The Grove Park

Stone Court was purchased by John Cater in 1697, who replaced the older house with a new house in 1710 on the site of the lawn of the modern Stone Court today. Cater appears to have realigned the river along Mill Lane and made a second channel as part of a garden but it is not known whether he completed the work. He ran into financial problems and took out mortgages from Sir William Scawen of neighbouring Carshalton Park Estate, to whose nephew and heir, Thomas Scawen, Stone Court passed in 1729 after Cater's death. Thomas had already inherited Carshalton Park (q.v.), now a public park, although he lived at Stone Court until his death in 1774. His changes to the grounds included the small Portland stone bridge over the Wandle River, named Leoni Bridge after Italian architect Giacomo Leoni, who was drawing up plans for Scawen's new mansion in Carshalton Park. The bridge has the Scawen arms on the keystone. Thomas Scawen formed the Wandle into a canal where it passed through his land and created a grove of trees and classical temple on land east of the river where The Grove house now stands. A large cedar by the bridge, felled in 2001, may have been a survivor from Scawen's landscape. The oldest surviving tree is an C18th yew near the rockery.

After Thomas Scawen's death the estate had a number of owners and the house was eventually demolished. In the early C19th the estate was divided in two, each side of the river. On the west the former outbuildings of Stone Court were converted to a house, now offices at the corner of North Street and Mill Lane. On the east a new house, The Grove, was built in c.1840, which in 1856 was leased to Revd A W B Cator, Rector of Carshalton. He may have created the Victorian garden, whose structure remains largely unchanged; its central feature is the lawn sloping from the house to the river, its southern boundary marked by a strip of trees and shrubs, and a clump of trees around the pond at its north boundary. A further grove of yews and evergreen oaks is north of the house and a pond is on the site of the rockery, probably planted towards the end of the C18th. These trees must pre-date the felling of Thomas Scawen's original grove, although they are too young to have been part of his landscaping. There was a walled kitchen garden between the house and High Street, now a car park.

Revd Cator had the freehold of both The Grove and Stone Court by 1879, living in the latter and letting the former from 1882. After his death in 1884 his widow lived in Stone Court until her own death in 1894, whereupon both properties were leased from 1895 to a wealthy tanner, Sir Samuel Barrow. He acquired the freehold in 1903, enlarging The Grove, constructing the rockery and a lily pond (now gone), and built The Nest adjacent to the house, probably for the gardener's office. When he moved to Kingswood, Surrey in 1923 The Grove was auctioned and, failing to reach its reserve, was purchased by Carshalton UDC in 1924 for £14,600. It was to be preserved as open space in perpetuity 'and also to obtain control of the beautiful ornamental waters which form such an attractive centre to the area'. In this way the two ponds that comprise Carshalton Ponds (q.v.) came into public ownership. Minor changes were made to the private garden when it became the public park.

The Lower Pond was probably made by Thomas Scawen in the mid C18th; an early C17th map shows this as a wet area crossed by streams from springs near the churchyard wall. The road causeways were added in the early C19th. The cascade probably dates from 1960s and is on the site of a weir that is traceable to the late C18th, but probably much older. The entrance drive along the east side of the Lower Pond probably dates from early 1860s. The High Street entrance lodge and iron gates are post 1868, and the North Street gates were erected in 1933-35. The Grove Park remains part of the centre of rural Carshalton with its ornamental pond, the recreation ground formed out of the grounds. There are the remains of an original wall and the fragment of a large waterwheel set in cement acts as a reminder of the many water mills active in this area in the C18th and early C19th.