Monks Orchard is a suburb on the edge of the London Borough of Croydon, in the ceremonial county of Greater London, England, priot to 1965 it was located in the historical county of Surrey. It is situated about 10 miles (16.1 km) south south-east of Charing Cross, south of Elmers End and Eden Park, west of West Wickham, and north and east of Shirley and Shirley Oaks. History Monks Orchard is not named after a monastery in the area, but in fact commemorates a family named Monk, from Addington, who owned a farm (Monksmead) and a wood (Monks Orchard) here in the 17th century. The land was acquired by Lewis Lloyd in 1854, who built a mansion here and adopted the name of the Monks Orchard wood for the whole estate. Lloyd's Monks Orchard House was one of the most substantial mansions in the Croydon area. It had 19 bedrooms, a billiard room, library, and numerous other rooms; the Dining Hall alone was over x . The estate covered a huge area, , stretching northwards from the Wickham Road almost to Elmers End, southwards nearly as far as Addington, and eastwards across the County boundary into West Wickham. It also included several other major residences, such as Spring Park, farms, including Eden Park, Ham Farm, Shirley Farm, Spring Park Farm and Oak Lodge Farm, two dozen or so cottages, The Rising Sun, The Cricketers and the White Hart, and Beckenham Golf Course. As late as 1923, the area was described in the following way: "The Estate, which has an extensive frontage to the road between the villages of Shirley and West Wickham, is delightfully rural in character, typifying that which is best in the unspoiled English countryside. The land seems adapted by nature for those who are seeking country houses not too far from London, being already park-like meadow land, well timbered, and dotted with coppices; thus affording almost unlimited scope for imagination, and taste, in laying out grounds, by utilising the natural advantages already there." When the estate came up for sale in 1920, only parts of it found buyers, and the rest, including the part now known as Monks Orchard, was offered again in 1924, and this was finally purchased by the Corporation of London for the relocation of the Bethlem Hospital, which had long outgrown its Lambeth home. Building of the new hospital started in 1928, which