Eleven: Now Back to Penge
Back to Penge – Down the Hill to Royston Road – The Conservation Areas
Crystal Palace and my Birthplace
THE LAST LONG LETTER TO MY PARENTS
King’s Lynn, Norfolk
July 2003
Dear Peg and Buster,
I’ve been writing in my memoir recently about how the Festival of Britain made such an impression on me, coming - as it did - in the year we moved from Shrewsbury. It’s easy to make the historical links here. The Festival’s Dome of Discovery connects us with the deservedly savaged Millennium Dome at Greenwich in our own time, something the Old Man would probably be glad to have missed.
But we can look further back. The much more dramatic contact is with the Great Exhibition of 1851 when the Crystal Palace was erected in Hyde Park. Paxton’s tremendous creation wasn’t scrapped a few years after the Exhibition was over. Its owners didn’t close it or sell it to some foreign financial opportunist. They thought it was more important than that, so they kept it, and moved it, as you well know, up onto the highest point of Penge Hill, now called Crystal Palace Park. Standing there, you could practically see the very road where I was born, and the lower part of Penge where you’d come to live in the 1930s. And from that house, you saw the Crystal Palace burn down.
Whatever I may have recalled about my earliest years and whatever I’ve researched more recently, I’ve said virtually nothing about Penge. I know you told me I’d been born there. You may even have taken me there during one of our London visits when I was small, but I’ve no memory of it. Now I must do something about it. Rewinding the tape of memory or experience is pointless: it will be blank. The only answer is to get some experience of Penge as it is today, at this, the latest stage of my life. I need to follow the threads of its history from what I can find, connect them to my own and present my testimony.
I don’t think you’ve ever read the great contemporary London writer, Iain Sinclair. He’s shown us how to do this kind of thing several times. If you were to read his Downriver, Lights Out for the Territory or London Orbital, for example, you’d have re-discovered something you’ve always observed during your own lives. There’s only one way to find out what a place is all about, what makes it tick. You have to walk the terrain. You could probably drive round Penge in fifteen or twenty minutes, and you would have missed nearly all of it. You might have caught the occasional street name or the date on a building, but not much more. For the feel of the area, for the incidental interstices of its history, for the detail and the greater substance, you must do it on foot.
Years ago, I recall you saying something about a nursing home, and I find that the ‘Place of Birth’ on my Birth Certificate is shown as ‘50, Palace Road’. This is on the northwest flank of Penge, just where Anerley rubs against Crystal Palace. The Certificate gives the ‘Residence of Informant’ (father) as ‘71 Royston Road, Penge’. The Certificate is signed W.A. De Jong, (there’s a grand old south-east London name), Registrar of Births and Deaths for the Sub-District of STREATHAM in the METROPOLITAN BOROUGH OF WANSDWORTH. It’s Entry No 43, dated 23rd March 1939, a good six weeks after I was born, showing that the OM left the registration until almost the last permissible moment
Of 50 Palace Road I would know absolutely nothing, and I know as little of 71 Royston Road, for within four or five months you’d removed to Shrewsbury, taking me with you. Strangely or not, I never went to look at Penge during the years when I first lived in London after leaving home. About 1959-60, I lived very close indeed at Honor Oak, close too to your old East Dulwich stamping grounds, and those of your own parents and siblings. I could have caught the 63 bus to Crystal Palace and walked down to Penge from there. But it never really occurred to me. I’ve always known about it but somehow my curiosity was never sufficiently stirred to go and explore it. Probably the distractions of my early life in London got in the way.
By this late stage of the memoir, you’ll realise that I’m no longer rummaging among past memories and dragging them up to the surface, dusting them off and showing them the daylight. This time I’m generating the record brand new, from scratch, for the first time. It means going to Penge in this warm summer of 2003, over sixty years after the critical event, to find my birthplace. I’ve studied page 109 of my old London A-Z closely to remind me of relevant street names, railway stations and the general lie of the land: the relationships between Anerley, Penge, Crystal Palace, Upper Norwood, Dulwich, Sydenham Hill, Elmers End and other contiguities. I’m taking the local Council guide A Walk around Penge - ‘This Walk is Grade 2 (an urban walk with some hills)’ – downloaded from the Internet with its street map. With notebook, compact camera and films, I’m ready to go.
This trip isn’t a pilgrimage. Finding your house, if I do, won’t be like arriving at a shrine. I’m engaged more in a process of exploration with a few specific targets, of making more concrete an otherwise completely insubstantial, yet key, occasion in my own life – its very beginning. There may be excitements at particular moments, chance discoveries and perhaps disappointments. In any case, I’m not just looking for a couple of significant buildings, but for something larger, for the place you used to know. I’m looking for Penge, a name that I’ve known all my life but never known at all as a place. Intending to spend an entire day there, I arrange an overnight stay with good, generous friends. There, soothing foods and wines in the garden, along with fond reminiscences, lead to a good night’s sleep and, for me, a relatively early start next morning.
It’s Wednesday 9th July 2003. By ten o’clock the morning pavements are already well warmed and another hot day is virtually guaranteed. Considering the excellence of most of June, together with what we’re having now (and, as it transpires, most of July in similar vein), the Summer of ’03 could become one of those we recall for the rest of our days. It could come to take its place with the Winter of ’47 which the OM never failed to mention whenever cold winters were under discussion. It may not be the seven continuous weeks of unbroken idyllic warmth of 1976, but both the sun’s heat and the clear mature blue of the sky from dawn to dusk have had that special daily quality we usually only experience in southern Europe. (As we know now, it did turn out to be at least as long as that, still warm, if not actually hot, and comfortable in the third and fourth weeks of September.)
