It's about time I visited an unsung suburb in Sutton, London's most unsung borough. And this one's really off-radar, despite having several distinct parts and covering up to two square miles. You'll find Woodcote south of Wallington, west of Purley and north of Coulsdon amid a rural fringe most Londoners can't even comprehend. The main nucleus is Woodcote Green but there's also Upper Woodcote (which the Ordnance Survey annotates as Woodcote), the outlier of Little Woodcote and a heck of a lot of roads called Woodcote Something, also no pubs and hardly any pre-20th century buildings. Let's see what I can find.
Woodcote Green does indeed have a green and it's triangular in shape (very much scalene, largest angle about 110). The shortest side is part of the main road between Carshalton and Coulsdon, thus quite busy, while the hypotenuse is lined by well-spaced detached houses. An awful lot of Woodcote is occupied by "well-spaced detached houses", and at the very least its residents get a broad semi with a decent-sized garden. The green has everything you'd expect - moulting trees, dog mess bins and the remains of a seven-stick Sky Master rocket propped up in a litter bin, no doubt left over from a guerilla display at the weekend. Unusually it also has a WW2 air raid shelter in one corner, its bricked up entrance still intact and with a very obvious flattened hump evident in the grass beyond.
The green also has a very informative information board, which is just as well because Wikipedia's page on Woodcote Green is only two sentences long and otherwise the history of this place would be a mystery. There was a village here in 1332, the steamed-up text says, which at the time was larger than Wallington. But by 1586 the village had vanished and no traces remain, with what's now the green just a triangular field. Even the arrival of a railway at Wallington a mile to the north failed to spur development, other than a brief terrace of Edwardian council houses by the green, until in the 1920s rustic avenues swallowed up acres of farmland and merged into the adjacent towns. It probably doesn't help with local identity that Sutton council have erected a huge sign at the tip of the green but instead of Welcome to Woodcote Green it says Welcome to Wallington.
The dominant buildings here belong to Wallington High School for Girls which moved here in 1965 and which is now 20-times oversubscribed, so they must be doing something excellent. Come while they're in lessons and it's extremely quiet but time things for late afternoon and I imagine a throng of dark green blazers heads across the road to Woodcote Green's sole corner shop. A sign demands no more than three pupils enter at a time, but also demands they "strictly keep a distance from each other" because its been sellotaped to the door since lockdown. Other local sights include half a quaint cottage that appears to be in rapid decay, a shifted horse trough and an MOT-friendly garage that acted as an auxiliary fire station during WW2. I feel I'm scraping the barrel somewhat here.
↖ To find the oldest building hereabouts head north towards Wallington and turn off down Woodcote Avenue. The well-spaced detached houses eventually reach a maroon sign proclaiming that the remainder of the loop is a private road, and absolutely definitely no learner drivers. On the back it additionally warns that "the Woodcote Avenue Road Fund accept no responsibility for damage or injury caused by this sign" which is a level of litigative paranoia I'm not used to seeing writ large. The first building is Woodcote Hall, formerly one of the country seats of the Carews of Beddington, for many centuries the local landowning nobility. The latest incarnation alas isn't medieval, it's two Georgian stucco properties joined in the centre by a later extension and since converted to 14 flats, so nothing to walk out of your way for.
↘ Another post-Carew nucleus was Great Woodcote Farm, this to the southeast off Foxley Lane. I can tell you that in 1859 it comprised 622 acres, that its Edwardian owner helped found Purley Cricket Club, that in 1931 a ‘cat burglar’ made off with a £1000 haul of jewellery and furs. During WW2 it was also the HQ of Field Consolidated Aircraft Services Ltd, being highly convenient for Croydon Airport. However the farmhouse then became uninhabitable while its land was turned over to housing, and if you turn up at the corner of Farm Road and The Ridge today all you'll find are well-spaced detached houses and broad semis with a decent-sized garden. Half-timbered gables are extremely popular, also topiary services probably pay well, and if anything the apartment block on the farmhouse's footprint is the least impressive building of all.
↙ Little Woodcote is a completely different matter, still mostly undeveloped in favour of lowly agricultural usage. Surrey County Council created smallholdings here after the Great War to create employment for returning soldiers, buying up land previously used for the growing of lavender and peppermint. Construction began in 1920, and 79 cottages were built (total cost £87,875), each with a few acres of land. Somewhat unexpectedly these weatherboarded semi-detached beauties are still here, if mostly no longer used for their original purpose, and to walk its crisscross of tracks is to step back into a twitchy backwater of microbusinesses and scrappy paddocks. I wrote about Little Woodcote in 2017 so didn't re-explore fully this time, but if you were ever to visit stick it in your top three sights to see.
← What I did do is walk down Woodmansterne Lane to the first of the nurseries, Woodcote Green being the south London equivalent of Crews Hill. It's a Dobbies and once you've finally crossed the car park it turns out to be vast, also very much not just a garden centre. I wandered in past shelves of yarn and jigsaws, also a rack of sparkly personalised tote bags, also knitted welly socks and a special offer 20% reduction on branded wellingtons. The food hall stocked giftable chutneys and a display of Diddly Squat wines, beyond which an illuminated village was helping to flog collectible Bavarian miniatures. It felt more like I was up in Norfolk than on the edge of zone 5. But what really took my breath away were the restaurant and cafe which were both mostly full, despite it only being elevenses and still too early for a Cumberland Sausage Ring. This it turns out is the beating heart of Woodcote Green, its community centre and economic heart combined, because who needs any other village facilities when you've got a Dobbies?
↲ I had one more old building to try to visit and that was Woodcote Grove, an unswallowed country house once the abode of the Campbell-Johnstons. To get there I followed the entirety of Woodcote Park Avenue, lined initially by some of the most exceptional well-spaced detached houses, even by Woodcote standards. On the first bend the tarmac runs out and the road becomes an unmade track entering a tunnel of yellowing leaves, running alongside a field in which Dogs Must Not Be Exercised. Four other exclusive avenues join at intervals, as desirably peripheral as London gets without tipping over into gated hell. Over the hedge is a patch of privatised allotments, a company called Roots taking advantage of Sutton's four year waiting list, complete with central teepee. Finally at the end of what feels like a country lane is yet another big secondary school, that's Woodcote High, also a recreation ground so unloved the welcome sign's disappeared. And turn right.
↲ At the top of Meadow Hill is Woodcote Park Golf Club, founded in 1912 and with a splendid monogram above what used to be the clubhouse door. The course has eight flat holes to the south, ten sloping holes to the north and an obliging membership who enjoy a civilised circuit before retiring to the Captain's Lounge. A farm track leads past a row of tractors to the entrance of Orford House care home, which it turns out is what Woodcote Grove was ultimately repurposed as, and far enough up the drive to be entirely inaccessible. It's just one of Woodcote's scattering of peripheral oddities, easily overlooked amid a blanket of well-spaced detached houses, indeed easily overlooked altogether. And I haven't even mentioned the most extraordinary Woodcote of all which is Upper Woodcote, a reclusive beauty that needs an entire post of its own...
