David Posnett - I saw this thread when Googling Fisher's Farm, Northolt and would be interested to know more of any local memories of the place.
My interest is family connections in Northolt generally (from the 30s-50s) and also a friend of the family who they said lived at Fisher's Farm in a shed there in the 30s. I've found newspaper articles of court cases of various people with this address during this period - fights, drunkeness, dealers, caravan dwellers, a court judge asking if he (Mr Fletcher) was a gypsy, with the answer that no, he was a showman. One person was accumulating a stack of stolen bricks there to sell on.
I'm wondering if some of the land was no longer farmed and an ad hoc settlement developed there? I found a newspaper article from 1939 to say the farm
had been might purchased for the site for a new hospital. Edit: can't find this article now. Typical!
In a history of Northolt (
http://www.northoltvillageresidents.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Northolt.pdf) it says that 'Before 1865 the soil of East Field was also dug for brickearth, adjacent to Kensington Road and the canal, at the Bridge Farm, and there were kilns and an engine house there. After the field was worked out, it was called Fisher's Farm, and used for breeding pigs and geese.' So perhaps this one part of Bridge Farm gained its own name?
I also found a very murky photo of gulls 'descending on Fisher's Farm' in a 1928 newspaper - you can just about see a stretch of water (not the canal, I don't think) by a house.
And theft of two geese from 2,000 in a field adjoining Vicarage Rd, opposite Fisher's Farm. William Fisher also featured with hay ricks on fire and summonses for transporting offensive matter (pig muck?) through Ealing, along with the swine fever fines as mentioned by johnhood.