I emerge this beautiful morning from the almost picturesque Grade II Listed railway station of Penge East to begin my personal mission. The station was opened in 1863 and was larger than most at the time. I can see the former Crossing Keeper’s cottage jutting out onto the London-bound platform. My blouson jacket and rucksack will soon become seriously annoying as I spend the larger part of a day walking through the developing heat. I ask at the station whether they have a Left Luggage facility. The man thinks I mean Lost Property. When I explain more clearly, he says No, they don’t. But they might have at Penge West - which is more or less the point where I intend to start the walk. I follow Station and Crampton Roads and, crossing the top end of Penge High Street at the bridge, reach Penge West – familiar territory? - and ask again. The man here also thinks I mean Lost Property, and tells me there’s no Left Luggage there either.
Up the hill and across Thicket Road is the southeast corner of Crystal Palace Park, with the Park Information Centre just inside the gates. One of the staff has just emerged from the Office, which was certainly not there in your day, to stretch her limbs in the sun. Even she, despite her charm and helpful approach, thinks I mean Lost Property. She, too, confirms that there’s no Left Luggage facility. Time to play the sentimental appeal card, I think. I’ve travelled all the way from West Norfolk to Penge, just for the day, for the first time in my life, to try and find the place where I was born. I left it when I was only a baby and have never seen it since. I affect what I hope is a slightly wistful, slightly pained expression. There’s lots of walking to do - I show her the street map - it will get hotter and hotter and I have no idea how . . . She stops me here and says she can look after my stuff in the Office until I come back. But first, she wants to check quickly that there are no bombs inside the rucksack. She’s satisfied. The first practical problem is solved.
I sit on a bench beneath the trees for a few minutes, fixing the map in my mind and re-reading the introductory comments to A Walk around Penge. This supportive material has provided most of the historical detail included later in my perambulation and showed me what to look for. I’ve no idea how much of its history you unearthed when you lived here, but for at least a thousand years the woodland area known as Penge (from Celtic: Penceat or Pencoed, meaning Wood End) belonged to the parish of Battersea, used for grazing pigs and recorded in the Domesday Book: ‘A wood for fifty pigs pannage’. Even the 1769 map by Andrews, Drury and Herbert shows little more than Nottley Farm and Penge Green with a few scattered cottages. A road ran along the line of the present High Street linking Beckenham Village, Dulwich and Upper Norwood (then Westow Hill).
From 1809 to 1836, the Croydon Canal operated between Surrey Docks and Beckenham via a wharf at Penge. It failed commercially, its traffic eventually replaced by the railway. This development, readily linking Penge to London, stimulated Penge’s expansion as a place for people to live, but the most dramatic changes resulted from the opening of the Crystal Palace itself. In 1895 Penge came under the administrative control of Lewisham, Kent, then becoming part of the new County of London. Five years later it became an Urban District and was finally incorporated into the London Borough of Bromley in 1965.
Penge High Street provides the obvious spine through the centre of this relatively small and compact suburb, running on a south-easterly curve down the hill from Penge West station. After slightly less than a mile, it becomes Beckenham Road. As I discover, the High Street is also the boundary between two rather different Penges. Behind the rows of shops, the right hand side – the side where you lived - has very late 19th and early 20th century streets of long terraces of small ordinary houses and some shops. On the left there’s a variety of residential developments dating from 1839 onwards to the end of the 19th century, intended for different purposes and for different social classes. The right is more commercial, narrow, crowded, tightly parked on both sides and potentially bustling; the left, more residential, wide and spacious. The latter – and I should think you’d easily recognise them - are now designated Conservation Areas: well preserved streets or groups of dwellings each with its own distinctive style, an atmosphere of its own, open, roomy, quiet and with very little daytime traffic. It feels as though a slice of busy Peckham or Clapham had been put down next door to a piece of laid back Wimbledon or Dulwich Village, the shop-lined nudging the tree-lined.
*
I go down the right hand side of the High Street first where I’ll eventually reach Royston Road. My starting point is Penge West Station, built on the site of the former Penge Wharf belonging to the Croydon Canal. The London and Croydon Railway Company bought it in 1836 and the railway follows the route of the canal for some distance here. When services began in 1839 the First Class fare to London was 1 shilling and 3 pence (1/3d), Second Class 1 shilling (1/-) and Third Class 9 pence (9d). Like Penge East, the Crossing Keeper’s cottage was built as part of the station and is still there today.
A deliberate diversion takes me down Oakfield Road, the first significant street off the High Street on this side. It leads me to Woodbine Grove where the world-famous Peggy Spencer Ballroom Dancing School flourished for more than forty years. Peggy is now over 80 and coincidentally lives in King’s Lynn where I’m writing now, providing my reason for following up this unexpected link. Later accidental research reveals that Bill Wyman, the Rolling Stones bass player, met his wife Diane at the Royston Ballroom here in the late 1950s. Although a Woodbine Grove address is still shown on the Dance Centre website, I find no trace of it on the ground. The road itself, along with neighbouring streets, has been demolished. You wouldn’t recognise it. In its place is a complex estate of low-rise blocks of flats, called The Groves. There seems to be nothing remotely resembling a Dance Centre. Woodbine soon becomes Graveney, and a dozen or more new Groves, Courts and Closes have been added. I shudder at the thought that something like this may also have been done to Royston Road, my ultimate objective, and that, when I get there, I’ll have nothing to see. This notion gives an extra frisson of anticipation to something I’d previously more or less taken for granted.
Back to the High Street. This side has the wider pavement typical of many London suburbs, built wider to give the terraces of small shops the space to display their goods out in the open. It’s exactly like the stretch of shops my grandfather (Pop) always called ‘The Terrace’ on East Dulwich Road, where the hardware shop displayed brooms, buckets, dustbins, forks and spades, clotheslines, dishcloths and mops. It makes the street feel more like a market. Next door to the barber’s shop here, there is indeed a selection of hardware goods on the pavement: planks of timber, green plastic water butts, small aluminium folding ladders. Next door but one there are beds and other furniture out in the open. Then comes ‘Kim’s Happy Days’ with every kind of stationery, gifts and toys as well as plenty of things that wouldn’t be out of place in the hardware shop.
