Trainers in trees

After reading about the presumably American fashion for throwing trainers into trees (on the Ship of Fools here – though being a presumably American fashion it is there called “Sneakers on wires”) I’ve actually seen some. Not very far from me in fact, by an estate just off Rotherhithe New Road, near Southwark Park, between Surrey Docks and the Millwall ground.

Right by the street so easily visible from the bus. Must have passed the place dozens of times this year but mostly in the dark, which is my excuse for not noticing.

Didn’t have my camera on me though. Maybe next time.

South-East Suburban Circular

One of the crazy things about asthma is that its often better being upright and out of doors. So when I managed to get to church on Sunday morning after four days more or less confined to my smelly little bedroom in my smelly little flat I felt a lot better for it. So I thought I’d spend the afternoon outside. But I’m too knackered to walk far, and not into sitting on park benches, so time to try another bus trip.

Bought a one-day travelcard in one of the local shops and got on the first bus that came down Loampit Vale – a 321. Crazy route, Sainsbury’s to Tesco’s, part of the current fashion for breaking up the Great Old Busroutes into inner and outer suburban sections. It starts near New Cross then down to Lewisham and transects what I think of as the layer of classic suburbia, straight up Lee High Road and then Eltham Road, Eltham Hill, Eltham High Street, before turning right on Footscray Road and down to Sidcup, where I walked down towards the station and got on a 229 through Bexley and Bexleyheath towards Thamesmead.

There aren’t many people on the street in these outer reaches of South-East London. You see some of them through their windows – some teenage girls chatting round a table, some men on stepladders Doing It Themselves.

Its suburbia, but its quite dense suburbia, and its not neat suburbia. There is something makeshift and ramshackle about it. Lots of little gaps. Pebbledash in some of the more downmarket parts. Odd bits of 1970s brutalism embeded among the older buildings. Small shops with cliched names – at least three “Buds of May”, a restaurant with the unfortunate name “Sophie’s Choice”, a shop called “Doors of Distinction” which sounds like the location of a spoof sitcom.

Glimpses of small, empty, muddy, sports grounds at the ends of side streets, Hills to the north and south, and over the hills and far away to the east, the lights of Dartford Bridge and the industrial North Kent Marshes

Why does Old Bexley call itself a “village” on the signs, when it was clearly a small town before London ate it, and not a village at all?

Things begin to change on the dual carriageway from Bexley towards Bexleyheath. Things are more open, more 1970s, more concreted. Bexleyheath announces itself with a big new Legoland-style Marriot hotel on top of a hill. There’s a lot of the feel of Legoland about the architecture of Bexleyheath shoppng centre. It looks as if they knocked it down and rebuilt it sometime in the 70s or 80s, and there are streets of huge shops. But there is no back to it – its like a sort of concentric Blackpool – the town-centre buildings back straight on to rows of 1920s and 1930s terraced houses, there is no urban depth to it – not even the sort of urban depth you get in Eltham or Sidcup with their pubs (some of which even have customers), their disused crumbling pre-war cinemas, Edwardian public buildings, and interjections of civic brutalism.

But there are more people around. Its getting dark, and all of a sudden the bus is full. I suppose it must be people who have been shopping and are going back to Erith or Thamesmead. The bus runs through Barnehurst to Erith and then back west again to Belvedere (more or less along a route
I walked a couple of years ago) Even Erith is getting posh private flats these days.

The view is occasionally spectacular – the towers of red lights down the Thames by Dartford, the lights of the City in the other direction, the multistory blocks of Plumstead and Thamesmead and most of all the industry by the Thames and in Belvedere. In the day it might not look so good, but at night it is a landscape of lights.

Thamesmead itself is magnificent in a way. But it looks utterly uninhabitable. Dark, threatening, inorganic, with no obvious plan or logic to the layout. Places that just grow have reasons for being the way they are. Thamesmead is laid out by obsolete whim. The bus goes round and round through probably similar sections – probably because I can’t quite see them. Other planned suburbs (& Thamesmead is nothing if not a planned suburb), other planned suburbs are being gradually humanised as they grow older. They become natural, they accquire an artificial backstory. Trees grow, streets are altered, new walkways broken through, buildings are infilled, retrofitted, reused. But Thamesmead is so structured, so constrained, so racked by its curvy grid of near-motorway roads that it has no way of linking itself across them. Most of the little neighbourhoods turn their backs on the streets, and hence each other, often set back twenty or more metres from the road, on a different level, screened by fences and lines of scrubby trees and municipal planting. This is a place built for cars, not people.

But weirdly, even though its dark and getting cold, and there is nothing to so, nothing open in the gloom., there are more people around on the streets and in the buses than there were in the posher suburbs further south. Mostly black and Asian. A lot of them look as if they are on their way to or from church. Its built for cars but a lot of the people who live there can’t afford them.

And a 177 back to New Cross, through Abbey Wood and Plumstead and Woolwich and Charlton and Greenwich and Deptford, and finally back to church for the evening service on another 321. Or maybe it was even the same one.

The Tower of the Lidless Eye rises anew!

Well over twenty years ago, I walked back from town towards Nunhead through the North-Peckham Walworth triangle with my old mate Dave Turtle. I mean that piece of land surrounded on the west by Walworth Road and Camberwell Green, on the South by Peckham High Street and Queen’s Road, and on the north-east by New Cross Road, Old Kent Road, and New Kent Road.

We walked across the bit of post-industrial desolation that was then just becoming Burgess Park – its quite pretty now but then it was basically a disused canal towpath connecting the abandoned church to the traveller’s site by way of an old school building full of squatters and a car-breaking yard, and looked out at the ramparts of North Peckham to the south and the flats round Albany Street and the Heygate and Amersham Estates to the North.

The first time he saw it, Dave named the place “Barad Dur”.

Here are those ramparts close-to:

Just a silly joke. OR SO WE THOUGHT!!!!!!

Then, I first saw IT a few months ago, rising over the collapsing brutalist mass that surrounds the Elephant and Castle. What was it? It is in this picture taken from North Peckham – follow the link to the larger picture and look at the tower you can see in the distance on the left:

Is that what it looks like?

