Drive through Tolworth today and it is difficult to imagine quite what was here before the bypass, the Tower and the great spread of 20th-century suburbia.

But hidden beneath the familiar streets is another Tolworth altogether — a landscape of grand country houses, wealthy merchants, East India Company fortunes, royal connections, walled gardens and extraordinary characters. And one small, rather curious building has survived to tell the tale.

Kingston Society stalwart and local historian Dr David Kennedy will reveal the largely forgotten story of Tolworth Hall, Worcester Park House and the remarkable Tolworth Apple Store.

The little building that opens a much bigger story

The Apple Store may look modest, but it is one of the few tangible survivors of the former Tolworth Hall estate. Its Gothic-influenced entrance, tiled roof and timber storage floors once formed part of a very different landscape of kitchen gardens, parkland and a great house. Tolworth Hall itself met a dramatic end, destroyed by fire in 1911 but  the Apple Store survived.

More than a century later, its future has again become a local cause. A campaign to protect it attracted more than 500 signatures, and following representations by the Kingston Society, Kingston Council has now recognised its heritage importance as a non-designated heritage asset. But for David Kennedy, that little building was merely the starting point.

Fortunes, fires and some decidedly grand neighbours

Follow the story backwards and the apparently quiet fringes of Tolworth and Worcester Park become populated by people whose lives reached far beyond the borough. David’s research has uncovered two directors of the East India Company, a banker with connections to royalty and a celebrated architect among those associated with these neighbouring estates.

At Worcester Park House that celebrated architect was Sir James Pennethorne, who had worked in the circles of architectural giants John Nash and A. W. N. Pugin before becoming one of Victorian Britain’s significant public architects. And the history of Worcester Park itself reaches further still — back towards the royal landscape of Nonsuch, and to an estate where fortunes were also made from the decidedly hazardous business of gunpowder manufacture.This is local history with unusually long tentacles.

A familiar place — seen completely differently

David Kennedy has lived in the Kingston area for some 60 years and, since retiring from a career in science, technology and occupational health and safety, has applied a researcher’s eye to the borough’s past. With  a background in science, technology and occupational health & safety,  he took up local history research upon retirement and his website www.kingstonhistoryresearch.co.uk  was established in 2016.

A long-standing member of the Kingston Society and recipient of a Heritage Heroes Award in 2022, he has become particularly good at taking buildings and places we think we know and uncovering the remarkable people and stories concealed behind them. This promises to be exactly that sort of evening.

Come and discover the lost estates beneath modern Tolworth — and why one rather wonderful old Apple Store still matters.

All are welcome.