This broad street has light traffic, though more than you would have known, but there are always small clusters of people waiting at the bus stops. Both sides have myriad small business premises with flats above them, with today’s versions of the local trades that have always been needed there – newsagents and tobacconists, hairdressers, cleaning and pressing, internet café, Indian restaurants, Chinese takeaways, fruit and veg. shops, ethnic delicatessen, video hire, snack bar, minicab office, photo-processing mini-lab, launderette, small cafés, chemists. Further down on my side the inevitable MacDonald's is housed at street level in what is clearly the former cinema – where you must often have gone – near what is now the Beckenham Office for Racial Equality.
Several small legal or accountancy firms have Asian names, and a fair number of the businesses are Caribbean or Asian, probably run and staffed by members of a single family. Many look rather run down without necessarily being run down, quickly turning over relatively small stocks of a large variety of products. People on the street are as mixed as the shops. My impression is that the white people are fairly distributed between the genders but most Asians I see are women and most of the Caribbeans are men. You certainly wouldn’t have seen them on the street in the late 1930s. This is the High Street where you did your shopping or popped into a local pub. In your final few months here, you’d have been pushing a pram with me inside it. Without invoking any synthetic sentiment, I’m following the very path you took every working morning from Royston Road to one of the two Penge stations for Victoria or London Bridge. In the evenings you did it all in reverse, walking these very pavements that I’m using today for the first time.
Across the High Street a bit further down is an old church, next door to the Blitz Ironing Parlour. This is Mosslea Hall, erected as a small chapel for independent worshippers in the 19th century and apparently used since then as a soup kitchen as well as a place of worship. It’s been totally renovated recently, looking almost new with bright red brick, new grey slate roof with leaded dormer windows, new tall arched timber windows and concreted buttresses. In the process, several separate private dwellings have been created, and there are at least five estate agents’ FOR SALE signs at the front. Almost opposite, on my side of the High Street, is The White House, said to be one of the few buildings along here originally intended for residential purposes, built in the 1840s. This two-storey bowed double-fronted house has a panel above the door, now announcing Dental Surgery. Three men emerge as I draw level, looking like neither dentists nor dental patients. They drive off in a red Transit van, which neatly releases the very space I want for taking a photograph.
Further down the hill stands the Penge War Memorial, which I’m sure you’ll recall. It has its own semi-circular space with neat flowerbeds inset off the pavement, and black railings tipped with gold paint. It’s a tall Celtic-type cross in rough stone on a substantial stepped rectangular base. Councillor Hodes unveiled it in 1925 to commemorate local people who died in the 1914-18 War. Names of those who died in the Second World War were added later. A Walk around Penge tells me that the area was ‘very badly hit by flying bombs during the last war’, but over sixty years later there’s no quick and easy way for me to know where they fell or what damage they did. Your move to Shrewsbury in the summer of 1939 was clearly beneficial in more than one respect, though, as I soon discover, Royston Road itself escaped damage.
Now I’ve reached Maple Road and am nearly halfway towards Royston Road. This end of Maple Road is in the High Street Conservation Area and street markets are held here on certain days, though not today. Nonetheless, the street is busy, with terraces of small Caribbean and Asian shops on either side. Further up, where the shops give way to terraced houses, I can see what looks like a corner pub called The Maple Tree over on the left. A large prominent building at this end is the long two-storey late 19th century pub called Market Tavern (formerly The Dew Drop Inn). Painted dark green with bright white window frames and gold livery at ground floor level, it has three doors and two satellite TV dishes above. It is open, but I’m not tempted. I reflect, though, that it’s close enough to where you lived to have tempted you in its time – The Maple Tree, too, perhaps.
I walk up Maple Road only as far as St John’s Cottages, that short row of modestly sized houses with front gardens, set at right-angles to the street itself. They were originally ‘built in 1863 as almshouses with money donated by John Dudin-Brown – the benefactor of St John’s Church and Watermen’s Almshouses. The architect was Edwin Nash, who also designed St John’s Church’. They’re built of predominantly pale yellowy brick, with slate roofs and five chimney pots per dwelling. This is one example of the philanthropy at work in Penge during the 19th century. More expressions of it appear later on the other side of the High Street. Across the road is The Salvation Army Citadel, dated 1895, a considerable building in red brick with plentiful stone facings. Its frontage above the door rises to a triangular peak, topped with a stone finial in the familiar shape of a chess pawn. From my photograph, I see a four-line text on the stone lintel above the door that I’d failed to notice. What I did notice is that they still use the Citadel for its original purposes.
As I walk back to the High Street, my eye catches two objects on the other side: a tall, narrow, green, copper plaque, with a stone surround in ecclesiastical style, set into the brick wall; and the pub called The Crooked Billet. The plaque is worded:
In Memory of
the Brethren and Apprentices
of the Watermen’s Company
who made the Supreme Sacrifice
in the Great War 1914-1918
this Asylum was Restored
in 1920 by the Subscriptions
of Members and Friends
◘ ◘ ◘ ◘
Greater Love
hath no man than this
that a man lay down
◘ his life ◘
for his friends
This is the street wall of the Royal Watermen’s and Lightermen’s Almshouses. Built in 1839, they provided accommodation for retired Freemen of the Watermen’s and Lightermen’s Company and their widows. It was also used for members of the Company who were constantly becoming redundant as more bridges were built across the Thames, making their former trade unnecessary. Local benefactor John Dudin-Brown gave the land, then called Billet Field, and £1,200 towards the building costs.
The architect George Porter modelled the Almshouses on Oxbridge Colleges with a cloistered quadrangle. I wander around and through this delightful, quiet enclosure. It’s like a tranquil monastic oasis, giving no indication that you’re in a London suburb or anywhere else in particular - except, perhaps, an Oxbridge college. The magnificent twin-towered chapel has curved leaded pinnacles. One tower has a clock on its front face, the other a sundial, and the triangular peak above the doorway is surmounted by the Royal coat of arms. Standing among luxuriant shrubs, lawns, paths and neat miniature hedges, the main houses are in yellowy brick, with elegant chimneys in clusters of four and red ridge tiles in the shape of little trees or arrows. Here and there a carved stone mythical beast rears up on an ivy-covered plinth. As I go round, I wonder how often you might have walked through here. It all has Grade II Listed Building status now and I discover only the following weekend that the chapel (since converted for private dwelling use) is for sale. An unusual selling feature is the original Shanks and Co lavatory fitted into a reclaimed confession box.