I had to find out.

For many hot and dreary weeks I quested through the railway cuttings, arches and twittens of South East London to get a better view of this monstrosity.

Finally, from behind a parapet in a dingy and little-used part of Waterloo station, I got a good view:

Follow the link and open the larger the picture, IF YOU DARE. Look at the top of the new building. Is this not clearly the Tower of the Eye, Sauron’s fastness in Barad-Dur, being rebuilt in South London?

Take a closer look:

CAN THERE BE ANY DOUBT?????

At the Elephant, after dark, I was able to approach unseen (I hope) almost to the base of the Evil Tower:

The picture is, I know, vague and distorted. I hardly dare approach the orc-works so close in daylight. (As if the evil within cared for the sun or the moon! Aaaaaah! I am already weary!)

Look at the horrible gaping windows with a ghastly pale gangrenous death-light of putrescense oozing from them:

This morning, in the rain, through distorted old plastic windows of the tunnel in the sky over Waterloo Road, I finally got a good picture. It looks almost beautiful, in its dull, damp, stony way:

BUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT???!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!

Uberhauses (pardon my lack of umlaut)

Three or four of my microprojects coalesce in one photo!

Click on this photo to see a bigger version and read the words on the sign:

Not only a grotesque or silly signboard (the list is rapidly growing), not only an insight into the rebuilding of the bits of London tourist guides don’t go to, but also an absurd new word. Result!

What on earth is an “Uberhaus”? And why? Well, I know what it is, its a largish flat with an upstairs garden, (which might be on the roof, or on a big balcony, or on the roof of a next-door building such as a car-park). But why? But why do the estate agents think that peopel willing to part with half a million or more squids in order to live on a reclaimed gasworks with a view of the A13 flyover will be attracted by fake German?

At least I got in first. Google has 8 hits for the word – six of them are estate agents, one is an article in the Daily Telegraph and first on the list is my photo linked above, which was only posted on Flicker last night.

Wandering around East Greenwich and Beyond

Been walking round East Greenwich as a side effect of attending church there for a few weeks as part of the Reader’s course. Taking lots of photos. This week they are mainly of the peninsula and up and down the Thames.

There are, I suspect, few Anglican churches in Inner London that have a grain elevator in the parish.

Can’t really think of anything relevant to say. Well, I did, but it had the word “palimpsest” in it as a metaphor, so its probably a bit pretentious! As before the pictures link back to bigger ones on Flickr. Not as pretty is the ones with smoke in from Tuesday though.

I knew South-East London was tough, but I never knew it was this bad.

When I was a little Evangelical they told us we should walk along the King’s Highway every day. Well, I found it, its in Plumstead. So I walked along it. And they have some very strange things up there!

This must be the ultimate Charlton supporters weapon against Millwall.

The second picture is repeated from the previous post because I like it a lot and its just at the end of the street. In fact its more or less my favourite picture so far this year. And no-one looked at it on Flickr yet! The relevant words are in the yesterday’s blog entry.

All four of these photos were taken within about a hundred yards of each other.

And a few more I didn’t post before:

Erith, land of sheds

The centre of Erith is marked by a giant brightly-coloured ceramic sculpture of three-in-a-bed oral fish sex right by the great big roundabout in front of the Town Hall. The photos is work-friendly, unless your boss is a moralising, monagamist herring.

Why Erith? I’m still trying to redirect Stuff and Thingy towards south-east London (if only because of the looming East
Greenwich) so I dreamed up the idea of trying out the bus routes but an 89 came before the 108 so I got on it instead to see where it went and it went to almost to Slade Green. Almost because the passengers – myself, one small drunk old lady, and about two dozen 14 or 15 year-old white boys from Bexleyheath with short hair and crutches whose idea of fun was talking very loudly about how well they had handled themselves at some mythical fight outside a nightclub, saying not-at-all work-friendly things about young women and the size of their genitals, planning to defraud the railway company, and running up and down the stairs screaming – all got kicked off outside a pub about two stops short of Slade Green station at a council estate with and a view of the Dartford Bridge, and some real ships. Big ones.

So I walked back towards London and found myself walking up a long gently curving dual carriageway with giant sheds on either side. Not garden sheds but the sort of huge aluminium clad box that could contain a shop or a factory or a warehouse, and mostly did, this being the nearest London has to a genuine industrial area.

That, as far as Lesnes Abbey (which there is more of left than I thought – you can clearly see the ground-plan where the church used to be) and I got bored of dual carriageways and sheds and so into the woods. Lesnes Abbey Wood to start with (hence “Abbey Wood” station) and over to Plumstead to meet up with the place the walk of a fortnight ago ended.

Once upon a time British botanists indulged themselves in a futile Quest for a Genuine Wild Wood (our version of the almost as futile Quest for the Historical Jesus) with various naturalists putting forward the argument for this that or the other stand of trees never having been felled for agriculture or for some reason resembling a real natural woodland. Whatever that is, as in these islands humans are older than the woods, we’ve been here longer. We have lots of so-called “ancient woods” that have been around since before about 1600, but there are probably no woods that were never managed by humans, at least for a few centuries (and some of them for many centuries continually).

And it is not clear whether or not a “natural” Natural British Woodland would be one that resembles the woods that existed before the introduction of agriculture, or one that resembles the woods that might have existed had agriculture never been introduced,or one that had never been subjected to agriculture, or one that contains only native British species (that is plants that got here between the ice going away and the North Sea coming back), or one that resembles the woodlands that might have been here at this stage in previous ice ages, or one that was simply left alone to look after itself for a few centuries – and all of those are different.

