Green Oak Park Buildings
Mona Villas (37-39 Lemont Road) and Green Oak Park bowling green buildings in 2010
Maya, aged 10, asked us what the old buildings next to the bowling green in Green Oak Park were used for. It is an interesting question and one that we have not been asked before.
Green Oak Park or Totley Recreation Ground, as it was originally called, was opened on 23 March 1929 by Mrs Sarah Milner, who lived at Totley Hall. There is a photograph of the opening day ceremony below. The park was on land that had been bought by the local Council from John Thomas Carr, a farmer and smallholder who lived at Mona Villas. In those days, of course, Totley was in Derbyshire and was part of Norton Rural District Council, along with places like Bradway, Greenhill and Beauchief.
Mrs Sarah Milner O.B.E. declares Totley Recreation Ground open, 23 March 1929. Left to right: Colin Thompson, James Gledhill, Sarah Milner, ?, Mr Wells, Charlie Swift, Frank Cook, J. R. Rodgers, Len Marcroft.
The Council bought over 8 acres of land made up of two large fields which were called Red Wells and Gilling Storth, together with a 285 square yard plot of land which provided access to the park for vehicles and equipment from Lemont Road. The bowling green was not constructed until Spring 1956 although other sports like football and cricket took place in the park from soon after it was opened.
The simple answer to Maya's question is that the buildings were used by the members of the Green Oak Bowling Club. We have some floor plans which show us what they were used for. The main building had ladies' and gentlemen's changing rooms and toilets, an office and a "mess room" with a kitchen sink, where drinks would be made and food prepared. The smaller building was used as an office and a store for equipment. It would have had filing cabinets to keep club records and accounts. There was also a third building which was used partly as an office and storeroom and partly as a garage. No doubt they kept their mowing machine and other gardening equipment in there. That has now been demolished.
Why were there three offices? One of them is in the demolished building and would have originally been a garage. Another would have been for the park keeper. Most public parks had a keeper and published opening times which changed with the season. The park keeper would have locked the park gates at dusk and opened them again in the morning. The park keeper would also have been responsible for the maintenance of the park and for scheduling bookings for the football and cricket pitches. Harry Bellamy was appointed park keeper at Green Oak
Park in 1951 and he and his family lived at first in a prefab before moving into a permanent home on Aldam Road. Harry remained in post until his death in 1970 at the early age of 52. His son, Clive, has been searching for a photograph of Harry, in his park keeper's uniform for many years. If you have any old photos of the park that might show Harry in his uniform, please get in touch with us.
However, if that is the simple answer, there is also a more complicated answer and one that we have not yet fully investigated. There is a lot of interest at the moment in the early days of Lemont Road. Tracing "the history of my house through time" has become a popular topic for research. We know from maps drawn by the Ordnance Survey and from land ownership records that the whole of this area was known as Green Oak and was pasture land until the 1870s. Mickley Lane had existed for a long time but Lemont Road had not yet been built. It was just a track across the fields.
The first houses on the road were probably Hawthorn Cottages, on the corner of Lemont Road and Mickley Lane (numbers 2, 4 and 6) which are dated with a plaque showing the year 1876. The three houses on the opposite corner, numbered 1 Lemont Road and 18 and 20 Mickley Lane, were built at much the same time. By the time the Ordnance Survey got around to mapping the area in 1896 most of the houses on the south (now park) side of the road had been built except for two gaps where numbers 19-25 (Moorland View) and 37-39 (Mona Villas) would later fit. However, the 1896 map shows some buildings next to number 33, in plot number 35, where the entrance to the park would be later.
If we move on to the next map we have, made in 1915, all the houses on the south side of the road have been built but there is a gap where number 35 would be and there are some buildings away from the roadside jutting into the field and a smaller separate building roughly where our small building would be. So could it be that they enlarged the older building (built before 1897) and built a second smaller building before 1915? We have one extra piece of evidence - a photograph.
Green Oak, Totley
Few people before the 1930s would have had their own camera and so picture postcards became a cheap and popular way of showing others where you lived or were visiting. We have a picture postcard taken from high up on Bradway Bank looking down across the fields towards the back of Lemont Road. Main Avenue can be seen in the distance at the top left. The houses in the bottom right corner (Brook Terrace and Glover House) were at the junction of Glover Road and Mickley Lane and have now been demolished.
Below is an enlargement of the area where our two buildings now stand. It is quite hard to see as the picture is rather blurred but there are buildings jutting out into the field. The trouble is they don't look much like the ones that are there today or even like the ones in the old maps. We can also see perhaps hen-houses or pig styes in the field near our buildings. The postcard was not sent, so we don't have a precise date for it but from the surrounding buildings and other postcards produced by the same company, it could be taken around 1926-28. It must be before 1929 as the park has not been created but after the Green Oak Labour Hall (now Heatherfield Hall) was built on Baslow Road in 1925.
Top end of Lemont Road, Totley
So we are beginning to form a picture where the original building (perhaps erected in the 1890s) has been modified not once but possibly several times over the years.
What do we see if we look at the back of the building? We have a photograph from the Lemont Road entrance taken in 2013. It appears to show that all the brickwork is not the same. It looks older on the left, the bricks are darker and the mortar is more worn, newer on the section behind the sign for gentlemen and more modern still in the section between the two. That might tie in with our floor plan. There could have been two buildings that were later connected together. It is beginning to look like the ladies changing room and toilets were added later and, finally, walls built around the entrances to the toilets to provide more privacy.
Rear of the main park building in 2013
The older, darker, part of the building, nearest Lemont Road has an entrance door with letter box, a wider cart door and a hatch above a modern window. Before the window was added, the cart door would have been higher. If this block had been built when the fields were being used for grazing, it would probably have been built to stable animals, or garage farm carts, with a hay loft above.
June 2020