The Crooked Billet is a large pub with a long, yellow frontage onto the High Street. Today it’s called Jack Beard’s at The CROOKED BILLET. According to A Walk around Penge:
It was originally built in 1827 as a small double fronted house with a gable
and projecting porch. It was rebuilt in 1840 when all the new building was
going on in Penge. The original owner was Peter Burrell, who sold it to the
Cator family. In 1834 it was sold by auction to a Mr Lambert. For many years
there was an Assembly Room upstairs where many august bodies such as the
Penge Masonic Lodge, the Ancient Order of Druids, and the Penge Rotary Club,
to name a few, held meetings.
I shall see inside it later after walking round several of the other interesting roads behind it. However, something else catches the eye here deserving mention, if only for its monstrosity value. Between the Watermen’s Almshouses and the frontage of the Crooked Billet is a triangular space, recently laid with the fashionable Italian cobbles that you find in every town and city these days. Its centrepiece is a tall, shiny aluminium (probably) cylindrical pillar. Three-quarters of the way up it is an irregularly shaped, lop-sided transparent open umbrella in Perspex or similar material. On top of the pillar above this thing is a circular clock. Clocks are always useful in public places but the rest of it could not be more grotesque or inappropriately positioned, especially given its proximity to the outstanding buildings of the old Almshouses. This is about the only truly contemporary architectural object I see in the whole of Penge and it’s an utter eyesore. I can easily imagine the Old Man’s comments and the tone of the letter he might have written to the local Council.
These diversions are interesting, and I must follow them up when they occur. They give me more detail, more of the essence of Penge. At the same time, they keep me from my true purpose on this side of the High Street, walking along Royston Road to find No 71. But there’s more to it than that. I want to discover these bits and pieces of Penge’s past and present to provide the significant context. Then I can prolong the final moment, as I’ve been doing, and come upon it as part of the whole experience, taking it in when it occurs naturally during my tour. By now, I’m fairly close. Across the road I see the yellow-brick Penge Police Station:
. . . the oldest of the Metropolitan Police Stations . . . opened in 1870 following
public demand for a police presence in the hamlet. In 1869 Mr William
Gibson of the Parochial Council wrote to the Metropolitan Commissioner:
“A police station should be erected with the coming of winter and consequently
an increase in crime, on the growth in poverty and want of employment of the
lower classes in the locality.”
Passing the Congregational Church, built in 1912, its tall East end abutting the road, I reach the first of three parallel roads named Kenilworth, Clevedon and Royston. They’re like three cricket stumps, with their points in the ground of Penge High Street, and Westbury Road running across the far end of them like the bails. Only two roads to go now as I pass the end of Kenilworth with nothing much to report, except that about here Penge High Street becomes Beckenham Road. Clevedon offers nothing either, and then - in front of some white-painted curly ironwork on top of a brick wall - a green street sign saying ROYSTON ROAD SE20. I stop, take a photograph and wait a few moments. I turn right and walk, not too fast, up the road.
The street hasn’t been redeveloped. There are smallish trees at regular intervals in the pavements on either side in front of terraces of two-storied houses, some with hedges but most without. Both sides are solidly parked with cars nose to tail, probably the only real difference you would notice. You may remember that Royston Road’s odd numbers are on the left. I walk up the even-numbered side so that I’ll have a better view of what I’m looking for. In common with many terraced streets, the houses were built in stretches of perhaps six or eight at a time to a particular common design. As I approach the top end of the street, I see the end of a red brick group giving way to the last pebble-dashed stretch before the end of the street. This is it. But is it? These small houses, maisonettes really, are in pairs. Beneath each arched porch there are two front doors. The one on the left would lead you into the ground-floor dwelling, the one on the right to the upstairs one. I read the house numbers under each porch: 61 and 63, 65 and 67, 69 and – there is no 71. After that come 73 and 75, then 77 and 79. Of all the houses built to this particular pattern, numbers 69 and 71 appear, from the outside, to be the only ones merged into a single residence. While the entire building is quite clearly still there, and I can see exactly where you made your home, No 71 no longer exists separately in its own right. My feelings are mixed: I’ve found the very place I was looking for but, in that single detail, not quite as I’d wanted and hoped it would be.
The main thing is that it hasn’t been either demolished or developed out of recognition. The bricks of the porch have been repainted in bright red with white strips on the mortar. The former front door of what was No 71 is now a white uPVC window, matching the new white door of No 69. The front hedge is thick with yellow and green privet, hydrangea and laurel bushes. The whole frontage is probably about ten yards long, and you’d pass between yellow privet and laurel to reach the front door. As I take a couple of pictures, a woman with a pushchair comes along and wonders what my purpose is. She’s very interested when I tell her, wanting to know when you lived there – the houses would have been relatively new then, we think – and where I’ve lived since. What a shame, she says, that I can’t take a photograph with ‘No. 71’ on the front door. I agree. It would have been the perfect finishing touch.
*
About midday now, and I walk slowly back down Royston Road towards the High Street. I think about you and your early life together in this street, at a time when, despite having known you all my life, I didn’t know you at all. I can visualise you in your late twenties, but not in any sharp detail. My strongest memories of you are, naturally, the more recent ones, of you in older age increasingly preoccupied with the very business of living from day to day. This later period of your lives, especially mother’s, has certainly preoccupied me in recent years. Writing a memoir has had the very positive result of pushing my imagination back into the earlier, seemingly lighter, years when we were all much younger.
Now I cross over to walk through the Conservation Areas and see the ‘other Penge’. A row of shops faces me, comprising part of Central Parade: Kew Electrical Lighting (Huge stocks, Lowest prices), China Lily (For Chinese, Peking and Cantonese Fast Food), Castle Associates: Pawnbrokers, Elite Dry Cleaners, Tweety Nails Studio and The Blue Orchid. Behind this façade is a different world, with no sign of small commerce, no business premises, no flats above shops: an environment of space and trees devoted to quiet residential needs.
