The 1908 estate sale
Freehold plots on the Firs Estate and at Queensville were being offered in 1908. A surviving estate brochure dated 30 September 1908 shows the sale proposals, while a separate freehold-plot map marks Sadler’s Pasture as sold.
The Firs was already a named West Mersea residence before the 1908 development. Willoughby John Bean was listed there in the 1894 Essex directory. The later sale material advertised building plots across the Firs Estate and Queensville.
Zoologist Henry Lyster Jameson later lived at The Firs with his family. He ran a fisheries experimental station at West Mersea and died at his Mersea home on 26 February 1922. The house’s association with him is recorded separately from the 1908 building-plot sales; the purchasers of individual Queensville plots have not been identified.
Jameson lived at West Mersea from 1914 until his death in 1922. His fisheries research station was connected with the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. Its presence is a separate strand of the house’s later history, not evidence that the planned 1908 pier or railway ever opened.
Page two of the Queensville sale brochure, dated 30 September 1908, printed a map with a proposed railway from Colchester, a West Mersea station and a railway pier. These were advertised proposals, not existing transport facilities. The railway and pier were never built.
Building beyond the older village
The established settlement was concentrated around the parish church, High Street, The Lane and the waterfront. Early-twentieth-century plot sales took residential development into former fields and pasture. New roads and houses gradually connected the estates to the older streets.
Railway proposals and road travel
Plans for a railway did not end with the 1908 estate promotion. A further railway, pier and hotel proposal was being discussed by local businessmen in 1911, but no line was built before the First World War. Islanders continued to reach Colchester by road across the Strood or by boat.
The surviving 1908 estate map distinguishes plots already marked as sold from the wider sale scheme. A proposed station symbol or line on an estate advertisement should not be read as proof that land was acquired or engineering work started for a railway.