Site of Carter's Tested Seeds

In eighteen sixty-three James Carter started selling seeds to friends from a small shop in High Holborn.
His business grew rapidly and in nineteen-ten, Carter’s Tested Seeds was established at a nineteen acre site in Raynes Park, complete with trial gardens and vast testing grounds. The firm became world famous and exported vast quantities of seeds all over the British Empire.  By the eighteen-sixties and seventies Carter’s was also expanding its agricultural work, pioneering the development of root crops for animal fodder. 
 
During the Second World War, the Government feared that German submarine attacks on British cargo ships would lead to serious food shortages. Keen to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign food, the Ministry of Agriculture launched the Dig for Victory campaign in October nineteen thirty-nine.
This encouraged people to grow more vegetables in their gardens, in public parks and on wasteland, such as railway embankments. The horticultural expertise of Carter’s Tested Seeds now became invaluable to the war effort. The firm not only provided horticultural advice, it also developed high yield fruit and vegetable crops, including manglewurzels for feeding farm livestock.
 
Carter’s Raynes Park complex closed in the nineteen-sixties when the trade name was sold to Cuthbert’s seeds.  In nineteen sixty-seven the land was sold and developed by Merton Council to form the Carters Housing Estate.