it became the Royal Air Force’s Fighter Command Headquarters during World
War II. Modern suburban development began after the construction of the Metropolitan Railway (later the Bakerloo and now the
Jubilee Line) in 1932.
|