Whatever, there are a dozen or so bits of woodland in England that someone or other claims to be the last, or the only, or the best, or the biggest piece of wildwood in the country. And apart from a two or three really weird stunted oakwoods in the north or west (and ignoring the claims of the some of the obviously artificial old deer parks such as Hatfield or Hainault or Petworth or Epping or the New Forest which preserve an artificially high density of large grazing animals which makes them in some ways more “natural” than any other woods since our ancestors killed off the mammoths and bison and wild cattle) just about all tof them are in historical Kent and Sussex, and some of the best ones now in the more industrialised suburbs of South East London, including Abbey Wood and Oxleas wood only a short busride away, which preserve more of the look and feel of the ancient countryside of England than just about anywhere else in the country, in bits of dogwalking rough land on the hills between some of London’s grottier council estates. Someone noticed a few years ago and invented the Green Chain Walk which (if unlike me, you don’t like walking through the council estates and industrial areas and concretey bits) will take your from Crystal Palace to the Thames at Erith through as many (more?) diverse little woodlands as any other walk in England.

But the most notable wood today wasn’t one of the ancient ones at all. I’ve never been to Bostall Wood before. Its lovely. Or at least the part of it I wandered through is. A very strange wood, hard to read. The trees on the flat past of the wood that I walked through are are mostly beech and birch. No ash or oak, not even a sycamore, but there is the occasional pine. Very little undergrowth, easy to walk through (which might be because so many people and dogs walk through it) and apparently very few characteristic woodland herbaceaous plants (though maybe thats because this is October, I should go back in April or May) The nearest to an understory is holly, with some brambles around, there seems to be or very little if any hazel or elder or small oak (though the steep edges of the wood are full of oak). Just over the road in Lesnes Abbey Woods I’d seen oak and ash and elder and hornbeam and holly and some cherries or other Prunus and Viburnum andClematis and ivy and dozens of other plants.

Here its quite different. Nearly all the tree trunks are quite thin – is that because they are close together or just because they are still quite young? Its obviously quite a new wood.

Most of the trees are perhaps not much older than I am. But is it self-seeded or planted? And who plants dense beech woods, or birch at all? And if self-seeded why no ash or sycamore? They get anywhere. Or oak? There is abundant oak, piles of acorns, just hundreds or even tens of metres away. And where did those pines come from? Did this use to be a golf course or some kind of public park?

Whatever the reason for it (whcih I might be able to disover by looking at my bookshelf but I haven’t yet because its more fun speculating) It’s beautiful. The ground is covered with golden-bronze beech-leaves and crunchy beech-mast. There are park benches to sit on, from the Green Chain Walk people. The sunset filters through the trees wonderfully. It smells nice.

Historical Archives of the First Circumnavigation of London

Select the map for a bigger picture:

This was a series of walks done, IIRC, in about 2001/2002. The idea was I would take a train out to the last station in zone two, then walk round to the outermost zone two station on the next line. So dividing the walk into a series of a couple of dozen stages round London. some only a few hundred metres (I tended to go on little excursions in that case) the longest being only a few hours walk, so they could be fitted in to an evening after work (followed by a quick pint in whichever local pub seemed nicest), or a Sunday afternoon stroll and still be back in time for the 6.30 service.

It started by taking the first train up to town from Lewisham (which went, not surprisingly, to London Bridge) then getting on the first tube train out of town, which took me to Willesden Green. So the first walk was something like Willesden Green to Kensal Green, the next Kensal Green to Kensal Rise and so on anti-clockwise (in tune with the natural rotation of the earth, the solar system, and the galaxy ) until I found myself back there a year or more later.

The pattern of walks tends to break down in the southern part, Herne Hill to Brockley is a longer stage than I wanted to do, and goes almost entirely through streets I have walked all over before, so I diverted down through Dulwich for variety. And it also breaks down in the downriver section where you need to go all the way to Woolwich to cross the river on foot and the stage ran (before the DLR extension) from Greenwich to Silvertown because you aren’t supposed to walk through the Blackwall tunnel. Though I walked past both ends of it.

Not that I would want to walk through the Blackwall tunnel. I’ve both walked and cycled through the Rotherhithe tunnel and its not recommended for the asthmatic and bronchitic. Or anyone remotely scared of playing with traffic. Its a bit like being trapped in a smelly dirty hole in the ground with a couple of hundred cars and a few dozen big diesel lorries, all belching fumes. In fact it IS being trapped in a smelly dirty hole in the ground with a couple of hundred cars and a few dozen big diesel lorries, all belching fumes. Its worse on the bike. You can’t use the narrow walkway so you have to share the road with the motors. And its a lot longer than it looks on the surface (I have no idea where it goes under the river but it certainly isn’t straight across ), and whichever way you go the second half is continually uphill for about half a mile, straining your lungs while being forced to cycle in the path of the motor vehicles whose drivers are getting angrier and angrier.

Anyway, like I said, time to buy a new book and set off for new journeys. The map books are all coloured now, which is fine for almost every likely use EXCEPT marking where you went by filling in streets with yellow pens. It was all so much simpler when you could still buy a black and white A to Z.

And on to Greenwich

Well, that was that. Here is a picture of the index page of the map book I used. Tomorrow I ought to buy another A to Z – that last book was kept going far too long – and focus more on Greenwich.

In a few weeks the Southwark Diocese Reader’s course starts over a month of “placements”. Which, being interpreted, means we go to church somewhere else for a bit. I’m to be at a church in Greenwich on Sunday mornings. At the momenrt it is looking like a good idea to get to know the area better in other ways as well. Walk around the parish. Maybe visit some of the pubs and cafes there. Relocate a bit of my life for a month or so.

I’m looking forward to it. I love an excuse to meet new people or go to new places.

Night journey through Bromley

The last two stages of the walk round Zones 4 and 5 were from Beckenham and Elmer’s End to Bromley, and then Bromley to Grove Park. Done mostly in the evening, mainly because Saturday being the Day of Rest I have trouble getting out of bed until after the early music programme happens on Radio Three. And then a nice bath is called for. So by the time I’ve bought some bread and juice and taken the bus down to the Outer Darkness of Suburbia, the sun isn’t far from setting.

To be honest there isn’t that much to say about the walk. Nothing very odd happened. I don;t think I had any stunning insights into the human condition or urban geography or even

The outer suburbs of south-east London would fit most people’s ideas of boring. In fact they are arguably the most boring places in Britain. (Though on the whole I prefer them to the outer suburbs of west London – more hills and fewer motorways

Beckenham is nicer than it sounds. Also higher density than you might think, at least near the centre of it. Lots of infill and little blocks of flats. And the scene is dominated by church towers. A sort of fake old town.

