To mark the Millennium, using material supplied by many members, the Association published a booklet entitled "Hollybush on the Map". The booklet is no longer in print, but reference copies are available in the Town Library. The introductory section is reproduced below.

A Historical Introduction

Sevenoaks is a Kentish market town of Anglo-Saxon origin, which grew up beside an ancient pre-Roman pig droveway (now the High Street) from about the 7th century AD onwards. In the 13th century the town was granted the right to hold a market, and at some point a second road arrived from London to join the old droveway, creating a very important road junction in the town centre. Until the end of the 18th century the market, the road and its traffic and the great houses of Knole, Bradbourne, Montreal and Wildernesse which surrounded Sevenoaks gave the town its importance and provided most of its employment opportunities.

The town was a small centre for local agriculture; to the north Sevenoaks proper ended at the Vine Cricket Ground. The Hollybush area which lay beyond contained substantial houses such as Vine Court, Vine House and Quakers Hall but it was essentially farmland, Hillborough Farm (centred on Quakers Hall) comprising most of it, whilst what is now the recreation ground belonged to the School and was let as farmland. The last two named houses (Vine Court having been demolished) together with a few farm-labourers' cottages are all that remains of pre-19th century Hollybush.

The advent of the railways destroyed the coaching trade between London and Tunbridge Wells which had brought prosperity to Sevenoaks in the eighteenth century, and a long period of stagnation ensued. The population fell considerably between 1830 and 1860. The Industrial Revolution did not pass the town by completely however.

Whilst elsewhere in Sevenoaks very few buildings were erected in this period, Hollybush bucked the trend somewhat with the establishment of the town's first gasworks (now dignified with the inaccurate title of The Mews) at Hartslands in the 1840s, accompanied by the construc­tion of a dense area of working-class housing between Bayham Road and Dartford Road. This was not, however, to remain the pre­dominant pattern of development. The railways arrived in Sevenoaks in 1860, very late owing to engineering difficulties which had to be overcome (almost twenty years after they had come to Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells), but their impact was dramatic: London was only an hour or so away, and for Londoners seeking to avoid the smog and filth of the capital Sevenoaks appeared a rural paradise. Canny building speculators were quick to realise this, and the first of the Victorian detached and semi-detached villas which were to transform Sevenoaks by the end of the century appeared in St John’s Road shortly before the first branch line to Bat and Ball (the Darenth Valley line) was completed in 1860. Hollybush and St John’s, close to the town centre and conveniently midway between Bat and Ball and the newer main line station at Tubs Hill, were the earliest areas to be developed. Hillborough Farm was sold and divided up into building plots.

Hollybush rapidly acquired its present appearance as more and more commuter housing was built, swallowing up the farmland. Only the recreation ground was saved, by accident, because it belonged to Sevenoaks School, which began using the land as playing-fields in the mid 19 th century. Part of it was sold for the construction of the imposing new red-brick buildings of Walthamstow Hall in the 1880s, whilst the remainder was sold to the Council in 1910 to be turned into a recreation ground. Primary schools on Cobden Road and Bayham Road were constructed, along with a church, St John’s, originally a chapel of St Nicholas’s. Shops for the convenience of the new residential area appeared at St John’s shortly after the first houses were constructed.

Hollybush remains more diverse than the other smart residential areas for commuters which surround Sevenoaks, containing as it does Sevenoaks’ first industrial development (superseded by the new gasworks constructed beyond Bat and Ball in the 1990s) at Hartslands, and a large area of smaller (now fairly gentrified) cottages originally constructed to house the workers at the plant. They, along with rest of Sevenoaks’ working classes who made up the bulk of the original inhabitants of the town, were gradually expelled from the town centre to the suburb around the new gasworks in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries.

Whilst there has been some twentieth century housing development, the social and architectural makeup of the Hollybush area remains much the same as a hundred years ago: retired people and London commuters living in fairly substantial Victorian and early twentieth-century houses.

{extract from “Hollybush on the map”, December 1999. With permission of Alexander Morrison}