History

Population 1838 - 1881

Very little is known about Claygate before the important early nineteenth-century events in its development, namely the coming of the railway to Ditton Marsh (Esher) in 1838 and the consecration of Holy Trinity in 1840. From the land use survey of 1838 (see monograph No 2) we can say that life in Claygate revolved round some desultory brickmaking and the perennial plough. We can assert that the quality of the land comprising Claygate’s farms was not of a high quality, unlike some that was nearby in the floodplain of the Mole river. It is probable that life in Claygate had been disturbed by the enclosure of land in the earlier part of the century, and perhaps before that as well, but generally it is probably true that Claygate’s land supported a certain level of population that had not changed much over the centuries. We can say with some certainty that before 1838 and for a little while afterwards there was no significant employment in domestic service: the grand houses in which they would have been employed did not exist. If there were domestics employed at Ruxley (probable) and in the farmhouses (less likely) their number would have been so low in the aggregate as to make this assertion safe. We must not forget the public houses – The Swan, The Hare and Hounds and The Griffin – were all active in 1838 and their households contributed to the population.

The absence of contemporary historiographic evidence before 1838 is frustrating. The first national population census was conducted in 1801 and repeated every ten years since. Initially, the censuses were crude but apart from this Claygate’s population statistics are corrupted by difficulties with boundaries: parts of Claygate were in the Kingston Hundred, while the rest was in Emly Bridge Hundred. It is only from 1851 that a more or less consistent measure of population is available; the figures are:

Year	Population
1851	451
1861	535
1871	576
1881	778

These population numbers are influenced by the development of Claygate after the railway came to Esher but before the direct influence of Claygate’s own railway from 1885. The best evidence we have of the population of Claygate comes from the case that was put for a new place of worship.

The Act of Consecration of Holy Trinity, Claygate, 22 December 1840 (SHC, ref 2371/8/2a) provides an insight into Claygate’s population. In the document, which is about supporting the case for a new church, it is said that the population of Thames Ditton ‘according to the return last made in accordance with an Act of Parliament’ (this would have been in 1831) was 1,878 and that in the ‘hamlet of Claygate’ there were more than 300 residents who lived ‘upwards of two miles from the parish church of St Nicholas and within one mile of Holy Trinity. This evidence is the best we have for Claygate’s population in 1838. It does not have the authority of an official census, and it may have been manipulated (in an upward direction) to support the case for Holy Trinity. But taking it at face value it tells us that the population of Claygate between the coming of the railway to Esher in 1838 and Claygate’s own railway in 1885 rose from c300 to 778: such a rise in population is greater than any, it would appear, that might have occurred in the centuries which predated the railway. Whether this sharp increase in population was induced by the railway at Esher, or by the influence of Holy Trinity, is something for investigation.

The attached modern map of Claygate (permission of OS for reproduction pending) has had two radii drawn on to it: the wider one is a two-mile radius from St Nicholas, Thames Ditton; the narrower one is a one-mile radius from Holy Trinity. On the evidence of the Act of Consecration of Holy Trinity upwards of 300 people lived within the one-mile boundary and outside the two-mile boundary. It is fascinating to observe that the on-mile radius from Holy Trinity captures the entire developed area of Claygate today: where c300 lived in 1838 now live c7,000 in today’s Claygate constrained into the limits of development suggested by Professor Abercrombie in his Greater London Plan 1944; a plan which inter alia aimed to prevent any further coalescence of villages with their neighbours.