Local History

Hullbridge started as a small hamlet with a few cottages, surrounded by farmland, clustered round an inn on the riverside.  It was here that pilgrims crossed the river on their way to Canterbury.

Signs of the old causeway can still be seen at low tide but the bridge said to have spanned the river from circa 1240 to Cromwell's time, no remains are left to be seen.

In latter years a ferry-man would row children across the river from Woodham Ferrers to the Old School House in Hullbridge (still standing in Ferry Road).

Incidentally, Jock, the last of the ferry-men, was a stand-in for Johnny Weissmuller, the first Tarzan of the movies.

In 1923, High Elms Farm was sold and divided into building plots and from this development the village of Hullbridge grew, but the footpaths that cross-crossed the fields can still be traced in the alleyways and passages between the house of today.

The developers took the line of the original hedgerows to build the roadways, which explains why the majority of the roads in the village today are straight and at right angles to each other.

Before gas and electricity arrived, barges unloaded coal at the wharf near the existing slipway and this was stored on a barn where Smugglers Den stands today.

Fresh water was supplied by wells, one of which was under the car park of the Anchor public house and another under the cherry tree on the corner of Pooles Lane, hence the bungalow nearby is called Wells Cottage.

The attractive Anchor Cottages are said to be about four hundred years old and as all old buildings, rumoured to be haunted.

A brickworks on the site of the \Tower Caravan Park made four million bricks and thousands of tiles each year and the terrace of houses nearby were built to house the workers.

The circular brickwork in the Rose Garden at the northern end of Ferry Road is the head of a vertical shaft 54 feet deep and at the bottom a brick and steel lined tunnel seven feet in diameter crosses under the river.  It was constructed in 1926 to house a water main so that fresh water from the River Chelmer could be pumped across country to a rapidly expanding Southend.

Kendal Park is a local Nature Reserve formed from ancient scrubland, which has a short but delightful walk alongside the River Crouch.

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