From Pollard's Hill to Norwood Junction

Categories: uncategorized, circumnavigation

Date: 21 May 2007 01:55:02

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)