Morley Park (formerly part of Atkinson Morley Hospital Grounds)

The area around Copse Hill was once extensive woodland from Wimbledon Village to Coombe Lane and in 1481 the area was described as 'from ancient times, arable, but for many years overgrown', possibly due to de-population following the Black Death. Prospect Place was built in 1757 on 6 acres by London goldsmith Peter Taylor; in 1767 it was purchased by Moses Isaac Levy, Vice-President of the Board of Jewish Deputies and a wealthy man, who laid out fine gardens here. The topographer John Edwards, in his book 'A Companion from London to Brighthelmstone' published in 1787, praised the 'handsome villa' as well as the 'judiciously laid out gardens' and 'extensive view to the south', and its hot house produced 'the earliest, largest and finest fruits in the county'. Levy sold the estate to Parliamentary Agent James Meyrick in 1789 who extended the house, adding a new porch and stories onto the wings of the house. He increased his estate from 60 to 250 acres, taking over woodland and meadows stretching from Copse Hill south to Coombe Lane. By 1816 what would be the site of the hospital was part of the grounds of Prospect Place. Meyrick engaged Humphry Repton to lay out 'decorative gardens' near the house, with hothouses and fine trees, a few of which survive near Atkinson Morley Hospital including a large cedar. The remaining land was used for wheat or grazing cattle.

The estate was sold by auction in 1825 to the Hon. John Lambton, Whig MP, Lord Privy Seal and later Earl of Durham, Governor-General of Canada. He passed it on in 1831 to Charles Pepys, a distant relative of the famous diarist, who became Lord Chancellor and took the title Lord Cottenham. He made further changes, added new drives and an experimental farm and replaced the south-western woodland with arable land that was later used for allotments. The 250-acre estate was sold for housing development in the early 1850s after the Earl's death in 1851, and developers used the name Cottenham Park as a means of attracting buyers of the new houses. Much of the area between Cottenham Park Road and Cambridge Road remained largely undeveloped until the end of the century, building accelerating when trams began to serve the area in 1907.

The house, Prospect Place, initially survived with 40 acres of land and for a few years was occupied by the 2nd Duke of Wellington. Empty in 1863, it was purchased by William Sims who demolished the house and sold 28 acres to St George's Hospital of Hyde Park Corner for building a new convalescent hospital. The remaining 12 acres were used to build two large private houses, one being Cottenham House, which was close to the site of Prospect Place; this house was extended by the owner in 1899. Mr Atkinson Morley of Burlington Gardens was a wealthy hotelier with a lifelong interest in medicine and a governor of St George's Hospital. When he died in 1858 he left a number of charitable bequests, including £5,000 to found the Atkinson Morley Surgical Scholarship; the interest on £3,000 was to be divided among 10 widows of tradesmen of the parish of St James Westminster, which became Atkinson Morley's Widows Fund, as well as other sums for Queen Charlotte's Lying-in Hospital, Lock Hospital, St Mary's Hospital and the Royal Sea Bathing Infirmary at Margate. The residue of his property was to accumulate for 5 years and then be applied to building and endowing 'a hospital or house of reception with suitable gardens and grounds . . for convalescent patients from St George's Hospital, to be called Atkinson Morley's Convalescent Hospital'.

The 280-acre site was acquired for £3,500 in 1863, the foundation stone laid on 25 July 1867 by the Earl of Cadogan, Vice President of St George's Hospital and the new hospital opened on 14 July 1869, the 11th anniversary of Morley's death. It was the first ever purpose-built convalescent sanatorium associated with an inner city hospital. For at least the first 45 years horse-driven vehicles would transfer convalescent patients between Hyde Park Corner and Wimbledon every Wednesday afternoon, later taken over by motorised transport. The main building was designed by architects Stephen Salter, Edward Kelly, John Kelly and John Crawley in Second Empire style, with a high central block containing offices and a first floor chapel flanked by three-storey ward blocks to either side. The laundry of the hospital was built on the site of the old Prospect House. In the early 1940s the hospital moved from convalescence to nurse training and a lease was taken on neighbouring Cottenham House in 1942, which was then sublet to the medical school and used for bacteriological, pathology and bio-chemical laboratories. Cottenham House was purchased in 1950 and later used for a variety of purposes. The hospital changed its role in the 1940s, becoming a world-class centre for neurosurgery until it closed in 2003 and moved to St George's Hospital Tooting.

In 1967 nurses' accommodation comprising 3 modern blocks was built on the site of The Firs, a house built in 1854, which had been an experiment in communal living for the families of two young barristers, one of whom was Thomas Hughes who wrote 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' based on his son Maurice's experiences at public school. After Maurice's death aged 11, the Hughes left The Firs, which now held tragic associations for them. Their social circle included famous writers of the day, including Charles Kingsley and Elizabeth Gaskell. The hospital bought The Firs in 1950 for £5000 and it was used to provide accommodation for junior medical staff and students, as a sports pavilion and as an outpatient clinic.

The wooded hospital grounds were on a sloping site, with an area of lawn levelled south of the hospital and the north-east woodland developed on an abandoned orchard and garden, this latter within the grounds of Cottenham House, which was later taken into the hospital grounds. Trees remaining from the former planting included London plane, lime, dawn redwood, weeping willow, sweet and horse chestnut, oak, holm oaks and false acacia and an avenue to Copse Hill; sweet chestnut and crab apple trees were cut back at Copse Hill; in front of the hospital's main entrance was a magnolia; and six mature cedarsin the grounds probably pre-dated the hospital. St George's Hospital moved from Hyde Park Corner to Tooting in 1980 and due to the opening of a new wing at Tooting in 2003, the Atkinson Morley Hospital was then closed. The site including The Firs accommodation was eventually sold in 2006, initially purchased by Laguna Quays, a company based in the Virgin Islands, In 2010 Laguna Quays sold the 25-acre site to Berkeley Homes who then carried out various public consultations on its proposals for the site which included restoration of the Metropolitan Open Land as a mixture of SSSI nature reserve and playing fields. The locally listed hospital building from 1869 was also to be protected as part of an up-market housing development including both flats and houses. In 2011 it was announced that the Wolfson Rehabilitation Centre, which had opened in 1967 and remained on site in the ownership of St George's NHS Trust after the main hospital moved out in 2003, was also to close; Berkeley Homes purchased the Wolfson site in 2012. The campaign to save part of the landscape for public use and the creation of Morley Park is well documented in the Friends of Morley Park website.

The former Cottenham House and its original coach house/stable block had been part of the hospital site until 1995 but were sold and became part of a neighbouring private residential estate with new landscaped gardens, named Prospect Place. The Healthcare Trust had been keen to develop the grounds and dispose of part of the land to Merton Council, who wished to keep it as open land. The C19th hospital building and the 1967 Firs nurses' accommodation were to be redeveloped. Also within the Copse Hill conservation area are Cottenham Park Allotments, which date from 1893, Oberon Playing Fields dating from 1931 and the new private estate, Prospect Place (q.v.).