The 18th and 19th centuries
The late 18th and early 19th centuries was a period of gentrification, with large estates formed around impressive mansions. Morden Hall dates from around 1750, and Morden Park from 1768-9.
During the 1870s and 1880s the Garths sold their Morden estates to Gilliat Hatfeild, a tobacco and snuff processor whose family had run the snuff mills in the grounds of Morden Hall since 1831.
His son, Gilliat Edward, who inherited in 1906, sold Morden Park to the Urban District Council in 1936 as a permanent open space. When he died in 1941 he left his Morden Hall estate to the National Trust.
During the 1770s the farms in the Lower Morden area were reorganised, and most of the land was divided among four large farms. Instead of the scattered small fields which had developed over the centuries, the fields attached to the new farms were in more compact blocks. Many of the earlier farmsteads became cottages for the farm workers.
There were isolated pockets of development in the 19th century. 12 cottages built by 1869 at the southern end of what is now Garth Road served a brickfield on Morden Common. Thomas North built corrugated iron clad cottages in Crown Lane, opposite 19 dwellings built in the 1890s for workers at John Innes's brickfield.
