Stonecot Hill (A24),
corner of Sutton Common Road,
Sutton, Surrey

The Woodstock public house occupies the south-west corner of the junction where Sutton Common Road meets the main London to Dorking road, the A24, which follows the route of the Roman Stane Street. The site itself has a commanding position, being at the crest of a rise, and any property built here in the mid-nineteenth century would have had a very pleasant panoramic view of the surrounding countryside, which was predominantly rural. According to the Sutton Tithe Map of 1840, the surrounding plots were meadowland, pasture, and arable.

By 1840 a house and outbuildings, with a garden which included a small strip of woodland, had been built and was owned and lived in by an Edward Arthur De Graves and his family.

The house had been considerably enlarged and an ornamental lake had appeared next to the woodland by the time of the first Ordnance Survey map of 1866. The owner at this time was a William Palmer, who had called the enlarged property ‘Stone Cot House’. The Palmer family continued to live there until Mrs. Palmer sold the estate, presumably after her husband’s death, some time between 1876 and 1879 to a J. Jackson. Jackson renamed the house, ‘Woodstock’, possibly to avoid any confusion with a nearby house, further west along the main road and much older than Woodstock, which was called ‘Stonecot Hill’ (later changed to ‘Stonecot Hall’).

The ownership of the house and grounds had changed again to a W. Lough by 1896, and the Lough family remained there until after Mr. Lough’s death, when it was bought around 1912 by John Corfield, who stayed in possession of the house, which was described as a ‘mansion’, until its sale and demolition in 1934.

An application was lodged to demolish Woodstock and build a "modern licensed premises" with a large car park, by the Royal Brewery, Brentford, in 1933, at the same time as G. Crouch, a developer, applied to Sutton & Cheam Council for permission to build 110 houses in the grounds of the Woodstock estate. Although there was opposition to these plans by various people including the Sutton Common Residents’ Association, after amendment Mr. Crouch the developer got the go-ahead to build, although the Brewery had to wait another year to get full permission for their redevelopment.

According to a newspaper report, by February 1934 the mansion was an"eyesore", and the house was eventually demolished later that year. A large pub with a garden, a separate off-licence, and big car park, was erected on the site, finally opening in March 1935. The off-licence had been built on the site of the former stables, but some time during the 1960s this was sold off and is now a carpet showroom.

The most remarkable feature of the newly-built pub was the retention of the decorated plaster ceiling from the drawing room of the old mansion. This was carefully preserved during the demolition, and then inserted into the new building as a special feature. The local paper at the time remarked how its "foundations are in the ceiling". The pub itself has undergone various refurbishments, particularly in the last thirty years, but the ceiling from the old mansion is still in situ, although there is much less of the decorated plaster left now than in 1935.

The last remaining boundary walls of the old Woodstock estate were removed about fifteen years ago. The only other trace of the old mansion is a magnificent Mediterranean oak tree, originally one of a pair, still standing outside the pub, on the front boundary overhanging the pavement next to the main road. The tree is estimated by Sutton’s tree expert to be around 150 years old. Several residential roads such as Woodstock Rise, Hill Top, and Chatham Close now cover the grounds of the Woodstock estate.

Several popular myths exist about The Woodstock, and the house it replaced. Some people have heard that the former mansion was an ancient manor house, and a set of stocks outside were used for punishing recalcitrant villagers. There were indeed some stocks outside the front of the pub during the 1960s and 1970s, facing Stonecot Hill. These were placed there during one of the refurbishments, presumably because of the name ‘Woodstock’. The old hanging inn sign also used to show a man in the stocks.

The legend of the manor house can be disproved with a quick glance at the Enclosure Map of 1815, which shows that, even if there had ever been a building on that site, it certainly was not there at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Also the manorial records relating to Sutton and its surrounding area show no trace of any manor based near Sutton Common Road.

