This view looks south along Farquhar Road, showing the new developments of the early 1950s.

After World War II the Dulwich Estate was having difficulty in attracting tenants to the area, partly because the leases on many of the older houses had an undesirably short period to run.

The governors took to demolishing these and, with Wates, implemented an estate-wide development plan. The first scheme was this in Farquhar Road. Many others such as Pymers Mead, Great Brownings and Courtmead followed, concentrated mainly, but not exclusively, on the woodlands in the south of the estate.

The initiative slowed a decade later, in part discouraged by the 1967 Leasehold Reform Act, which entitled leaseholders to buy their freeholds, and so increased the value of many of the older houses.