I take the recommended route in case I get lost or miss something interesting. Near the railway bridge up Green Lane, but not yet in the Conservation Area itself, I pass a scrap metal merchant’s yard behind a high chain-link fence. A tall, dilapidated board advertises TODAYS PRICES for Bright Wire, Heavy Copper, Braziery, No. 2 Copper Wire, Gunmetal, No.1 Gun Metal Swarf, Mixed Brass, No. 1 Brass Swarf, Aluminium, V.I.R.Wire and Lead. No prices are shown against any of them. The hefty dealer and his hefty female companion sit with their hefty dog in the yard on folding chairs, enjoying the sun, seemingly oblivious to the lack of business. Just past the bridge and before the bus stop is the old Horse Trough filled with blooming flowers, dedicated to David Benjamin 1815-1895. Then turn right into Parish Lane and down Kent House Road to the Barnmead Road Conservation Area.
A relatively rare feature nowadays, though quite common when I was a child: Barnmead is an unmade road. It’s dusty and pebbly, and lined with trees. On this magnificently hot sunny day, it feels almost like a village street on the continent, practically deserted in the throbbing heat of the day. An occasional pedestrian passes but, apart from a parked tradesman’s van, I see no traffic at all. The building firm of Syme and Duncan developed the road between 1883 and 1903 on land formerly known as Barn Meadow, one of the fields belonging to Kent House Farm. Most of the houses, frequently called ‘villas’ in their day, are large when compared to most contemporary developments, ‘mainly Victorian but with some Edwardian features’. Intended for middle-class occupation, they’re in extremely good condition, mostly but not all semi-detached, many with large bow windows to the main upper and ground-floor rooms, with sliding sashes. Again there is plentiful yellow brick, some with red brick decorations over the windows, and grey slate roofs. A number of front gardens have been adapted to allow for car parking in front of the house rather than on the street, but many still remain unreformed, filled with flowering shrubs, bushes, creepers and some very large trees.
The former mansion Kent House names the nearby railway station, the next stop out of London after Penge East. The house was demolished at the end of the 19th century having most recently been a nursing home, and finally a hotel. A Walk through Penge says it dates back to the 13th century (with an early mention of one Lethieuller Esq. occupying it) but the ownership details provided are very sketchy:
During the reign of Edward VI (1547-1553) a survey of the Manor of Battersea
was made, and at that time a man called Thomas Wood lived in Kent House. In
the late 19th century it belonged to John Julius Angerstein who was the founder
of Lloyds of London. At that time it was a farm of 178 acres. On this side of Kent
House Road you are in Penge. Cross the road and you are in Beckenham. There
used to be a stream here which marked the boundary . . . This stream has now
been put underground.
That last point reminds me of my recent discovery about the river in Brussels. As you know, I was sent to work there for several months in 1961 and I spent plenty of my spare time walking its boulevards, streets, squares and parks. I was there again recently, and had a good look inside the King’s House Museum on the Grand’ Place. On an upper floor there are paintings of the city made in the 18th and 19th centuries. I suddenly noticed that they depicted a river flowing through the city. I couldn’t work this out. I’d walked the city from end to end and side to side and never seen a river. How could I have missed it? On reflection, it is surprising because virtually every city and many towns, especially very old ones, were established on the banks of a river at a good crossing point. The answer came in a later display of 19th century photographs, showing the burying of the River Senne underground during the 1880s. This was done to purge the environment of the noxious stink of the variety of industrial waste being poured into it by the many mills and factories on its banks. The same happened to the Fleet River – and others - in London.
From Barnmead, you walk through Kent House Station beneath the railway line into the Aldersmead Road Conservation Area. This is another late 19th century housing development with even more space around it. Local builder Mr Whiffen began the construction work in 1888. The houses were ‘only built on one side of the road to give the residents a fine view across Cator Park’. This is still the case today. They are large semi-detached houses in yellow brick but with many more redbrick decorative features and other details than you see in Barnmead Road. Many have stone window surrounds to their main rooms on both floors, with mock Classical pillars, pilasters and capitals, and there are stained glass decorations in many of the original front doors. The road took its name from a field called Alder Meadow:
It once formed part of Copers Cope Farm, which was acquired by the Cator
family in 1783. They were major landowners who owned Beckenham Place and much of the land around it. It was John Barwell Cator who sought parliamentary permission to develop the land around Beckenham in 1825, having suffered financial losses through the purchase of land in Norfolk in 1813. A plan was drawn up in 1864 by Peter Cator, an ex Indian civil servant with considerable business sense, to develop much of the Cator land . . .
. . . but the development only started some twenty years later and wasn’t completed until 1894. The only people I see on the street here are in a group of three, two parents and one adult daughter (I presume), who could be on a mission similar to mine. From time to time, the older woman stops in front of a house and describes things we can all see as well as other things that only she knows about, inside the house, or round the back of it. She’s not quite sure, and goes back to look again at one of the houses they’ve already examined. She looks at me, to see what I’m doing. Have we both come to find the same house on the same day? She certainly seems to be looking for a particular one, but then I’m not. I’ve already found mine and am just browsing, looking at all of them reasonably quickly and taking the odd photograph. I overhear a fragment of personal family history as I pass them for the last time, and then step out towards the end of the road and its junction with Lennard Road.
This provides a long, reasonably gentle but unrelenting uphill walk and I deliberately cross over to the shaded side of the street. I reach Holy Trinity Church. It was ‘consecrated in 1878, built by the generosity of the Peek family on land given by Albemarle Cator, the architect E.F. Clarke’. The East end is open to the skies and its windows gape glassless. Apparently it suffered an arson attack in 1993 but the funds eventually raised for rebuilding work couldn’t cover all the damage done. On the south side you can see the rebuilt sections of the roof at levels lower than the original. Further up on the right is Cator Road, developed to provide large, detached houses ‘much grander in style than those in Aldersmead Road or Barnmead Road . . . for the professional classes who sought quiet dwellings which were nevertheless within easy reach of the capital’.
