The Toby cottage website contained a history of the building, sadly the page has gone from their site, so I have reproduced their article below
The History of the Toby Cottage
The Toby Cottage is a well known landmark on the Guildford side of Ripley. There has been a restaurant here for over sixty years, the earliest reference to this so far discovered being in Kelly's Directory for 1924. The entry names Mrs M Curtis as manageress and gives the telephone number as 25.
As most people who know the house will realise, it is of course considerably older than its time as a restaurant, although not, as we shall see, as old as some might think.
From study of the Tithe Apportionment of 1844 it can be shown that of the two group of cottages now at this spot, only the Toby existed at that time and that the owner was a James Stanton.
Turning now to the Court Rolls of the Manor of Send & Ripley, the name Stanton occurred frequently during the last century and this particular story starts in 1816. In October of that year James Stanton was admitted to six rods on the waste land near the Maiden Lands, which he enclosed, and built thereon the cottage which is the subject of this report. The rent (to the Lord of the Manor) was set at two pence. Immediately behind Toby Cottaqe, the Maiden Lands were a group of fields on part of which the present Ripley C of F Primary School now stands. The name Maiden Lands goes back many hundreds of years, the fields being church property.
In common with many highways, the Portsmouth Road had large areas of common or waste land along its verges. Most of these disappeared as a result of the Enclosure Award, which became effective in Ripley and Send in 1815. The enclosure map shows no building at this particular spot, thus corroborating the 1816 build.
James Stanton hold the cottage until his death in 1848, when it passed to his widow, Sarah. At that time the Stantons were not living here since the Tithe Apportionment shows one Wlilliam Stringer as the occupant. After Sarah's death in 1856, the property passed to her four children, William, James, Sarah and Eliza Ann, as "tenants in common", but shortly afterwards James bought the shares of his brother and sisters for £25 each.
Within six months of acquiring the whole of the property, James junior also died, leaving his property in Shalford and Clifford, as well as Send and Ripley, to his widow, Hester, of Stoke Fields, brother of Bramley Wharf (he was a coal merchant) and his friend, William Pullock, a bookmaker from Cranley (Cranleigh). Subsequently in 1860 the property, then occupied by a person named Persons, was sold to a Charles Brown for £100
It would have been shortly after this sale that the other cottages were built, since they are shown on the 25" Ordnance Survey map of 1871. Charles Brown died in 1874, leaving the property, now described as four tenements, to his niece, Elizabeth Mary, wife of Samuel Anderson, a draper of Dorking
The story gleaned from the Court Rolls draws to a close after Elizabeth Mary's death in 1886, when eventually her eldest son, Samuel Charles Anderson of Glasgow, is recorded as owning the property in 1903.
Since that time the only details of the property so far found are from Kelly's ,directory. In 1927 and 1930 William Thomas Bolwell owned the restaurant and, after him, Major A Simpson in 1934. William Thomas was the owner in 1938 and, it is believed, for many years after that.