Mitcham to Norbury, backwards

Categories: uncategorized, circumnavigation

Tags: london

Date: 15 May 2007 01:40:29

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...

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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.

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Streatham Bowling

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.

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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?

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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.

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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!

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RESULT!!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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