A visitor to Merstham is unlikely to be aware that the village has any great antiquity so completely has its past been overlaid with the present. Yet its name is Saxon and perhaps originally described the "dwelling of the people of the marsh".
In The Old Road, Hilaire Belloc described the ancient high road along the North Downs linking the two religious centres of Winchester and Canterbury, and how Merstham was one of the few watering holes similar to Mickleham or Caterham en route.
Battle Bridge appears on the earliest map of Merstham. Local folklore maintained a Viking raid was repelled there, based on an unverified local account of old swords being found. There is, however, archaeological evidence of a late iron age and early Roman farmstead with some later Saxon deposits. Tragically, a parachute mine landed on Battlebridge Lane in a much later conflict and destroyed All Saints’ Church.
The first documentary evidence of Merstham’s existence was once thought to be a copy of a charter granting land there to Chertsey Abbey in AD 675. However, the monks of Chertsey were notorious for forging or heavily ‘improving’ their own early history. The supposed charter dated 727 may in reality have been written after 947 to contest the grant of Merstham by King Eadred to his thegn Oswig.
An original copy of Eadred’s Merstham Charter Bounds (947) survives. It referred to Merstham as Mearsoetham and the marsh dwelling people who lived there were known as the 'Mearsoeti'. At this time habitation and farming was concentrated on a short length of the Merstham Gatton boundary. It was a man-made landscape of small farm homesteads surrounded by their own arable and pasture enclosures. One enclosure name tunles weorp survives as Tollsworth farm, on the boundary of Merstham with Chaldon.
By the time of the Domesday Book, Merstham’s name had been simplified to Merstan. The land was held by the Archbishop of Canterbury and its rental income helped clothe the monks of Christchurch, Canterbury.
‘In Chercefelle Hundred the Archbishop himself holds Merstan for the clothing of monks. There is a church and a mill worth thirty pence, 8 acres of meadow, 16 acres grazing for pigs.' The property of Merstham in the Chercefelle Hundred was recorded as five hides, which would have been approximately five hundred acres and valued at twelve pounds. The Lord's rent was set at 25 fat hogs and 16 lean hogs. There were 21 villagers, 4 smallholders and 8 slaves.
Merstham’s church, St Katharine’s, later benefited from the increase in pilgrim traffic that followed the murder and subsequent martyrdom of Thomas a Becket in 1170. This contributed to the expansion and building of the church’s chancel.
The mill mentioned in the Domesday Book was a watermill, located in the low-lying valley and fed by a large mill pond (little of which survives)
This stream which fed the millpond rose at “Wellhead” near Marlin Glen, just off Gatton Bottom and was known as the Merstham Brook (a tributary of the River Mole).
The watermill, shown close to the church in this illustration, was in use through the 19th century, falling into complete disrepair before being demolished in 1938. It was effectively subsumed by the M25 motorway cutting.
Brook Road sits directly along the southward trajectory where the Merstham Brook historically flowed toward the rest of the village and is a reminder of the stream that once flowed south from there.
There was also a windmill built in the eighteenth century on the elevated ridge looking down on the village and watermill, seen in the background of this painting of Colonel Jolliffe’s hounds.
The mill was demolished in1896, during the construction of the ‘Redhill avoiding line’ (Quarry Line) by the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway.
Merstham Manor was held by Christchurch, Canterbury until the Dissolution of the Monasteries caused its breakup. Merstham Manor House was near St Katharine’s church. It was the principal manor of the area but from at least the 14th century there had been a sub manor, Albury Manor, further south in what is now South Merstham. Albury Manor had its own separate financial economy, collecting its own agricultural yields, mill fees, and tenant rents. Albury Manor House was a moated house at Albury Farm, next to the modern Moat House Surgery in Worsted Green.
Following the Dissolution, Merstham Manor passed to Sir Robert Southwell, Master of the Rolls and was held by the Southwells until 1569. It then was owned in succession by the Copleys, the Hedges and from 1678, Sir John Southcote, whose family had owned Albury Manor. Albury passed with the rest of the Merstham estate to William Jolliffe in 1788. The Jolliffes retained Merstham until the twentieth century.
William Jolliffe was a rich MP from Petersfield who purchased the Merstham estate and manor for £40,000. Over the next two centuries, the family developed local stone and limestone quarries, backed the building of a railway and turnpike road to exploit them and became prominent landowners.
William Jolliffe built a grand residence known as Merstham House between Quality Street and Gatton Bottom.
From the late 19th century the house was let out, used by Canadian forces during World War II, and was eventually demolished in the 1950s. Some of the grounds are now crossed by the M25.
The present Merstham House and grounds, formerly known as the Cottage, were built by the Rev. William Jolliffe on what had been the former road through Merstham, south west of the church.
When the Jolliffes arrived in Merstham, the hills to the north of the village were covered with open-pit chalk pits and ancient stone quarries. Merstham lies on the upper greensand and its stone and chalk may have been quarried before the Norman Conquest.
Around 1803, William’s son Colonel Hylton Jolliffe and his brother the Reverend William Jolliffe went into partnership with the civil engineer Edward Banks to increase commercial exploitation of local building stone, chalk pits, and lime works. Jolliffe and Banks completely industrialized and scaled up the existing operation to feed the rapid growth of London.
Merstham stone’s quality as freestone, which has virtually no grain and splits fairly easily in all directions, made it suitable for decorative carving and it had been exploited since the Middle Ages, helped by being the nearest source of building stone to London.
Chalk had been dug from the North Downs since early times to make agricultural lime (used to neutralize acidic fields and improve their fertility) and basic building mortar. However, chalk extraction and lime burning was highly fragmented, localized, and seasonal. The Jolliffes replaced temporary structures with permanent, large-scale industrial kilns capable of continuous firing.