As you walk round the suburbs you are never out of earshot of suburban life, even in the middle of a largish park. Not just the ever-present noise of cars (I’m not sure there is anywhere in the south east of England you escape from that) but you can hear the odd snatches of talk, occasional shouts and raised voices, kicks of boot against ball, some partying teenagers, kids out late, now and again a dog barking. You can smell cooking too. Small whiffs of pizza or chips, a late season barbecue, Indian takeaways.

And then, fireworks. I’ve no idea why, or what it was all in aid of, but someone was letting off fireworks from their back garden somewhere round Langley Park. Maybe it was on Barnfield Wood Road. The first of the year. Fireworks always lift my heart. Just great fun.

Langley Park is apparently an Area of Special Residential Character whatever that means. (it seems to be a sort of conservation area for wealthy suburbs) Except they call it Park Langley on the signs.

The approach to Bromley town centre from the south west takes you through another one of those estates that turn out to be a lot higher density than you’d expect. Quite a successful layout for what it is, with shops and restaurants integrated into the blocks. But why so many blind-ended blocks? Neary all the blocks show blank brick walls at one or both ends, and quite a few do along their length as well, the houses set back behind walls and turned inwards. Its pathetic. It just makes dog toilets. Why not just put windows in end walls? It makes the rooms inside more pleasant and lets you overlook the public street, making everyone safer.

The worst are the seven or eight foot high walls at the sides or ends of gardens, or the fences out in front cutting the front of a block of flats off from the streets. Not only do they make even more dog toilets but they reduce the safety of the inhabitants. I suppose they think they will protect against burglars, but they won;t stop any professional thief who knows what he is doing, they won’t stop a fifteen-year-old pissed on cheap cider who doesn’t and they won’t stop a desperate junkie. The illusion of security while making us less safe.

Everyone I see in the street after dark seems to be in their teens or twenties. Where are the other 80% of the population?

Bromley town centre is not a pretty place any more. It looks like it might have been once, and its got some nice old buildings – and some nice modern buildings – but the sprawl of multiple-lane roads surrounding the overlarge overheated mall make it all a bit inhuman. Not as nasty as Romford (where is?), but not as lively as Croydon or Kingston and on a more inhuman scale than either.

And there are plenty of brutal little buildings tucked away at the back:

I started by getting on the first bus that went past the bottom of our street bound for anywhere beyond Lewisham, and it was a 136 to Grove Park. So I came back on the 136 from Grove Park. Which meant I had to get to Grove Park . And I didn’t fancy walking along Burnt Ash Hill so I went down into the Downham estate and back up again

Downham is in some ways the most unpleasant place I’ve been on my walks round London. Its also in some ways the most familiar. Its very similar to the sort of place my Dad’s relatives lived around Brighton when I was a kid. If it wasn’t for the absence of the South Downs it could almost be Moulscoombe, where Dad was brought up and only a mile or two from where we lived on a slightly newer estate.It is a similar product of the municipalised ebb of the Garden City movement. The Garden City was cut away from its economic and political roots and turned into the Garden Suburb, low-rise low-density council houses covering entire hillsides with families who didn’t have an economic reason to be there or enough money to get out. If they were allowed out. At Valeswood Road in Downham, just round the corner from where I was walking today, they actually built a wall across the street to cut off the LLC council estate from the private suburbs of Bromley. I always feel odd in Downham. Its too much like where I actually come from and don’t particularly want to go back to. I like more obviously urban places.

But seriously, if this is as bad as it gets we’re doing OK.

And where are the photos I took in Downham? I need to look at my camera again!

Well, I’m back.

OK, Sam walked a lot further than I did, and he didn’t go home every night on the bus. But I finished. It took five years (though two and a half of them were missed due to arthritis) but I have now done my second circumperegrination of London in Zones 4 & 5. I’ve walked through every one of he 30-something London boroughs and across all but two or three of them and visited every single London postal district and (if I include my first circumnavigation of London through zone 2 and 3) visited more or less very large council estate.

Only about a hundred miles. Which in three years of walking is less than a mile a week.

But I finished, I did it.

I have all these notes about Bromley I just wrote up in my notebook for a posting here. But I got back to the local and the landlady’s daughter gave birth earlier today. So there were drinks and more drinks and I’m a bit squiffy now. So maybe my account of walking through Bromley at night gets posted in a day or two when I get the photos online. Or maybe not.

One thing to say. I’ve quite genuinely now been everywhere in London. On my own, on foot, mostly after dark. Walking in to random pubs. Getting on busses. And no-one was ever nasty to me at all. London is a nice place.

But I did it. And I’m chuffed.

Norwood: Hilly and Proud!

Grange Hill to Elmer’s End (or more prosaically, Upper Norwood to Lower Norwood)

Bank Holiday Monday, what we would have called Whitsun once upon a time. The wettest day of the year so far. Just the day to go for an evening stroll through leafy Norwood. I left home about 6.30 (Abi left not much later to go to see Cabaret at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue. I’m told its wonderful) got a bus to Brockley Rise…

…then 122 down to Crystal Palace, then I got on the first bus that came along and round the houses down past Gypsy Hill and Beulah Hill (less Biblio-romantically called “Bewley’s Farm” on old maps) to Spa Hill by the David Livingstone Primary School. Yes, Norwood is hilly and proud of it.

I don’t know it well, but I think I like Upper Norwood. For reasons I don’t understand it is nice. There are places you come across (if you wander round London) that are for some reason or other more pleasant than you expected. That make you smile to find them. Not the coolest or the richest or the most trendy or the most fun places. Maybe its partly low expectations. No-one demands much from a visit to Osidge, or to Cricklewood and Willesden Green, or to the denser parts of Penge, so when you find them to be slightly less boring than you feared, your easily-pleasedness is stroked.

