At the Housing, Economy and Business Committee meeting on 13 February the Committee considered a draft of a publication that will list all the “locally listed” buildings in Sutton. Most people are aware that historic buildings might be “listed” to prevent their being inappropriately developed or demolished. This is, however, a national system, and local authorities can prepare lists of local structures that are of significance locally though not grand enough to go on the national list.

There are four such structures in Sutton South Ward.

• the Registrar’s office (The Russetings) in Worcester Road, a Victorian house that it is believed the Walls family, famous for Walls ice cream and Walls sausages, lived in, though this is disputed
• Stowford in Brighton Road, a Victorian house, now the Eagle House school
• the pavilion of the Highfield Lawns tennis club at the junction of Mayfield Road and The Ridgway, as an example of an Edwardian tennis pavilion, build by local builder Percy Vere Windebank in 1908
• a Victorian sewer vent pipe in Hillcroome Road, one of 24 in the area, manufactured at an ironworks (W. Macfarlane and Co.) in Glasgow and erected when mains sewerage came to the area in the nineteenth century.

Perhaps the most unusual of these is the sewer vent pipe, pictured above.