These are big houses with big rooms and long frontages. The pair Numbers 11 and 13 are typical in both size and style. Yellow brick yet again with stone window surrounds and four steps up to the front door, topped with a semi-circular red brick arch. A line of decorative brickwork runs right across the front between first and second storeys and the whole thing is under a relatively shallow grey slate roof with chimneys visible at either end and at the back. The main rooms to the left have bowed sash windows beneath a pointed turret covered with curved grey tiles. There is a decorative strip of red bricks, four rows deep, immediately beneath the guttering. The front gardens are mostly more extensive than those of the other Conservation roads, and the space between houses is probably larger too.
I’ve seen how the middle classes and the professionals were housed in 19th century Penge. Now to find the dwellings intended for working people. I walk back to Lennard Road and across it into Hardings Lane. The left hand side is part of the Alexandra Cottages Conservation Area which also includes roads called Princes, Albert, Victor and Edward, rows of terraced houses and small semis. Alexandra Cottages is an estate of 164 two-storey houses:
. . . constructed between 1866 and 1868 by the ‘Metropolitan Association for
Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes’. This organisation was
established in 1841 to provide housing for labouring men and their families. It was unusual because it was the first organisation to build semi-detached dwellings with their own gardens . . . The cottages were built in pairs like modern semi-detached houses, each pair occupying a generous plot some 40 feet wide and 90 feet deep. It was a lavish layout by the standards of the day, made possible only because the land had belonged to the Duke of Westminster, who aided the Association with favourable purchase terms for a meadow belonging to him . . . The cottages all have side entrances, allowing maximum room for living accommodation, and they all have two or three bedrooms. They were all let to working men from London. They are now mostly privately owned.
A substantial picture of planned housing development in this part of Penge during the19th century has become clear. There are trade guild almshouses, entire roads devoted to the houses of middle and professional classes, and an estate for hundreds of working people and their families. The process took in almost the entire second half of the century. At times land was given free of charge by large local landowners or sold to the developers on generous terms. Some benefactors even provided funds for the building costs. What you can still see on the ground today expresses, in one way or another, evidence of all the varied gradations of the English class structure from the landed aristocracy or gentry owning the land, to the working man, renting the smaller houses built on it. I didn’t expect to find all that when I set out to look for your former home, and I wonder what memories come back to you from being reminded of all those Penge street names. And there are still more to come.
Down Albert Road and across Parish Lane to Penge Lane, and I’m back at the High Street with the Watermen’s Almshouses on my right and The Crooked Billet on the left. The awful modern clock thing tells me it’s five to one on this blazing day, and I’ve been hammering Penge’s pavements non-stop for three hours. This is the perfect opportunity to pause, to get inside the Billet, give my throbbing feet some recovery time and reflect on what I’ve seen and thought. In summary so far, I’ve found what I hoped to find and have discovered a great deal more. It’s more than just a question of facts or historical data or architectural detail. The whole emotional baggage is what gives the project its purpose. It has worked and I’m both satisfied and pleased to have reached this point to such good effect. The Sinclair modus operandi could never let you down. I know I deserve a pint of beer now and a good sit down.
Dripping with south London sweat, I approach the bar. Two elderly men sit with newspapers and pints at a table near the mercifully open door, chatting vigorously. Two or three other people lean at the bar, looking round occasionally at a television screen on low volume showing some kind of sport. The words ‘London Pride’ on a pump speak to me at high volume. Delivering it, the barman says ‘Two pounds sixty’. This central London price dismays me. I consider it a bit much for a pub in Penge. Having no pound coins, I hand him a fiver and sixty pence in coins, expecting three quid change. I wait, looking at my pint but not yet touching it. He comes back from the till at the other end of the bar and asks ‘Is that all right?’ ‘I was waiting for the change’, I reply. He goes back down to the till and opens the drawer. Then he calls out ‘Did you give me a fiver?’ ‘Yes, and sixty pee.’ ‘Ah.’ He rattles around among the coins in the till drawer for ages. What can he be doing? Has he got enough change? Eventually he returns and gives me three pound coins in one hand and sixty pence in the other. ‘Thanks.’ This makes the pint only two quid, which is much more reasonable. I go to a table near one of the other open doors, where he can’t see me and won’t be tempted to think again about what he has just done. It strikes me that he’s probably not tempted to think about anything very much very often. I also know it’s not for me to tell other people how to run their business.
Half an hour later I’m off again. I want to finish Penge now and get up to Crystal Palace to find the nursing home. On the next corner up the High Street is St John’s Church, designed by John and Edwin Nash. It was built in 1850, partly financed by the local benefactor John Dudin-Brown, and the Watermen and Lightermen’s Company received the patronage of the living in perpetuity:
The new church could accommodate 500. The present building was enlarged
in 1861 and 1866. The North aisle contains the King Edward VII window (The
King was 29th in direct descent from the first known Lord of Penge – Earl
Harold Godmisson). The window contains the figures of Temperance and Hope, executed by one of the William Morris Studios in the style of Burne-Jones . . . The West window incorporates a landscape of the area with Crystal Palace and the church easily identifiable.
This sounds interesting enough to have a look inside. I haven’t been into a church yet during the walk, but soon find that I won’t be going into this one. The door is locked. So I continue up the road to the King William IV Gardens, the last significant location on the circuit.
Built in 1837 as the King William IV Royal Naval Asylum, this group of almshouses accommodated widows of naval officers. A Walk around Penge reveals that both these and the Watermen’s Almshouses have plumbing designed by Thomas Crapper (1836-1910). By the same architect who designed the Watermen’s Almshouses, they also follow the quadrangle principle with gardens, bushes and trees in the centre. Here the brick is dark red with stone surrounds to windows and doors, all very recently painted cream. Roofs are grey slate and the chimneys, somewhat out of scale, are tall Tudor style in pairs and fours all round. It’s another secluded hushed haven of stillness, another suburban surprise in SE20. You don’t quite feel like a trespasser in here but it is an area that instinctively demands respectful behaviour. On the way out I find the cast iron boundary post inscribed Beckenham Parish 1868.
