Listed Building History: 2 & 4 St Andrew’s Lane
No. 2 St Andrew’s Lane (Church Hill Cottage) is on the left of this picture.
It has a bay window, as it was formerly a shop.
St Andrew's Lane was formerly known as Church Lane.
No. 4 (Church Hill Farm) is on the right of this picture
This house and its farmland was once held under the Manor of Heddington. The curtilage of the house alone (described in the early Court Rolls as "a messuage, tenement or cottage, malthouse, outhouses, backside, garden and orchard") occupied the site of the present William Orchard Close. In addition, it had another eight acres of meadow and arable land.
No. 2 St Andrew’s Lane (Church Hill Cottage)
This former shop is hard to identify in the censuses, but it looks as though it could have been occupied by the tea dealer Edward Underhill in 1841 and then by three butchers in succession: John Williams, Elizabeth Hunt, and Joseph Williams. From 1922 to about 1930 it was Mrs Tempero’s sweet shop: according to Within Living Memory, she persuaded Mr Wylie of the Grange to build the bay window to display her wares, and there was always a black cat asleep on the sweets there.
No. 4 St Andrew’s Lane (Church Hill Farm)
In 1759 the house and land was conveyed by John Griffin senior to his spinster daughter, Ann Griffin. Ten years later in 1769 she in turn conveyed the copyhold to Joseph Holly or Holley.
By mid-1803, Joseph Holly had died and his son, Thomas Holly, had come into his inheritance. Under the Enclosure Award of that date, the additional farmland held by Thomas Holly under the Manor of Heddington was replaced by three allotments "in the Meadow" totalling over 8½ acres (Plots 81, 82, and 83): a third of this land adjoined the farmhouse to the north-east, but the rest was further away, to the north of the present bypass.
In 1820 Thomas Holly and his wife Mary (daughter of Henry Godfrey) sold the property to Charles Browne of Hanborough, gentleman: the occupant at this time was William Savours.
In 1832 Charles Browne died, and his infant son of the same name inherited the house and land. It was immediately conveyed to Henry Carr of Headington, a butcher: the 1841 census shows him at the age of 60 living with his family in the farmhouse. The property appears to have been enfranchised around this time. In 1844 Carr sold the farm to William Graham (a bookseller at 41 High Street, Oxford) who let out the farmhouse and its immediate land land to a poulterer, Richard Gibbs, and the other fields to Charles Godfrey (a small-scale farmer of ten acres who lived in St Andrew’s Road). Gibbs lived in the farmhouse (with his chickens presumably in the orchard) until the mid-1860s. The Headington Rate Book of 1850 shows that the property rented by Gibbs had a rateable value of £20 and a gross estimated rental of £25: the farmhouse had no name at this time, and is identified by the description "Near the Church".
From around 1883 to 1948 the farm was owned by the Wylie family of the Grange. It was let out as a dairy farm, from which local people were able to purchase their milk directly. Walter J. Wheeler was the dairyman there from 1890, but he died in 1895 at the age of 38 and his widow, Mrs Louisa Wheeler, then ran it on her own until 1906, when she took over a farm at Barton. William Cook then held it for just four years, and it is during that period that it is first listed in directories under the name of Church Hill Farm, rather than simply as "Dairy".
In 1910 the farm was taken over by Alfred Stopps, and after his death in 1944 his son of the same name continued to run it until it ceased to be a farm in the early 1960s; in the latter years the northern bypass bisected the fields, making life very difficult.
In 1967 the Church Hill Farm Trustees oversaw the building of William Orchard Close on the orchard and sold the farmhouse to Frank Ricketts, who lived there until the 1980s.
Listed Building ref: 1485/49