However, transporting the stone, chalk and processed lime still relied entirely on traditional packhorses and wooden carts navigating deeply rutted, muddy lanes. To make the most of these valuable raw materials the partnership needed to solve the transport bottleneck.
The Jolliffes heavily backed the construction of the Croydon, Merstham and Godstone Iron Railway in 1805. By laying a horse-drawn plateway directly into the Merstham chalk and stone quarry pits they bypassed the muddy roads entirely. A single horse could now pull wagons laden with tons of lime and stone all the way to Croydon, where a canal that operated 1809-1836 connected Croydon to the Thames. The train line followed the easier gradients through the Merstham gap and its cuttings can still be made out beside London Road North.
‘It is extremely fortunate that it is directed through the very valuable quarries of Lime Stone at Merstham, superior in quality for waterproof lime to either that of Guildford or Dorking.’William Jessop, founding engineer
Before the arrival of road and rail, the village did not have the winding, "S-shaped" curve seen on the modern main road. The entire village stretched along one single, straight street running from School Hill northwards through Quality Street up the chalk escarpment through Marling Glen and Harps Oak. This was the early haulage way for moving stone north from the Merstham and Gatton quarries. Southwards, the road ran to Nutfield, with a spur east via Worsted Green to Bletchingley.
Rocque’s Map of Surrey in 1762 shows the old route through Merstham village running along the west side of St Katharine’s whereas the modern A23 runs to the east of it. You can make out the church and the watermill on his map.
Merstham House and grounds lay on this old road, south west of the church.
The current road layout that runs to the east of St Katharine’s dates from the construction of a new turnpike road in 1807. It was built to avoid Reigate Hill, to accommodate the smoother gradient required for stage coaches. This road ran via Wray Common to Reigate to join the old turnpike south but a further turnpike was built in 1816 to pass through Redhill, becoming the main London to Brighton Road. These turnpikes were not built without a fight. Reigate trustees and sympathetic landowners blocked its construction for years, fearing a loss of traffic for the Reigate route.
Apart from taking traffic from the Reigate turnpike the new roads also brought trade to the Merstham railhead. Fullers earth from Nutfield was carried in wagons each drawing from three to four tons, to the beginning of the iron railway near Merstham.
The old horse drawn railway line was made obsolete by the opening of the London & Brighton Railway in 1841, on which steam locomotives hauled passenger carriages as well as goods wagons.
Merstham station was initially sited on the edge of Gatton Park, (¾ mile south of the current position), entirely to suit the landowner Lord Monson as part of the deal to run the railway line over his land. This station survived for just less than three years when it was replaced by a new station, on the present site in the village, in 1844.
Towards the end of the 19th Century, Jeremiah Colman who had bought the Gatton estate, sold land to the east of the railway to Robert Nicol, who owned a department store in Redhill. He developed Dean and Albury Roads off Nutfield Road and included communal tennis courts and a bowling green on what is now Melton Road. South Merstham became a new parish, carved out of both Merstham and Gatton parishes, with All Saints church at its centre. A local brickworks was established at the southern end of South Merstham, the excavations creating a lake beside what is now Bourne Road.
The architect, Paxton Watson developed Rockshaw Road, Church Hill and London Road South, including a new school building in the same “Arts and Craft” style. These Edwardian houses were typically bought up by City commuters who would walk down to the station each weekday morning. The 1911 census listed 2,558 persons (excluding the Netherne asylum which was then part of the parish). That year the village got its own telephone exchange with only 43 lines.
After the second World War, many Londoners were left homeless after four years of bombardment. The London County Council set about establishing satellite developments to house them. It bought Worsted Green, the farmland either side of the Bletchingley Road, and by 1952 had built 1,560 new homes there with their own pub, shops, schools and two churches, The Epiphany and St Teresa’s. While Furzefield School remains, the pub, post office and The Epiphany church went when Portland Drive was later redeveloped to provide the current configuration.
The arrival of the M23 and M25 Motorways had a dramatic effect on Merstham. The ancient parish church of St Katharine’s was severed from its village and Quarry Dean Farm and some large properties at the end of Rockshaw Road were destroyed.
Yet Merstham remains an attractive and convenient base for its 7,000 residents with a railway link to the heart of London, ready access to the two motorways and proximity to Redhill and Reigate for secondary education, restaurants, entertainment and shopping.
Early medieval Surrey, Landholding Church and settlement, John Blair, (1991)
Surrey Archaeological Society, Bulletin 340 (July 2000)
https://www.surreyarchaeology.org.uk/system/files/SAS340_0.pdf
Open Domesday https://opendomesday.org/place/XX0000/merstham-and-south-merstham/
Disused Stations Site record: http://disused-stations.org.uk/m/merstham_first/index.shtml
Water colour of St Katharine’s Church, John Hassell (1821), SHC Ref No: PX/101/21, copyright Surrey History Centre. Later alterations (in 1861 and 1875) changed the appearance of the building. Reproduced by permission of Surrey History Centre.
Image of St Katharine’s Church and Cutting, Thomas Allom, A Topographical History of Surrey” by Edward Wedlake Brayley, published between 1841 and 1848.
Hounds of Colonel Hylton Jolliffe of Merstham House, Surrey with Merstham Church and Mill beyond, Dean Wolstenholme, Sen.
John Roque’s Map of Surrey (1762)
Surrey’s Industrial Past https://www.surreyarchaeology.org.uk/sites/default/files/aspects16.pdf
Image of Motorway interchange between the M25 and M23 motorways in Surrey, England. The M25 (lowest level) is running across the centre of the image and the M23 (uppermost level) curves from bottom right to top left. (2014), Mike McBey
A Historical Guide to Merstham, Kevin Austen