Walter Bentley Woodbury and the planned Craven Cottage pleasure resort.

[100GroundsProject]

According to Simon Inglis' Football Grounds of Britain and documents shared on this forum, Walter Bentley Woodbury, an American, took Craven Cottage for conversion into a pleasure resort in 1868, but the experiment failed.

I had a look through the newspaper archives to try and learn more about this.  According to a piece in the Todmorden Advertiser of 1871, a Walter Bentley Woodbury of Craven Cottage, Fulham, put forward a patent for an improved method of producing surfaces by the aid of photography.

This Walter Bentley Woodbury, however, was almost certainly the pioneering English photographer. He died of a suspected laudanum overdose in Margate, in 1885.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_B._Woodbury
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Woodbury,_Walter_Bentley_(DNB00)

Assuming there weren't two people called Walter Bentley Woodbury in residence at Craven Cottage at the time, it isn't clear where the American (or pleasure resort) reference comes from.

Are there any useful sources that might explain a bit more?