DID YOU KNOW?

The Church of the Ascension By Simon Reed

In 2009 the Anglican Parish Church of the Ascension in Beaufort Road will be seventy years old. Designed by Seeley and Paget, a different firm of architects from those who were responsible for the Haymills Estate, the foundation stone was laid on Sunday 19th March 1939, and the building consecrated as a place of worship for the new parish on Sunday 23rd July 1939.

 

Designed in a modern style in keeping with the rest of the estate, the plain brick exterior with its unusual curved east end conceals a light and airy interior whose clear glass windows allow the full brightness of the sun to illuminate the building. The eye is drawn immediately to the large wooden statue of Jesus, Mary and John which tops the central arch. Christ is depicted in kingly robes, standing in front of the cross, symbolising his free choice to undergo suffering in order to overcome evil and death. The statue was added in 1946 as a war memorial.

The church community hopes to mark this anniversary with a project to create a hospitality area in the rear of the church that will make the building more versatile (for example when it hosts the HHERA AGM!) and to re-roof the church hall, which is used by many local people and groups

Ritz Parade bu Robert Gurd

Ritz Parade is named after the former Ritz Cinema which stood on the site from 1938 until 1983. The cinema was designed by Major William King for London & District Cinemas but became an Odeon cinema after the war. It ended its days as the Paradise Cinema showing Asian films. In between, it operated as a part-time bingo hall and a cinema club showing risqué movies. The entrance was in the centre of a parade of shops and was dominated by a large brick tower that had inlaid glass tiles which were lit from within and topped by a glass lantern light.

The cinema was demolished following a period of dereliction after it closed in 1980. No pictures of the interior are known but local residents plucked the old projectors and a few light fittings from the derelict building during the demolition process. It was replaced by Orbit House office block -- a rather featureless red brick affair which does no favours to the area. This building has now received planning permission to be converted into an apart-hotel.

The Life and Times of Boileau Road by Michael Black

Go back more than 100 years, to August 13, 1904, and stand outside North Ealing Station. The station, built on the site of Hanger Lane Farm, is just over a year old and was opened last June by the Metropolitan District Railway for its line to South Harrow. Around you are fields, though you can make out the newish houses in Madeley Road and a few at the southern part of Hanger Lane – but this is mostly a country lane leading up to the Hanger Hill woodlands. A motorcar chugs up the hill towards the wood, watched by a solitary stroller taking a short rest under the trees, on the wooden fence edging the road. About 50 yards right ahead of you is another line of trees – could they be oaks? – and a few grazing cows, and beyond, the boundary of the golf course. You have brought along that day’s Middlesex County Times and you open it at page 5, where the death of Edward Wood in Shropshire is reported. The Wood family, since the late 1700s, has owned a great amount of land in Ealing and Acton, more than 700 acres, and with Edward’s death the estate will fall to the surviving, younger son, Charles Peevor Boileau Wood: Charles’ mother was Isabella Annie Boileau, of Ealing, hence this part of his name. The Boileau family in England and Ireland were prominent Huguenot refugees of the 17^th century. 

Go forward now to 1906. Charles has sold the land that you looked over in 1904 making way for its development for residential purposes. The first road is soon planned and to mark the original landowner it is registered as Boileau Road, continuing the practice of naming roads in Ealing after the Wood family. The line of trees that was there in 1904 will have to be sacrificed, as they lie almost on the route of Boileau Road, which will run parallel to the railway track.

Boileau Road first enters the records in the street directory for 1912, but it is likely that it existed in 1911 when data were collected. The builders did most of their early work on the western side of the road (the odd numbers): so by 1912 numbers 1-27 were inhabited, and only the solitary number 2 on the other side. Numbers 2-18 were occupied by 1913 but there had been no further construction on the ‘odd’ side. Houses were gradually added and occupied - except in the last years of the Great War and immediately afterwards when there was a break for two years - until all houses were built and with residents in 1923/24. 

At the Hanger Vale Lane end, the road departed from the line of the railway to leave a plot of land on which lock-up garages were erected in 1924/25. Attention shifted back to the station end of the road when a large building was put up, listed in 1927 as The Ealing Car Agency (on the site of the present Balcon Court).

A firm of builders, Kendalls, erected the garages, and possibly also was responsible for the whole of the road. Several features of the Edwardian houses, many of which survive, indicate that the homes were intended for gentlemen and gentlewomen of the middle classes. The halls of most houses had ceramic tiles, and in the larger, older houses, rather impressive columns. Pattern books or catalogues were in vogue in 1910 from which prospective house buyers could choose tiles, stained glass and fireplaces. Indeed, some existing fireplaces in the houses are very similar to ones shown in the books: so it is possible that house fittings were at least partly customised to the owner's choice. Each living room had a bell-push by the fireplace, which, with the one for tradesmen by the back gate, was linked with a cabinet of bells mounted on the kitchen wall. Here worked the servant, ready to be summoned by bells, to attend to the requirements of the master or mistress, and to take delivery from the coalman at the back door. Residents were predominantly professionals – engineers, teachers, musicians, and at least one writer.

In its history, Boileau Road has had its adrenalin boosted by danger and excitement. At about 2.30 am on September 26, 1942, a bomb fell on number 94 but fortunately it failed to explode: there was some damage but no casualties. Later in that year, in early morning of November 14, a land mine exploded in mid-air over the station end of Boileau Road, slightly damaging several houses and blowing out the windows in Queens Parade shops. Almost exactly forty-five years on, in October 1987, Boileau Road was struck again, this time by the storm which tore along the road, uprooting almost all the lime trees that had stood for 60 years and more. Many houses and cars were damaged but one positive outcome was that residents were united in their horror of the disaster and exchanged words for the first time, even though they had been neighbours in the road for many years. Thus adversity makes brothers and sisters of us all!

The building of Boileau Road therefore initiated residential development in the area. Shortly after it was finished, in 1926 the freeholder Charles Wood sold the remainder of his Hanger Hill estate to Haymills Limited who started building (at the Hanger Lane end of Corringway) in 1928. The old golf clubhouse was pulled down in 1930, the club was wound up, and the Haymills Estate burgeoned. And just as Boileau Road was there at the birth of the Estate, it now sustains it, its bloodstream as it were, as its major point of entry and exit to the rest of Ealing.