suitable for market gardening or self-sufficiency, and the option of a basic house, usually single-storey ‘colonial’ style bungalows in a ‘do-it-yourself’ community. ‘Colonial’ was a trade name with the several standard designs, mostly one, two or three bedrooms with a living room and kitchen costing from £100 upwards. The higher prices also brought tile roofs instead of corrugated iron. Homestead’s developments were sold without utilities: no clean water (use of a water tank or a well to be dug), no electricity (generator, solid fuel stoves and fireplaces, kerosene or gas lamps) and no sewerage (outside earth closet toilet). In the ten years to 1901, the settlement around Four Marks doubled: inhabitants to 279 and dwellings to sixty-seven, and by 1911, a further increase to 334 people and to eighty-seven homes. Three maps of the sales survive for Winchester College, The Land Company and for Carter’s Herbert Park. Together, they contain 242 plots comprising an estimated 251 acres, about half the total acreage enclosed in the 1709 Ropley enclosure and on approximately the same land. The maps also cover almost every nook and cranny of the early Four Marks developments with the exception of the early bungalows on the southern side of Blackberry Lane; about twenty-three according to the 1912 map of Winchester College. Within five years, the population of this small area to the south and east of the London to Winchester road had almost trebled to close to 250 people with over thirty new homes. Many new inhabitants, noted in later censuses, came from ‘London’: Battersea, Bloomsbury, Bow, Bowes Park, Camberwell, Chiswick, Ealing, Holborn, Hornsey, Islington, Kilburn, Kingston-upon-Thames, Leyton, Old Bailey, Paddington, St Pancras, Stamford Hill, Tooting, Tottenham, Tower Hamlets, Walworth, Westminster and Windsor. Four Marks had no beating heart. The most needed infrastructure was built by its new inhabitants before the war. The school was largely a gift of two benefactors. Marianna Hagen of Ropley was the driving force. She bought the plot of land, part of Homestead Farm on Hawthorn Road, in 1902 from J Tomlinson, a farmer. Tomlinson, in turn, gave the purchase price towards the cost of construction. At first, church services were held in the school. In 1908, Miss Hagen moved the ‘Iron Room’, a corrugated iron and timber hut from Ropley Soke to opposite Belford House where it became the mission. Around 1910, a social and multi-purpose Institute was formed which met in