Walthamstow house where William Morris born and Borwick family lived

Elm House was built in the early 19th century at a time when the area was a popular countryside retreat for wealthy city folk. The house stood in around three acres of grounds, and its garden front faced south onto a large lawn with a large mulberry tree surrounded by shrubs and kitchen gardens. There were also stables, and a meadow to the west. The adjacent Elm Lodge housed the successive gardeners and their families.

Plaque affixed to the wall of the fire station on Forest Road, opposite the site of Elm House

The Morris family moved from Lombard Street in London to Elm House in 1833. Emma and city broker William Morris senior already had two small children, Henrietta and Emma, and Walthamstow’s rural setting was the ideal place to raise a young family, yet close enough to London for William senior to commute daily. He used Wraggs Stagecoach, a service that departed from The Chequers public house on Marsh Street (now High Street) to the Green Dragon in Bishopsgate Street.

William Morris was born at Elm House on 24 March 1824, followed by Hugh in 1837 and Thomas in 1839. The growing family relocated to the larger Woodford Hall in 1840, before moving back to Clay Street (Forest Road) in 1848 to take up residence at Water House (William Morris Gallery) following the sudden death of William Morris senior in the previous year.

William Morris aged 23, published by Walker & Boutall in 1899. Picture: National Portrait Gallery, London

The Gibson family were the next to reside at Elm House. Charlotte and retired industrialist Thomas Gibson were a well-to-do couple in their sixties whose former residences included a fine town house in Canonbury Place, Islington. Their son, Thomas Field Gibson, his second wife Eliza, and Thomas’ young daughter Mary Anne from his first marriage also lived with them at Elm House. Thomas and Thomas Field were prominent silk manufacturers in Spitalfields, and were active Unitarians, believed that education was the key to a better society. As such they were proponents of political, economic and social reform, and supported several community programmes to improve the living and working conditions of the ‘industrial poor.’ Thomas Field was a founding Director of the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes, the first corporation to build relatively large-scale social housing, and was one of Prince Albert's Royal Commissioners behind Crystal Palace’s Great Exhibition of 1851. He was also a keen fossil hunter and made contributions to the field of geology.

1890's advert for Borwick's baking powder

In the 1860s and 70s Elm House was home to another manufacturing family, the Borwicks, most famously known for their world-renowned baking powder brand. The Borwicks had lived in Walthamstow for some years before moving to Elm House, having also resided in Blackhorse Lane and Marsh Street (now High Street). George Borwick in particular, was known locally as a charitable and good-natured chap, and supported several local institutions. Interestingly, their life at Elm House was as an extended family household, with recently married Eliza and George Borthwick, and two of George’s children from his first marriage, Robert and Joseph, as well as George’s brother-in-law Robert Hudson and his wife Emily.

The Hudsons hailed from West Bromwich, where Lancashire born George Borwick had worked as a teacher and had met and married Robert’s sister Jane. They had lived in a house on Blackhorse Lane, before moving to Marsh Street and then Elm House. Jane died in April 1868 and George married Eliza just a year later, making the Borwick-Hudson household set-up at Elm House rather an unusual one.

Ordnance Survey map extract, surveyed in 1863

Robert was a successful manufacturing chemist who had produced the first successful commercial soap powder in 1837. A relocation to London in the 1840s involved George Borwick working as a wholesale agent for Hudson, selling his washing and bleaching powder and also a new baking powder. Hudson gifted the latter’s formula to Borwick, and after several years of perfecting the product, manufacturing premises were established, and sales boomed, averaging between 12 and 14 thousand pounds a year between 1845 and 1857. The product was sold in Walthamstow Market as well as being supplied to retail premises around the country. Its unprecedented success led to the relocation to larger manufacturing premises in Finsbury, and in the following year George’s sons Robert and Joseph joined the company, renamed as Borwick & Sons. Robert Borwick was later knighted, in 1902, and was created 1st Baron Borwick in 1922.

The last family to live at Elm House were the Freirs, who moved into the house c1890. Newspaper owner and editor William Edwin Freir, his wife Sarah and their children Ada, Albert, Frederick, Bertha, Harold, Ethel and Mabel formed a large household, along with their live-in servants. Frederick and Harold joined their father’s family business as journalists, and when the family left Walthamstow, they relocated to a house in Ponders End with their parents.

The house’s untimely demolition in 1898 marked less than a century of its existence, so it is all the more remarkable that it enjoyed the occupancy by some renowned residents in this once rural corner of Walthamstow. Interestingly, Elm House’s namesake Elm House Dental Surgery at 288 Forest Road is located broadly where the once leafy grounds of Elm House met Forest Road.

Karen Averby is a seaside-loving historian and research consultant specialising in researching histories and stories of buildings, people and places. She researches house histories for private clients and collaborates in community heritage projects (karenaverby.co.uk). She is also director of Archangel Heritage Ltd, an historical research consultancy providing research services for the commercial heritage sector (archangelheritage.co.uk). Also found on Twitter @karenaverby and @archaheritage