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From Ash Road entrance |
Looking towards Ash Road |
Looking towards Woodland Ave |
Allotments |
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Facts about Larksfield
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Larksfield is a pleasant road of mainly detached and semi-detached bungalows, but also some houses. The vast majority are in private ownership, but a few are owned by a housing association. The road Larksfield existed for about half a century before any houses were built upon it, as this aerial reconnaisance photgraph taken by the Germans in 1940 shows. Larksfield is numbered 1, Wellfield 2, Merton Avenue 3 and the junction of Church Road and Ash Road 6. The only houses nearby are Rosecroft and Westwood in Ash Road by the junction with Larksfield.
Larksfield, then called Silverdale Avenue, was part of a large field purchased and laid out in building plots by Payne and Trapps Co Limited in 1907 (for further details see the article on Payne and Trapps, and a map of Larksfield in 1907). The road remained a ghostly outline in an area called Strawberry Valley by the locals, until the second world war, when it was taken over by the War Agricultural Executive to grow wheat and potatoes. Development began in the 1950s with first the (then) council houses at the Ash Road end, and then piecemeal private development of the remainder of the road. One semi-detached bungalow sold for £2,250 in 1958. Compulsory purchase had been used by Dartford Rural District Council for the council housing, and later for part of the remainder of the road, where the ownership was unknown, by the Land Commission in 1966. Links
Houses and approximate dates of construction
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