Cockayne House

This house is most notable for being the home of Cornelius Butler, a prominent local surgeon who often saw patients at his house. It was an 18th century brick house similar to many of the large houses that used to stand on the High Street. This house was on the corner of the High Street and King's Road, in fact if you look at the King's Road side of number 120 (currently Bennetts Funerals) you can see the stubs of the walls that were once Cockayne House.

Its immediate owner after Cornelius Butler is not known, but whoever it was sold off part of the gardens to become an ice rink, which was then in 1904 bought by Johnstone's Motor Company and redeveloped into garages.

In the early 20th century it was bought by J. W. Cook who converted the building into the Brentwood Institute, an educational club for men from Brentwood. It was stewarded by Ernest Perry until he was killed in the first world war.

As traffic to the station increased it became more and more important to impove the junction with King's Road, which unfortunately was right where Cockayne House stood. For that reason the house was pulled down in the 1960s and the High Street end of King's Road was widened.