Norwood is one of those nice places, or at least the streets between Upper Norwood and Thornton Heath are. Maybe its the combination of high density and greenness and a feeling of openness. Maybe its the way Croydon council have preserved and labeled loads of pathways and twittens between streets, so everything is penetrable. Maybe its the way social and ethnic diversity has been added to what was mostly a lower-middle-class/respectable-working-class Victorian suburb without quite overwhelming it. Maybe its the hills providing views over or out of London. Maybe it just reminds me of home. Maybe there are waves of evangelical niceness pulsing down over the landscape from Spurgeon’s College. Or else its the unpretentious radio waves from the transmitter at the top of the hill – the original ITV TV mast, but now used for Channel 5 TV and local commercial radio stations on MW and DAB, with the UHF being just the hot backup for the 70m taller and much flashier Crystal Palace transmitter. There must be some beneficial effect from living in the shadow of Kiss FM.

If this was America perhaps the Baptists would make a bid to take over the transmitter and broadcast Christian TV. There can’t be many many unused TV transmitters with thirteen and a half million people in the footprint. But as it is, Norwood is a nice place.

My PC seems to have lost my photos of Spurgeon’s College (amongst other things). Try again tomorrow.

I decided that if it was past 8.20pm when I got to the Goat House bridge (where there is no Goat House Tavern any more) I’d look for a pub for a quick drink then get the bus back, but if not I’d extend the walk a little. It was 8.18. So off over the railway and past some flats…

…and into South Norwood Country Park, Which was beautiful quite unexpected, and very wet. Flatter than I expected, with a lot of drainage ditches lined with thorn and elder running between small open areas of grass, nettles, and brambles with tall herbs like cow parsley and hogweed and and some larger trees. Quite a bit of ash and some oak. Almost heathland, but chalk underfoot. I have no idea how it came to be there. By the amount of concrete and brick rubble lying around I guess it might have been built on once. Its hard to be sure in the near-dark but I don’t think I saw many mature trees.

Remarkably empty for a park probably not as much as a quarter of a square mile in extent. Just me in the middle and a couple of dogwalkers working round the edge. Maybe Croydonians don’t like walking in woods in the pouring rain in the evening. Birdsong everywhere. I wish I could identify birds by their song but I usually can’t and I only got a good look at one largish bird perching on a lookout branch in the gloaming and much as I tried to make it a short-eared own it was a crow. It looks like a place for warblers. I could fantasise that there were nightjars there, but I expect that the place is much too small.

Even if there were any it was a little wet for them to be about. This years weather can’t have helped insect-eating birds. An unusually hot and dry early spring, followed by a sodden May. At the end of March and beginning of April London was not only hotter than New York (not unusual at that date) but hotter than LA and Houston – and Melbourne. Almost as hot as Sydney and Cairo. By the end of April the temperature was hotter than our summer average. This last week of May has been cooler than the last week of March was. And its been raining for days. That’s great for plants which got an early start with spring sunshine and no frosts, and are being watered during the long days of cool light, which is more important to them than intense sunshine (most native plants can’t make much use of direct bright sunshine anyway, much of the benefit is lost by photorespiration and increased metabolic rate). But many insects like it the other way round. Damp winters and springs to get the grubs going, then hot dry smelly weather for them to fly around and bother people. And what insects like swifts and nightjars like. I fear they are having a bad year.

And I lost my way and turned too far south on Footpath 666 and ended up at Arena tram stop and had to yomp up the dual carriageway to the uninterpretable junction at Elmer’s End for two pints of Spitfire in the William IV and a bus home.

No photos of the Park yet, as it was getting dark and however lovely the light seems when you are in it, trees don’t photograph well after sunset in the rain. Maybe later.

I’ll be back.

From Pollard’s Hill to Norwood Junction

There is a hole in my knowledge of suburban South London. I’ve been familiar with Croydon at least since I was first at university back in the 1970s and I’ve often had reason to visit there. Now I live in Lewisham I sometimes go to Sydenham or Crystal Palace or even Penge because they are easy to get to by train or bus, being in the same radial sector of London, so I just need to go out and in and not round. Brixton I’ve been to, and I used to have friends in Stockwell and Clapham and Tooting. But, apart from the A23 (main road to Brighton via Croydon) and the mainline railway the gap between those places is much more anonymous from my point of view. Streatham, Tooting Common, Norbury, Thornton Heath (north of the Mayday, if the Mayday counts as Thornton Heath) haven’t really been on my radar.

So the next stage of my circumnavigation of London in Zones 4 and 5 was all exploration, at least for the first few miles.

Tube to Clapham Common then 255 bus to take me back to Pollard’s Hill, somewhere I didn’t even know existed till I walked up it last week.

This time I approached from the Mitcham side through a perhaps 1970s flat-rooved high-density low-rise estate that looked like a little version of the Ferrier at Kidbrooke at first, until I saw if from Pollard’s Hill and realised how huge it was. Pleased to find I could still steer through the little playing fields behind the estate and predict where the hole in the fence that gets me to the hill was – one of the few skills you learn being brought up in suburban council estates outside Brighton, followed by years of experience in walking round putting political leaflets in doors. I can nearly always find my way from a council estate to the nearest little municipal recreation ground or swing park.

The view from Pollard’s hill is wonderful (if you like looking at south London suburbia, which by now anyone reading this will have realised that I do. Almost 360 degrees, though you have to position yourself very carefully to look north thought the gaps between the houses. In some ways a bigger view than from Crystal Palace or Hilly Fields, perhaps because the hill, though not very high, stands more alone and falls off more steeply.

Where do white people go on Sundays? I mean, I’m white, I know where I go, I go to church and the pub and sometimes the shops and occasionally on bus-trips of bike rides or longish walks round London. But where are the rest of them? Not in our church (pretty obviously) but today not in the streets on the east side of Pollard’s Hill either. Today it mostly seemed to be Asian families wearing western clothes and driving BMWs. Its quite posh round there, Some private streets and lots of kempt leafy spaces.