However the appearance both of the exterior and interior of the old house, which was demolished in 1934, was until recently a total mystery. It is not noted in Charles Marshall’s History of Sutton and Cheam, which was first published in 1936, even though it had only recently disappeared, and he mentions several other large houses that had been pulled down over the previous couple of decades. There are no known photographs of the house in the 20,000-plus collection belonging to Sutton Heritage Service, nor any paintings, prints or drawings of it. Perhaps because it was only built in the nineteenth century and had no illustrious occupants, Marshall and his contemporaries did not think it of importance to record.

The exterior of The Woodstock public house is of the style usually described as 1930s ‘road houses’, built at a time when motoring out on day trips from Central London was a recreation of the middle and upper classes, who needed refreshment en route. Many similar buildings can be seen on all the main arterial routes out of London. The unique feature of the building is hidden until you walk through into the bar called the ‘Garden Room’ and see the highly decorative moulded plaster ceiling in Jacobean style.

The Woodstock pub is built of standard red bricks laid in English bond, with a thin brick plinth, with decorative features also of brick, excluding the stone window sills and the curved stone steps outside the French windows of the ‘Garden Room’. The string course consists of six rows of headers, with a row of stretchers placed vertically above. The doors and windows have architraves of vertical stretchers, and all the doors have rows of protruding thin tiles as a type of cornice set into the bottom of the string course. The sides of the doorcases are marked by a row of horizontal stretchers. All the windows are of sash construction.

The tiled pitched roof has deep Italianate eaves, with what appear to be wooden corbels. The chimneys rise well above the roof, with protruding brick bays rising the height of the facade. Just above the eaves, the chimneystack on the east side narrows with shaped shoulders reminiscent of Dutch gabling. The rest of the chimneys are plain, cutting through the roof line approximately two-thirds of the way up.

The curved exterior wall of the ‘Garden Room’, the only area of curved brickwork, is in header bond, which is mainly employed for its decorative effect, but is also in demand for curved walls and engineering work, due to its great strength. Note that all the windows are also curved, as are the French windows. These lead outside into the garden by a set of curved stone steps with an iron handrail, the verticals of which are set into the steps. The top step is marked with radiating grooves, presumably to avoid any hazard of slipping if the stone is wet.

Looking up at the eaves from outside the ‘Garden Room’, you can see that between the corbels are panels with circular motifs. There is no evidence to suggest that the exterior wall of this room is any older than the rest of the building. However the unusual semi-circular bay was dictated by the design of the ceiling taken originally from Woodstock mansion’s drawing room, since on the left-hand side of the original mansion there was a semi-circular bay of the same shape and size.

The Function Room was probably the Children’s Room when the pub was first built, which was designed to be completely separate from the rest of the licensed premises, with its own entrance. Originally the interior was divided into several bars, for different clientele, for example, a Public Bar, Saloon Bar, Lounge Bar and Private Bar. Various renovations have altered the shape and layout of many of the bars, but due to the incorporation of a specific ceiling, the ‘Garden Room’ probably only changed the colour of its appearance, rather than anything more structural.

The plaster decoration consists of a highly moulded deep curved cornice, with a border of moulded decoration around the edges of the ceiling, and a central shape, something between an oval and a diamond, containing the same type of moulded decoration, around the central light fitting. At the bottom of the cornice there is a row of high relief palmettes. Above these is a projecting moulding, running around the whole room, and above this ‘rail’ is the main design. This consists of circular loops of acanthus leaves, each main circle culminating in a rosette. The whole area is concave, but with high relief designs. Where the room has angles, i.e. at the chimney breast and the corners, there are full height large acanthus leaves. In the centre of each wall is a motif consisting of two birds holding a twig or branch in one claw, facing each other, with a classical style urn with a rose above in the centre, between the two birds.

Several regular customers of The Woodstock remember the ceiling as it was in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was painted gold and white, and moulded decoration covered the entire ceiling, rather than the borders and central shape that now remains. It was then called the Lounge Bar, and there were apparently two chandeliers, one large and the other smaller, plus a large wall clock, all taken away at the same time. The loss of the majority of the moulded decoration is believed to be due to a serious water leak from the flat above in the late 1960s or early 1970s