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The acme of Kentish suburbia, situated midway between Chislehurst and Orpington, and previously divided between those two
parishes. The wood is believed to have been planted in the last quarter of the 16th century by the Pett family, who were leading
shipwrights for 200 years and are mentioned in Pepys’ diaries. Not until 1872 was the first house said to have been
built here, and named Ladywood. William Willett came up with his idea for daylight saving time while riding through Petts
Wood just after dawn one morning in the early 1900s. Basil Scruby, an entrepreneur from Harlow in Essex, had already built
more affordably at Newbury Park and elsewhere when he turned his attention to Petts Wood in 1927, securing an option on 400
acres of woodland and strawberry fields and proceeding to buy it in sections. In the same year, the National Trust acquired
the remainder of the wood and erected a granite sundial in William Willett’s honour. Scruby appointed the architect
Leonard Culliford to lay out roads that emphasized the natural curves of the landscape, rather than simply cutting across
it. He also paid the Southern Railway Co. £6,000 to open a station in 1928, and provided the site for the passenger building
and a goods yard. Shops, the Daylight Inn hotel and the Embassy cinema were built in the vicinity of the station from the
early 1930s. Scruby leased groups of plots to numerous builders, including his Harlow friends Walter Reed and George Hoad.
The various subcontractors soon built up the eastern side of Petts Wood in a variety of grandiose styles, with mock-Tudor
predominating. St Francis’s Church was built on Willett Way in 1935. From around this time, Scruby began to sell off
the land west of the railway line but as a result of his financial difficulties he was unable to exert control over the quality
of building. Much of this area was developed by Morrell’s and New Ideal Homesteads, both major players in the suburbanization
of rural south London. On the edge of Scruby’s land, other developers added some modernist houses and chalets, a few
in the voguish ‘suntrap’ style. Congregational (later United Reformed), Methodist and Roman Catholic churches
were built in the 1950s and 1960s. The Embassy cinema closed in 1973 and was replaced by a Safeway supermarket in 1982, whereupon
five local shops closed within months, but generic factors have also played their part in the subsequent decline of the centre’s
village character.
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