Back to Norbury High Street (or whatever the A23 is called there) and up the other side through back streets. It seems to be a bit of a taxi suburb. The homes of cab drivers congregate in London. There are few streets round the back of Welling where you could almost believe about one house in five has a black taxi parked outside it. And there is a bigger load of them in Ilford. There seemed to be quite a few parked outside lockups and in little alleyways round Thornton Heath and Norbury. Quiet streets of semi-detached or largish terraced houses, mostly inter-war, very lace-curtain and respectable, often with front gardens, some looking like ex-Council places. One suspects that there are many large flat-screen TVs inside. The London working class moved a few notches upmarket and out to the suburbs, but not so far out as to make it hard to drive in to town. Who wants a two-hour journey home after their last fare of the night? Maybe if Welling is where the white drivers accumulate, and Asians in Ilford, black black cab drivers end up in Thornton Heath.

Up the hill towards the centre of Thornton Heath and houses getting shabbier and older – must have grown out north from Croydon rather than being developed south from inner London through Brixton or Sydenham – or perhaps more likely they merged from a little cluster of high-density nineteenth-century hosusing round each station, the sort of thing you see near every little station on the Brighton Line – even such exurban places as Hassocks or Balcombe (Or do I mean Barcombe? Very irritating that they are in the same county) can have a street or two of smaller older houses around the station. Before they filled in the gaps with the 1920s and 30s semis this must have been a little like a Surrey version of the MegaVillage One in Sussex (a name my brother-in-law gave to the network of “villages” north of the Downs between Lewes and Henfield and north almost to Hayward’s Heath). There is a web of roads connecting old centres that actually or almost join with each other, with nineteenth century streets at right-angles to them, and newer housing filling in the gaps. Large chunks of Thorton Heath could easily be in Brighton. The houses are almost identical to places like Ditchling Road.

Further up the hill through the little recreation ground towards Thornton Heath station and the old houses are grottier again, though older and larger. And much of the infill is council estate with the odd brutalist block, or else some very new estates of high density private housing. There’s a very flash old building just uphill from the station that has been turned into flats. Looks half-way between a posh French house and a church. The little square of new houses beneath it is called Reservoir Close so I guess it must be a waterworks building. Really flash

Now I can either turn left up through a very nice-looking park towards the little Croydon clone of the Crystal Palace mast and back to the Fields We Know that way, or I can drop down to Norwood Junction and get a 75 bus, The second option would join this walk to the route of one I did to Penge a few months ago, so I go for that.

And take a wrong turning on what I assumed was Whitehorse Road and ended up crossing the mainline railway and had to backtrack round the Palace ground to get to Norwood clocktower and a pint at the Alliance Tavern. And I was only five minutes late for evening service.

There are two ways to finish the circumnavigtion formally

In the first year of the walk I worked my way anticlockwise in stages round from Grove Park station (at Downham between Lewisham and Bromley)
to Mitcham via Beckton, Forest Gate, Enfield, Mill Hill, Harrow, Hillingdon, Whitton, Kingston, and Sutton (amongst other places). Not in a continuous set of walks but in a sequence of overlapping walks crossing each other zigzagging through each others routes.But there it rested for about two years longer than intended, In the gap I’ve visited Penge and Norwood a few times (and once the Norwoody bit of Streatham) and I’ve been to Beckenham Place Park. so I know have lines on my AtoZ connecting Norwood junction to Beckenham. I also went to Downham for a funeral and walked back to Lewisham. So I know have only two gaps, totalling less than a kilometre from to connect Beckenham to Grove Park. So I could join the dots with a couple of busrides and less than half an hour’s walking.

Or I can work my way east from Norwood Junction through Zone Four passing south of Beckenham through the outer reaches of Croydon – all those anonymous suburban stations in the litany of the Mid-Kent Railway and the old Crystal Palace line named after pubs and some now reborn as tramstops: Kent House, Clock House, Elmers End, Birkbeck, Bellingham, Beckenham, Bickley. That will keep the outerness going

(Piccies added Monday night)

Mitcham to Norbury, backwards

After the success (from my point of view – I had fun and my wonky knees held up) of last week’s walking round Preston I decided to reboot the second Circumnavigation of London. Which after all was what this blog was supposed to be about in the first place. I last managed any of the walk over a year ago, leaving my anticlockwise journey by stages through London Transport Zones 4 and 5 (with occasional excursions to Zone 6) off somewhere in the middle of Mitcham Common, which as far as I can tell is the only heath in the south of England with its very own tram station.

On Sunday afternoon after church I took a bus to Peckham, than another to Brixton, by which time the rain had turned from hat weather into umbrella weather so I bought myself one in Boots and walked down to take some photos of St Matthew’s Church. Not that I got any good ones because it was impossible to get a decent angle on it from the Brixton side, not without street furniture and leafy trees in the way. The rain didn’t help either. Maybe professional architectural photographers do all their work on sunny days in winter…

Down by bus through Streatham which has always been a rather anonymous place for me. I’ve been at least vaguely familiar with Brixton for all my adult life. Its the sort of place you go now and again, to see bands, or go to parties, or have a drink with friends. Its probably the only place more than a hundred metres south of the river that’s on the social map of most of London. I met my brother there once, walking in the street. “But I thought you never came to South London?” “This isn’t South London, its Brixton”. I’ve been familiar with Stockwell and Balham and Tooting at various times as well. Streatham though is a gap on the map, seen from a distance, wooded hills covered with middle-middle-class suburban homes, 1920s semis with small gardens and leafy streets. I’m never sure what London Borough its governed by either. Most of it feels like Croydon, but I think lots of it is run by Lambeth. It always surprises me that LB Lambeth goes to Gipsy Hill and right up to Crystal Palace where it borders on Croydon and Bromley. It just seems like a different part of London. Its as if Camden went up to the Wanstead Flats.

The main road through Streatham is familiar though, I must have been driven up and down it in other people’s cars hundreds of times, starting when I was in primary school with my Dad taking us to London to see his office, or up to Scotland to visit relatives. Its got rows of impressive redbrick Edwardian shopfronts, large mansion flats, and some of the brashest-looking places of entertainment in London, No, the brashest. They make the old gin palaces and boxing pubs of the Old Kent Road, or the nightclubs in Romford where fourteen year old boys go to get pissed, stare hopelessly at girls, beat each other up, and pass out on the street, look like models of restrained taste. I strongly suspect that the customers who use these places are not the people who live in the winding streets on the hillsides behind them.

