Brookwood

Recorded as Brickwood, Brockwood and Brookwood, this is an English surname which is well recorded in the surviving church registers of the diocese of Greater London. As Brickwood it is clearly locational and presumably from a place called 'Brick Wood', although no such place is to be found in any of the known maps and gazetters of the past three centuries. Indeed the name is barely logical, but may suggest that it was a place in a wood where bricks were made, and hence probably closed down when brickmaking ceased. If this was the case then the inhabitants would have scattered taking as their surname the name of their former home. We expected to find that the surname was a variant of the more popular surname Brookwood, or the wood by the brook, of which there are at least two surviving places so named in the counties of Surrey and Hampshire, or Brockwood, a place also in Hampshire, whose meaning is the same. This may indeed be the case, but if so we have not been able to make any positive link. Brickwood for instance, is first recorded in the London registers as early as January 31st 1627 when Joseph Brickwood married Sara Gistead at the church of St Andrews by the Wardrobe. This is a century before Thomas Brookwood is recorded in London in 1735, and two centuries before John Brockwood, in coincidentally, 1835. We also have the recording of Thomas Breakwood at St Giles Cripplegate, in 1676, but this spelling would now seem to be extinct.