Kara Knows London
Woodfield · Guide 1 of 9

A short history of Woodfield

How a single Anglican bishop, a brewer's daughter, and a wave of Victorian builders created the neighbourhood London now treats as its prestige core.

Before the city: the land, the Schofields, and the Crown grants

The ground under Woodfield is older than London. Long before any surveyor ran a chain along what is now Richmond Street, the forks of the Thames were a gathering place for the Attawandaron (Neutral) and, after their dispersal, Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples. The land you walk over when you cross Princess Avenue is part of the territory covered by the McKee Purchase of 1790 and the Crown surrender treaties of the 1790s, the agreements through which the Crown extinguished, on paper, Indigenous title to most of what became Middlesex County.

The Township of London was surveyed by Mahlon Burwell in 1810 and reorganised after the War of 1812. The block that became Woodfield sat just outside Burwell’s plan for the future town, on the eastern flank of what would be the village of London once Colonel Thomas Talbot’s settlers began arriving in earnest. The original Crown patentees of the lots that make up today’s Woodfield were a small handful of farming families. The best-documented is the Schofield family, who held land along the Hamilton Road corridor and the eastern edge of the future neighbourhood through the 1820s and 1830s. The Schofield holdings were among the parcels later subdivided as London grew north and east.

When London was incorporated as a town in 1840 (and a city in 1855), the area you now call Woodfield was still effectively rural: scattered farmhouses, orchards, a few rough lanes, and the single dominant feature that would set the neighbourhood’s trajectory for the next century, a large, wooded estate on the rise of land east of Richmond.

The Pines, the bishop, and the brewer’s daughter

In 1845, Benjamin Cronyn, an Irish-born Anglican clergyman who had been rector of St. Paul’s since 1832 and would, in 1857, become the first Bishop of Huron, bought roughly 30 acres of high ground east of Richmond Street. Cronyn built a country house on it that he called The Pines, after the stand of mature white pine that crowned the property.

The Pines was not a modest manse. The building accounts and later inventories describe a two-and-a-half-storey limestone house with twelve working fireplaces, interior shutters of black walnut, and exterior stonework cut from the bed of the Thames River downstream of the forks. The drive came in off what is now Queens Avenue and curved through a planted allee toward a coach house at the rear. For its first decade, The Pines was the largest private residence east of Richmond.

Cronyn sold the estate in 1853 to John B. Strathy, a Scottish-born banker who managed the local branch of the Bank of Upper Canada. Strathy held it for a generation. In 1887 the property changed hands again, this time to John Labatt II, son of the brewery’s founder, who bought The Pines as a settlement for his daughter Amelia.

In 1892, Amelia Labatt married Hume Blake Cronyn, the bishop’s grandson, born 1864, and the couple took up residence at The Pines. It is at this point, by most local-history accounts (the London Public Library’s local history room has the clearest paper trail), that the estate was renamed Woodfield. The name slid off the house and onto the surrounding subdivision as the Cronyn-Labatt land was carved into building lots through the 1890s and 1900s. The neighbourhood took its name from a mansion most of its current residents have never seen.

The Pines/Woodfield house itself survived until 1968, when it was demolished, quietly, and to considerable later regret, to make way for an apartment block. A London Public Library plaque in the parkette near the original site marks the location. If you stand near Queens Avenue and Waterloo and look at the unremarkable mid-century brick building in front of you, you are looking close to the spot where the neighbourhood’s name was invented.

The 1880–1910 building boom

The houses that give Woodfield its character were almost all built in a thirty-year window, and they were built for a specific reason: London, between roughly 1880 and 1910, was getting rich.

Three forces compounded. The Great Western Railway had reached London in 1853, and by the 1880s the city was a junction point for the GWR, the Grand Trunk, the London & Port Stanley, and the Canadian Pacific, whose tracks, then as now, formed Woodfield’s northern boundary. Second, the city’s industrial base, Carling and Labatt brewing, McClary’s stoves, Imperial Oil’s first refinery (founded in London in 1880), the insurance companies clustered around Richmond Row, was generating real money for a managerial class that needed somewhere to live. Third, the streetcar arrived: London opened its horse-drawn street railway in 1873 and electrified it in 1895, with lines running up Richmond and along Dundas, putting the eastern edge of downtown within an easy commute of the new lots east of the Cronyn estate.

The result was a wave of construction in Queen Anne, Gothic Revival, Second Empire, and Edwardian Classical styles, mostly between 1885 and 1910, on lots that had been the Cronyn-Labatt property and the Schofield-era farms. The buyers were doctors, lawyers, brewers, insurance executives, hardware merchants, and the second tier of the industrial families. Builders and architects like George Durand (architect of the Old Court House and several of the more elaborate Woodfield houses) put their signatures on the streetscape. By 1910 the neighbourhood was effectively built out, which is why the housing stock today is so unusually consistent.

Twentieth century: decline, rooming houses, and the heritage fight

Woodfield’s twentieth century is the standard arc of every North American inner-ring neighbourhood, with one important deviation at the end.