Looking at my field AtoZ I realise that I can fill in the next block of my circumnavigation by getting off the bus just after Norbury station and walking up Pollard’s Hill than through to Mitcham Common. That will be back-tracking a little, taking the section clockwise rather than anti-clockwise, but at least it will fill in a gap. And I’m on the wrong bus to start this afternoon’s walk at Mitcham. It turns out I’m on the won bus to start at Pollard’s Hill either – we turn left just after Streatham Common and I get off two stops later and walk back to Norbury Station.

Unlike Streatham Hill and High Street I have no childhood or hitchhiking memory of Norbury High Street. I must have been driven down it, or gone along it on a bus, in order to get to Thornton Heath. But according to my master AtoZs (green lines for walking, yellow for cycling) I’ve never been there on my own steam. Its grottier than I expected. And suddenly Pakistani as well. Brixton is famously diverse, not as all-black as people who don’t know it think it is (or as Balham or parts of Peckham are), but white European faces are a minority in the streets. As you go south through Brixton Hill, Streatham Hill, and Streatham High Street the faces get whiter, and the clothes less stylish. Then suddenly I turn left near Norbury station and maybe half of the people in the street are Asians. Punjabi signs and Halal meat everywhere, though unlike similarly Muslim parts of North London, the people are mostly wearing European-style clothes and I only see one woman with her head covered. Yet one more piece in London’s ethnic jigsaw. Almost as obvious as the Brazilians in North Lambeth or the Koreans out beyond Wimbledon, and (to my ignorance of the district) as sudden and surprising as the tiny cluster of Japanese businesses and faces I found behind Hendon.

Radnor House in Norbury is one of the most unpleasant-looking new buildings I’ve seen in a long time. Blank walls at street level, tiny windows, no obvious doors, as if the only access is by car. A huge block that turns in on itself, posing as a place to escape from the nassty nassty street where strangers lurk. A storage facility for misanthropes who don’t even want to set eyes on their neighbours. Did the architects think it was a machine for living in? Or a machine for turning human beings into Tories?

I get to Pollard’s Hill about an hour later than I’d intended and start up it. The houses get larger, newer, and posher rapidly. By the top of the hill some of them are post-war and most are rather expensive looking. I’d marked the place in my A to Z years ago as a possible destination and I’ve forgotten why. The trouble is there was more than one reason for making such a mark. Sometimes it was a classic bit of high-density suburban layout I read about in Pevsner or elsewhere (there are some cool ones in Merton) Sometimes it was because of some notorious bit of suburban blue-plaquery – maybe John Major’s boyhood home, or ken Livingstone’s. Sometimes because I found a potential view on the map. maybe this was the latter, because although I had no idea as I was walking up it, the hill turns out to be a real hill, with a view in every direction – the St Helier Hospital, central Croydon, Crystal Palace. Howling wind and pouring rain didn’t help the photos though.

And, high-point of the day, if I position myself just right at the top of one of the side streets on the north side of the hill I can see Battersea Power Station in the distance!

RESULT!!

Maybe you had to be there.

Not much more to say, other than passing over a social boundary that coincides with a borough one, then past one of the many William Morris Schools, through a council estate, and onto Mitcham Common. Nice trees, lots of rain, cute goslings. Ending up on Cricket Green in Mitcham. Time for a pint of beer.

Another result. Pub called the Hooden on the green. A pint of very very nice Shepherd Neame Spitfire. Though its nearly five they are still doing food. I haven’t even had breakfast yet, just a cup of tea and a biscuit after church. Roast Sunday Lunch? Well, it smells nice, but I’e only got half an hour as I want to get back to church in time to do evil things to computers and projectors for the evening service. Have they anything lighter. No, only the cooked meal, but the barman will check. He does, and says the cook will make anything on the menu. I ask for a shrimp baguette, for £2.95 instead of the 5 to 7 quid they are charging for the full meal.

Can this be Britain? I ask for what I want rather than when they are wanting to sell me and they make it for me? Have I discovered the secret of power over catering staff?

It gets better. The “baguette” turns out as expected, to be a long roll with shrimps in some sort of slimy sauce in it. Americans and Australians should any be reading this, should know that when eating them Brits name that sort of crustaceans by size, “Shrimp” means little, maybe no bigger than a baby’s thumb. “Lobster” is big, the size of the baby’s arm or even leg. Or maybe the whole baby. “Prawn” is anything in between. So my shrimp sandwich contains a slimy pink sauce, which is not unpleasant, full of little lightly fried abdomens about the size of a bean. But the bread is good, and toasted. And there is a very English green salad – that is some lettuce leaves, and a few slices of tomato and cucumber, and a tiny piece of onion, with no dressing – not advertised but not unexpected.

What was unexpected was the chips. Lots of them. Half a plateful. Hot and crispy too, I’m almost embarrassed. Did I order this? Well I’m not going to complain. Did I pay for it? They’re not asking for more.

So in the end I do have a hot meal, of a sort, and another pint.

And I both got to church on time, and managed to see some Goldmith’s students having an intense learning experience with an overly complicated bit of equipment that seemed to be doing zoom shots of other students in the street.

Take that! Badger-culling scum!

When you look for one thing you find another. I went up to look at an ivy-clad house in a street just north-west of Sloane Square and found this:

I was actually on a Quest For The Mysteriously Aligned Building. I’d been looking at the western part of central London on Google Earth and noticed an odd building inserted into a block at a strange angle to the rest near Victoria Station (51°29′31.03″ N 0° 09′11.69″ W). So I went to have a look.

It’s almost exactly over the road from St Mary’s Bourne Street, where the grid plans of Belgravia, Sloane Street, and Pimlico meet at funny angles. It turned out to be nothing very special – though exactly what it is I have no idea. All over London blocks of buildings are involuting, alleyways and mews are opening up into courtyards, blocks that once only had an outside now have an outside and an inside, increasing both the density of building plan and the surface area across which interior space can meet exterior space. Prokaryotic townscapes are vacuolating and becoming eukaryotic, solid blocks of cells are invaginating, gastrulating, diploblastic structures becoming triploblastic, interior space is breaking out to the exterior through pores and gateways.

