G’day, James Sutton here. Over the next few weeks and months, I’ll be bringing you a range of stories buried deep in our amazing community. My family have a long history here in Roseville and I feel it’s important to keep these stories alive. Today I’m gonna go back to the origin of Roseville because in the early 1800s, this area was full of forest and the logging industry was just starting to take over. The government wanted to encourage permanent settlement to the area and they offered what we would now consider massive blocks of land to early settlers on the proviso that they cleared the land and improved it. A grant of land was made in 1819 that virtually covers the whole of Roseville. This 400-acre lot was granted to an architect named Daniel Dering Mathew and he named it Clanville estate. So that’s where the name Clanville comes from on Clanville Road. The Clanville estate stretched from the highway east to Archbold Road, and from Boundary Street north to Tryon Road. Daniel Mathew had arrived on the ship Clarkson.

The ship had left Portsmouth in November, 1811, to become part of the West Indies convoy until parting in Madeira and moving on to Rio de Janeiro and eventually arriving here in Sydney in May of 1812. Mathew gradually cleared the land and initially he sold the timber off to the Lane Cove Saw Mill, which was very well established at the time, but he soon began his own saw mill here in Roseville and developed a farm on that cleared land. In 1824 he sold that huge parcel of land to Richard Archbold and moved north to an estate he called Rosedale. which covered areas that we now know as parts of East Pymble and part of St Ives. His son, Richard Archbold Junior built a house here on Clanville Road. That house is called “Firs Cottage”. And that’s what you can see over my shoulder here. He built that sometime in the 1880s, and that has ensuingly become known as the Sous Le Soleil French Restaurant, which was opened here in November of 2007. Prior to that, it was the caretaker’s house for Roseville Park here.

According to the records, Clanville Road has 67 houses, 8 townhouses, and 9 units. 80% of the properties are owner-occupied and 29% of those owner-occupiers have lived here for more than 10 years. A few of the last registered sales on Clanville Road were: number 7, which sold for $5.215 million and settled in March of this year; number 45, which sold for $5.6 million and settled in June of last year; number 33 sold for $7.95 million and is still the highest residential sale on the street, which is closely followed by number 10, which sold for $6.75 million in September of 2015; and number 35, which sold for $5.9 million in September of 2019. The median price here in Roseville has soared this year to $3.4 million. It’s a 17.6% increase on last year and a 9.6% increase on the year before that. My name’s James Sutton. I hope you enjoyed the story of the establishment of the Clanville estate. I’ll be digging out plenty more stories about Roseville in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned. If you’d like to discuss your property, don’t hesitate to drop in and see me at the McGrath North Shore office, located at 280 Pacific Highway in Lindfield. Or give me a call on my mobile. My number is 0422 704 370. Bye for now.