Beare Green

One of the aims of this blog is to uncover the mystery behind our little village. After some scouting I found an excerpt from a document: The Beare Green Community Plan, where Chris started a project to inject some interest into Beare Green. Here is the story from his website:

Taking its name from Walter de la Bere, a local landowner in the 13th century, the original hamlet of Beare Green lay in a boggy woodland area where wild boar ran freely, four miles south of Dorking. With its area stretching from north of Capel village to South Holmwood, bounded by Newdigate to the east and Ockley to the west, the small community literally surrounded the village green. The present settlement called ‘Beare Green’ owes its current location to the coming of the railway and the opening of Holmwood station in 1867. This shifted the focus of development to the north west of the original village green, with the A24 dual carriageway now separating the two. From the outset, the railway service provided extremely efficient links to London [and the rest of the country] and, to a lesser extent, still does.

The railway also acted as a catalyst for some speculative development during the 19th century and encouraged the wealthy to establish country mansion houses. Otherwise, the local economy was predominantly agrarian based, augmented by employment in the local brickfields, with a multiplicity of small retail and service businesses attending to the needs of the inhabitants. Despite its rural location and small population, the basic infrastructure included a local school, post office, public houses and various shops. As road transport developed between the two World Wars, Beare Green was found to be conveniently situated between the Metropolis and the South coast, leading to the expansion of the “White Hart” public house, the construction of the “Red Arrow” café and a petrol filling station to accommodate the needs of the day trippers.

The electrification of the railway in 1938, and its improved service, encouraged some further sporadic development but this was immediately halted at the outbreak of the Second World War. The effects of the Blitz and the reliability of the train service made Beare Green a popular destination for those wishing to escape the bombing. This led to irregular “homesteading” in what is now Highland Road.

As part of the initial post-War regeneration, the general area around Holmwood station was identified as a potential area for “overspill” housing. However the refinement of the “Green Belt” policy and the conception of the “New Town” philosophy moved this expansive development to Crawley. The traffic congestion on summer weekends between Dorking and Beare Green resulted in substantial road works in the late 1960s that made the A24 into a dual carriageway and which effectively severed all the settlements either side of it from each other.

During the last four decades of the 20th century there was a rapid sequence of building work in the area of Beare Green south of Holmwood station, on both “greenfield” and “brownfield” sites or on backland created by the A24 road improvement works. Based on 2001 census figures, the current population of this main part of Beare Green is estimated to be 1,800.