Plaque

Sutton's local list gives: "Russettings is a large house built in 1899 on a three-quarter acre plot at 25 Worcester Road. It was one of the last of a number of similar upper middle class homes built on Grange Mulgrave and Worcester Roads, now mostly replaced by flats and smaller houses. The house was designed by architect Frederick Wheeler for George Smith, a baker and confectioner, and his wife Mary, the sister of local benefactor Thomas Wall. Smith had his initials GS put on the facade of the red and blue-grey brick building. The house was built in the Arts and Crafts style, with gabled roofs, tall brick chimneys, upper wall tiling, bay windows, a green copper dome and a porch with a turquoise mosaic floor. Inside there is a grand oak staircase, inglenook and tiled fireplaces, wood panelling and leaded light windows.

"When Thomas Wall’s mother died, he moved in with the Smiths to Russettings (then named Blythewood) from Sutton Common Road and died there in 1930. After Mary Smith died in 1932, her son Dr Percy Hall-Smith may have used the house to administer the Thomas Wall Trust. Following occupation by an engineering design firm during World War Two, Surrey County Council bought the house in 1948 for £6,000, using the ground floor as a careers office and one room for registration from 1953. When the London Borough of Sutton was formed in 1965 the building became the Register Office for the district. It was refurbished in 1994 to provide two marriage rooms."

NewsShopper adds "... George Smith ... lived there from 1901 until his death in 1917. A subsequent owner, Thomas Wall, bequeathed the house to his nephew Dr Percy Hall-Smith, who with his wife Cynthia, ran it as a nursing home from 1931 to 1938. ..."

There is another plaque in this road, and the inscription on that plaque about where Wall lived for the last 30 years of his life contradicts the local list information quoted above. See that plaque for our further researches.