*
I’m particularly disappointed to discover that the popular myth about Thomas Crapper is only a myth. Apparently, no evidence whatsoever exists that he invented the first flushing lavatory. Albert Giblin probably invented it, and was granted British Patent 4990 for his ‘Silent Valveless Water Waste Preventer’ in 1898. Most likely, he sold the patent rights to Crapper who proceeded to market the product. Crapper himself held nine patents for plumbing and waste-related devices, including a spring-loaded lavatory seat which caused the cistern to flush when the user got up from the seat.
Having served his apprenticeship, Crapper first became a journeyman plumber in Robert Street, Chelsea and later moved to the well-known Marlboro’ Works nearby. Eventually the firm established a ‘flagship store’ – quite possibly the first ever bathroom showroom - on the Kings Road, opposite Royal Avenue in 1907. By then Crapper had retired and sold the business to his two partners, who kept the name. He had served as royal sanitary engineer for many members of England’s royalty, and his installations appeared at Sandringham, Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey (where one of his manholes is popular for brass rubbing). Crapper and Co. held the Royal Warrant under Edward VII and George V, just one aspect of a significant contribution to our national plumbing history. Thomas Crapper lived in Thornsett Road, just off Beckenham Road. His grave is in Elmers End Cemetery where one of his close neighbours is the cricketer WG Grace.
One of his living next-door neighbours in Thornsett Road was the writer Walter de la Mare who died in 1956. He was a clerk in the Anglo-American Oil Company until 1908, about the time you were both born, when he was granted a Civil List pension to enable him to devote his time to writing. He wrote several volumes of poetry, particularly though not exclusively for children, novels, short stories and essays. These include the prose romance Henry Brocken, the poetry collection The Listeners and the fantastic novel Memoirs of a Midget. He became Companion of Honour in 1948 and received the Order of Merit in 1953.
It is his adult poetry that probably attracts most analytical comment. H. Coombes, in the Penguin Guide to English Literature, Volume 7, writes:
It is indisputable that most of his poetry evades reality in various important ways.
Yet precisely because of his evasion, his gifts being what they were, he created a
body of exquisite minor poetry . . . he cultivated fantasy, he aimed consciously at
entrancement.
He summarises de la Mare’s central themes:
Happy childhood, harsh adult world, happy recollection of childhood,
pleasure and profit in dreaming, beauty and transcendental worth of
nature, the duty to love: this seems a reasonably fair account.
He enumerates a considerable list of the writer’s shortcomings, including ‘a tendency to repetition’, ‘flat emotional commonplaces’, ‘excess of self-pity and yearning for rest and peace’, ‘ponderous moralising about time and eternity’. Even so, he manages to conclude much more positively:
It is a measure of de la Mare’s gifts that when all has been said in question
of his total achievement, there remain poems of his fine enough and numerous
enough to ensure him a permanent place among twentieth-century poets.
So my last precinct of almshouses brings me back to the High Street. I take away with me thoughts of Thomas Crapper, de la Mare and other notables in the developing Penge of the mid-late nineteenth century. Enid Blyton lived here, and Camille Pissarro made a painting of one of the railway stations in its then rural landscape. More than that, I reflect on the countless faceless and voiceless folk, including you, my own parents, who lived here into and through the fast-changing twentieth century. On Penge High Street again, the more distant past gives way to the past that is only now being created, the past that I belong to, as I focus again on my real reason for being here.
*
Now at last to find my birthplace, the nursing home at 50 Palace Road, opposite Crystal Palace station. It’s getting on for three o’clock now and I’d be quite prepared to pay for a taxi if I could see one anywhere. I should think I’ve only seen two all day. They will certainly come out and flock around the two stations at commuter time but seem to be in hiding during the rest of the day. I join the temporary limbo at the bus stop nearly opposite the end of Mosslea Road. A minute later the single-decker 227 arrives and takes me to the Crystal Palace terminus at the far end of the Parade for 70 pence.
From there I have a hot walk down the steeper part of Anerley Hill to the railway station. While Penge East largely owes its appearance to the rural cottage tradition, Crystal Palace, Grade II Listed, is a positive aristocrat among outer London suburban stations. It’s resplendent in its new manifestation, the result of a Millennium Fund £4.5 million refurbishment during 2000-2001. The chunky brick-built tower at the Park end of the building is topped with the truncated flat-sided irregular cone, itself topped with wrought iron tracery, each face covered in grey slates, that typifies the medium-sized country mansion in the Loire valley. It probably looks as clean and new as it ever has since it was first opened. The new dark green and red paint on the row of six cast iron columns shines freshly in the sunlight. The stone window frames have been meticulously cleaned, right down to the details in the composite Ionic/Corinthian capitals of the flat pilasters at ground floor level. It’s a majestic architectural statement in a high place, and I’m sure you’d approve.
The building’s size and shape speak of the epic 19th century train journeys people made between London and the great capitals of Europe - Brussels, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vienna and beyond. In a scaled-down sense, it reminds me of the commanding edifice of the SNCF station at St. Omer, or one end of Amsterdam Centraal, or part of that great cathedral of a station at Antwerp. It looks as though it was designed in the same spirit of mid-century optimism that brought the re-located Crystal Palace to this spot in the 1850s and then brought the crowds of Londoners out for the day to see it. Its tragedy now is that all it does, day to day, is to process the blind hordes of commuters in and out of central London, and that such a proud monument has to be associated with the wretched apology for a railway system that we’re probably doomed to endure for the rest of our days.
