Simpson's Manor

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Simpson’s Manor was a medieval moated house in Bromley, Kent. People lived there from the time of King Edward I (late 1200s to early 1300s). The house stood until about 1870, but the name survives in a nearby road called Simpson’s Place.

By 1302 the site belonged to the Bankewell family. John de Bankwell had a charter giving him certain rights to the land, and his descendant Thomas de Bankewell died in 1352. The land later passed to the Clark family. During the reign of Henry V (1413–1422), William Clark asked for a license to build a fortified manor with crenellated walls and a deep moat fed by a spring.

In the later part of Henry VI’s reign (1422–1461), John Simpson acquired the manor and gave it his name. One of his descendants, Nicholas Simpson (fl. 1530–1541), was Henry VIII’s barber and is linked to a Holbein painting. He is said to have added a large, handsome red-brick chimney.

The estate then passed to Alexander Bassett and later to Sir Humphrey Style of Langley, a sheriff of Kent, with the property held in a form of tenure known as socage. The Styles owned it until Sir Humphrey Style’s death in 1659. After that, the manor passed through several families and was converted into a farmhouse before 1796. It fell into disrepair and was demolished around 1870.

Description of the building comes from Dunkin, who said the original manor was probably square with fortified walls and a deep moat, approached by a drawbridge from the north. The foundations used large flints set in lime mortar, with strong corner buttresses. The lord likely lived in rooms inside the outer walls or in a separate building inside a central courtyard, with a small eastern terrace.

The site sits on a low hill, not the best for defense. By 1815 the house was brick and timber, built in the 16th century on older foundations, with features like the old fireplace, doors, and panels still visible but altered when it became a farmhouse. The northern and western parts of the moat were later filled in by a tenant named Jeremiah Ringer, giving rise to nearby Ringer’s Road. There were even ghost stories about sounds and a lady in white.

In 1831 Henry Warren noted the building was remote but worth seeing for its antiquity. In 1838 Freeman described it as timestricken and derelict. Today the site partly hosts a Quaker meeting house at the junction of Ringer’s Road and Ravensbourne Road.