After the First World War, the families who had built the big houses began to age out, and their children, the generation that came of age in the 1920s, increasingly preferred the new bungalow subdivisions north of Oxford Street. The Depression accelerated the trend. By the late 1940s a number of the largest Woodfield houses had been subdivided into flats, and through the 1950s and 1960s rooming-house conversions were common, particularly along Princess Avenue, Maitland, and the southern blocks closer to Dundas. The 1968 demolition of The Pines was the low point: the neighbourhood’s namesake building was knocked down without serious public objection.

That demolition, and the wave of similar losses across London in the late 1960s and early 1970s, produced the reaction that saved the rest of the neighbourhood. The London Public Library’s local history activists, the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario’s London branch (the parent organisation was founded in 1933; the local chapter became active in heritage advocacy in this era), and a cluster of residents, many of whom had bought derelict mansions cheap and were restoring them, began pushing the city for protection. The Ontario Heritage Act, passed in 1975, gave them the legal tool. After almost two decades of organising, the city designated East Woodfield as a Heritage Conservation District on January 18, 1993 (bylaw L.S.P.-3179-68), covering roughly 150 properties. West Woodfield, the larger half, followed in 2008 with around 500 properties. Together the two HCDs make Woodfield the largest contiguous heritage district in London and one of the largest in southwestern Ontario.

Famous Woodfield residents

Bishop Benjamin Cronyn (1802–1871). First Anglican Bishop of Huron, builder of The Pines, the man whose 1845 land purchase set the neighbourhood’s footprint. Buried at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Confirmed Woodfield resident.

Hume Blake Cronyn (1864–1933). Lawyer, insurance executive (president of Mutual Life Assurance Company of Canada from 1920, and earlier general manager of Canada Trust), Unionist MP for London 1917–1921, a Liberal who joined Borden’s wartime coalition, and grandson of the bishop. Lived at the Woodfield estate with his wife Frances Amelia Labatt from 1892 onward; the couple raised their family there. Confirmed Woodfield resident.

Hume Cronyn (the actor, 1911–2003). Born in London, Ontario on July 18, 1911, son of Hume Blake Cronyn and Frances Amelia Labatt, and grandson of the bishop. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry on Hume Blake Cronyn and the actor’s own memoir, A Terrible Liar (1991), both place his childhood at the family seat near Queens Avenue before he was sent to boarding school at Ridley College. Confirmed Woodfield connection through birth and childhood at the family estate.

John Labatt II (1838–1915). The brewer who bought The Pines in 1887 and gave it to his daughter. Labatt himself lived primarily at his own home on Talbot Street, but he was on the Woodfield property frequently and was, through his daughter’s marriage, the financial backbone of the estate’s late-Victorian phase. Connection confirmed; primary residence elsewhere.

Thomas Carling (1797–1880) and the Carling family. Founder of Carling Brewery. Thomas Carling’s own house was on Waterloo Street near the brewery, on what is now the southern edge of Woodfield. Several of his children built houses inside the present HCD boundaries. Family connection confirmed.

Sir Adam Beck (1857–1925). Founder of Ontario Hydro, mayor of London 1902–1904. Beck’s principal London residence, Headley, sat at the corner of Richmond and Sydenham, south of Woodfield’s modern boundary, not inside it. He’s a London figure rather than strictly a Woodfield one, but his daily life ran through the same downtown core. Connection adjacent rather than resident.

The Ivey family. The Ivey philanthropic dynasty has deep London roots. Several Ivey-connected houses sit inside Woodfield, but the family’s principal estates were in Old North and on the river. Connection plausible but not a primary Woodfield association, flagging as uncertain.

Cool things a long-time resident would know

The carriage stones, squared limestone blocks set at the curb to help passengers step down from a buggy, still survive in front of at least a dozen Woodfield houses. There is a particularly good one on Princess Avenue near Maitland.

Several houses retain the cast-iron footings of their original gas lamps at the foot of the front walk, repurposed now as garden ornaments or, in at least one case on Wellington, wired for electricity and still working.

The walnut shutters from The Pines were salvaged before the 1968 demolition by a Woodfield resident and reinstalled, reportedly, in a private house on Colborne. The provenance is local-folklore strong but not formally documented.

There is a persistent ghost story attached to the Idlewyld Inn (corner of Grand Avenue, well outside Woodfield in Old South across the Thames but often treated as part of the same heritage conversation): the original owner, Charles Smith Hyman, federal Minister of Public Works 1905–1907, and a five-time Canadian singles tennis champion, is said to walk the upstairs hall.

The CPR cut along the northern edge, the rail trench that defines the boundary, is, geologically, a glacial meltwater channel. The railway followed the path of least resistance laid down 12,000 years ago.

Several front gardens on Wellington and Colborne are direct descendants of the original Pines plantings: bishop’s-grandson-era peonies, lilacs, and at least one black walnut that local arborists have aged at over 140 years, meaning it predates the subdivision and was likely planted by the Cronyns themselves.

Finally: the neighbourhood is named after a house that no longer exists. Woodfield is, in that precise sense, a memory of a memory, which is exactly the kind of layered, slightly improbable origin story that the surviving streetscape, with its over-built Victorian confidence, deserves.

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