I only have to cross Anerley Hill to Palace Road to see at once that the search for my birthplace is doomed to fail. The original street has been completely demolished and replaced by a high-density development of two or three storey blocks of maisonettes. They’re all very neat and clean, with competently kept gardens. But the Number 50 shown on my Birth Certificate no longer exists. I hadn’t worked myself into a towering state of anticipation beforehand. Even so, having found 71, Royston Road and now this place, it is disappointing to discover absolutely nothing to locate the moment of my entry into the world. It would have been satisfying, at this culminating stage of the walk, to find the very building, to look at it for a few moments, to reflect and photograph it. This cannot be. With the material available, the best and nearest I can do is a shot of the green street sign that says: NOS. 31-53 → PALACE ROAD.
With some regret, I wander round this little estate, perhaps just in case the builders had missed the old No 50. Then I walk back towards the main road. On the corner of Palace Road with Anerley Hill is the only building standing that bears any relation to what used to be there: the substantial, square, three-storey corner pub, The Paxton Arms Hotel. Painted in cream overall, with its name in gold lettering on red background, you can see the earlier messages at the top of the second storey: Taylor Walkers Ales and Established 1730. A large notice on the front corner advertises HOME COOKED FOOD and something I’ve never seen mentioned anywhere before, a DRINKING LOUNGE. A big wordy panel above the Palace Road entrance tells the story of someone drinking there who smartly rescued someone else during a wartime air raid. The old Taylor Walker lamps are still in place and the pub sign has been given a new frame high up on the wall. The whole exterior is equipped with a range of lamps and floodlights, and I can imagine its striking night-time appearance, especially as you approach it from further down the hill. If established in 1730, it was almost certainly a coaching inn and certainly not named after Paxton originally. I wonder what it was called in 1939. I wonder also whether the OM slipped in here a few times for a pint while awaiting the outcome of Mum’s labours in the nursing home. I think I know the answer to that.
A few photographs later, the project is more or less complete. I decide to walk back to Penge down through the Park. The annoying thing you realise almost immediately is that, on this side of it, you can’t avoid the National Sports Centre. You imagined yourself strolling across wide green spaces or drifting through the soft shade of mature trees in full high summer foliage. Wrong: you have to walk at ground level or on raised walkways on hard, pitiless surfaces as you negotiate – almost circumambulate, it appears – this enormous concrete installation. I end up doing it on the road itself where there is a thoughtful but narrow lane at the side with white symbols of little pedestrians. The road itself has the word SLOW written on it in long white letters at regular intervals, and fortunately there is no traffic to read them.
Paxton’s Crystal Palace of 1851 was a showcase for British brainpower. It displayed to the world the products of home-grown human inventiveness, ingenuity and originality. It celebrated the technical and economic might of the leading mid-Victorian nation. This National Sports Centre, in its slabs of concrete and its stark lines punctuated by ‘futuristic’ angular additions and decorations, expresses a contemporary enthusiasm of a very different, though more democratic, nature. The achievement celebrated now is physical, something that most people could do if interested and properly trained, and which tens of thousands of other people want to watch them doing: extreme physical feats - running very fast, jumping very high and throwing things over long distances.
This place is an Olympic Games writ much smaller, but for most of the time nothing whatsoever is happening here. Like the railway station, it just has to cope with the occasional rush. The runners, jumpers and throwers only do it in public now and again, when they are ready and when enough of them are invited to do it all together at the same time. So this enormous obstacle to my sylvan promenade sits there, empty, vacant, silent, occupying acres of former green space, denying the whole notion of a park in a city suburb. Of course, if there has to be such a facility, and it seems there does, it has to go somewhere. The athletics lobby would probably argue that there’s still plenty of space left in the Park for sylvan walkers and everybody else. They may be right. I’ve no idea whether anyone objected when the thing was in its planning stage. Some of the locals certainly did object much more recently when developers proposed a 16-screen multiplex cinema, bars, restaurants and car parks up on the Parade. The case went as far as the High Court and the objectors won. They were not having it in their back yard.
For me today, this Centre is simply in the way, both physically and emotionally. It is not my kind of thing. I see this inert, rocklike focus of utter inactivity resembling an awkward spaceship sent from a planet where they have no sense of humour. All its control systems are intact but idling, waiting for new instructions. Close to, you can hear its cooling or heating mechanisms buzzing quietly. Its supervisory functions are all locked into permanent snooze mode. Or, if you like, you could see it as a madhouse for people convinced that the zenith of human fulfilment is running round and round and round, fast. When they do it, crowds of people will come to watch them, rather as the crowds would turn out to gawp at the lunatics in the Bedlam Hospital gardens. The last lot of inmates here obviously ran so well and so fast that they managed to run away from the place completely. Now it waits for the next consignment of nutty people who will run round in circles, jump up and along and throw things at nothing, torturing themselves while entertaining everybody else. I have to remind myself that all this runs counter to the OM’s position when young. You ran fast and swam fast and collected cups and medals for doing so. It’s not impossible that I was a disappointment to you in this respect, let alone any others.
In the end, I reach the shady avenue of trees towards the Park gates. The day has moved on now. There are mothers with prams and children, dog-walkers and sitters on benches. One of the gardeners is messing about with a long, yellow watering hose. Just before I collect my stuff from the Information Office, there are still a couple of things in A Walk around Penge that I haven’t seen yet, and I might as well complete the circuit if I can. I find one of them easily: another cast-iron Boundary Post, marking the boundary between Penge, Surrey and Beckenham, Kent. It’s about two foot six high, red with a black top like a mushroom, inscribed Hamlet of Penge 1875. The final item is a 300 year-old oak tree, known as the Penge Oak, said to be the last surviving tree from the old West Wood. But it’s over towards the lake which is all fenced off by an orange plastic fence. I decide this one isn’t really worth the effort. After all, I still have to walk back to Penge East for the train to Victoria.
I think I’ve done enough and, by now, I’ve had enough. I’ve walked the territory for nearly five hours, most of it on the flagstones of Penge on this, the hottest day of the year so far. Now I know whereabouts I was born. I’ve seen the house where you two lived and, after all these years of ignorance about it, I have got the measure of Penge. The circle is complete. For me, the job is done.
Your son and only child,
Graham
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