But that doesn’t make for good pictures.

Unlike Battersea Power Station

taken in darkness with a long exposure, resting the camera on a wall at the bottom of Chelsea Bridge.

Croydon and Chelsea

Start as we don’t mean to go on. No real walking yet. I actually did get to Croydon last weekend, though not for a walk but a drink, a Ship of Fools meeting in the Dog and Bull.

The centre of Croydon is an interesting place, London’s most large-scale urban suburb, the sort of place that might be less unfamiliar to Americans than most, with a decent-sized central business district of its own. Back in the 1970s and 80s the council used to make absurd references to its “Manhattan skyline” in their publicity, but one of them must have bought a cheap flight to New York and seen what it really looks like and now they have stopped. But now they have trams. The trams are shiny.

The tram system works. Not because its cheaper or more efficient than buses (it isn’t, except when heavily loaded) or faster (it depends) but because it looks serious. It plonks itself in front of cars and says “Hey! We mean it! Pay attention!” It excludes them by being there, a congestion charge on wires. The day it started central Croydon became a slightly more pleasant place to be in.

Which is one of the few recent changes in Croydon that has made it more pleasant. Like a lot of outer London suburbs its been ruined by traffic over the last few decades, Attempts to “pedestrianise” usually make things worse because they are almost always put through alongside an attempt to build a ring roads round the old centre, isolating it from the network of streets that keeps towns alive. (This happens to real towns as well as suburbs – Ipswich and Preston both have bad cases of it, only working well because the “ring road” only gets round half the centre not all of it because their respective rivers get in the way.) Add that to the habit of replanning large areas at once instead of a building at a time, and shopping malls dedicated to car traffic, and most better-off people driving out to large out of town stores to shop anyway, and you get a centre that is isolated and cut off from normal life once the high street shops close, dominated by huge chain pubs selling expensive lager to teenagers out on the piss.

Croydon’s not as bad as some. Bromley is about the same, and Kingston is worse, and Romford is a shithole after 7pm on a Saturday. The time I got to Romford on my walk I looked around to see if there was a pub I fancied going to – there wasn’t, so I tried the railway station for a train back and found seventeen police, with dogs, just keeping an eye on the kids. So I made my excuses and left – ending up lost on the ring road, and waiting for half an hour for a bus while some poor kid of about fourteen was abandoned by his mates and threw up all over the next bus shelter but one and lay down as if to collapse.

Croydon also had police on Saturday. And, even more worryingly, it had about half a dozen emergency ambulances parked on the High Street (which, Croydon being Croydon is only about the seventh most significant main street). The sort of things that you see when something blows up. Engines running. I hope it was an exercise of some sort.

And a queue to get into Wetherspoons. Where else has a queue to get into Wetherspoon’s? It’s a chain that prospers selling cheap real ale to broke middle-aged men. And where else does Wetherspoon’s have bouncers? Ok, that’s a rhetorical question – I saw someone get bounced from a Wetherspoon’s in Argyll Street in Glasgow only just before Christmas. But bouncers are usually is enough to put me off a pub. Anywhere with bouncers must have people they don’t want to get in. So either I’m one of the people they want to protect their other customers from, presumably because I am too old or fat or unfashionable for their sensitive eyes) in which case I don’t want to be there, or else there is someone else who is trying to get in that the management want to protect me from. In which case I’ll make it easier for them by not taking the risk of being there.

The shipmeet was good fun, if a little quiet (my photos of everyone might be for Another Place), the resolutely unbouncered Dog and Bull has nice people in it and good beer (not that expensive either) and on the way out we saw that the ambulances were still there. I hope they had warm coats.

Then at East Croydon Station an unexpected phone call from my cousin who has come down to London to see a Black Crowes concert on Sunday night and wonders if I want a pint on Sunday afternoon? I said yes of course. After all its a long way to come for a gig someone who works for the Forestry Commission in north-east Scotland. Though once he went, by public transport (plane, train, bus, taxi) to a remote village in the west of Ireland to see someone play in a pub. And went back the next day.

So on Sunday afternoon off to South Kensington and down the Fulham Road to have a drink in Finch’s and find him already talking to a woman called Wendy who seems somehow to resemble a garrulous Sandy Toksvig. When the TV started showing the local derby between Chelsea and Fulham (why did we choose that day?) we went off to the Pig’s Ear in Old Church Street. Which was a lot more crowded and I was almost certainly the oldest person present. Lovely beer though.

Its true about Chelsea. The pub, like the street, was full of attractive young women with posh accents who seem to have spent the gross national product of a small Central American nation on the kind of makeup that looks as if it isn’t there. (I passed a shop and thought I saw two dummies in the window, they moved and they turned out to be real.) And, very different from Lewisham, nearly everyone was white & those that weren’t were mostly east Asian.

Apparently it hasn’t always been like that. It was a very mixed area once, before the seriously rich overflowed Belgravia to the west, and decided they no longer needed servants so they let out their mews to the upper middle classes. Those upper middle classes have now got as far as Fulham – which was a mostly working-class district in my own memory – and have got Hammersmith surrounded as they try to link up with their more suburban friends coming in from Chiswick and Turnham Green.

Not all the buildings are up-market Georgian terraces, gorgeous Queen Anne houses that we couldn’t afford to rent breathing air in, or twee converted mews. I was impressed by Hereford Buildings built for Octavia Hill in the 1870s, once apparently “Chelsea’s tenements”, small flats for industrial workers, and now a posh-looking Gothick block of flats home to Royston Hughes, the first pensioner to be given an ASBO to prevent him using the tube.

And there is a dinky but of apparently 1970s (or later?) brutalism in the same street. I’ve no idea what it is but its wonderfully out of keeping with the area. You wouldn’t get away with that these days. Not unless it was well over twenty stories high.