Hill House Billericay

At one time Major Thomas Jenner Spitty of the Essex Rifles lived at Hill House, before moving to Hurlock, a house in the main street.

The park now known as Lake Meadows once formed part of the Hill House Estate, which was just one of the estates and farms owned by local landowner Major Spitty.

Major Spitty was seriously rich. It is estimated that in the early 1890’s his annual income from land rental alone was some £2,500. In today’s terms that would be worth millions of pounds a year. At a time when Major Spitty was seriously rich the agricultural workers were exceedingly poor. In the early 1890’s a series of poor corn harvests, combined with an influx of cheap corn from America, had caused mass unemployment amongst the agricultural workers.

Providing work for the out of work farm labourers was one of the reasons why Major Spitty decided to have a lake dug in the meadows of Hill House. As a keen shooting man he was also anxious to encourage more wildfowl onto the estate, and a lake would certainly do so.

Throughout 1893 and 1894 local agricultural workers toiled to hand dig the lake on wages of a shilling a day. When finished the lake was known as The Moat. It was slightly bigger than it is today, and also a lot deeper. Said to be over twenty feet deep in places the lake had a boathouse at each end. One of these was designed to look like a small castle. The lake certainly attracted wildfowl, and Lord Kitchener of Khartoum is said to have been a regular member of the elegant shooting parties at the Hill House Estate.

Major Spitty died in 1898, and Lake Meadows, as it became known, stayed in private hands until 1936 when it passed to council control.