A tour of south London boroughs (but not in the order I visited them yesterday)
BROMLEY - The Penge Heritage Trail
I found myself in Penge, as you do, looking down at the pavement, as you would, and spotted several bronze plaques. One pointed out the adjacent Royal Naval Asylum, one pointed out the obligatory Royal Watermen's Almshouses and another pointed out that a prominent black Shakespearean actor married in the parish church in 1865. They're all part of the Penge Heritage Trail, a crowdfundedproject launched in 2017 to encourage people to walk round SE20 with their eyes more widely open. The two dozen plaques extend from the Alexandra Estate to the dinosaurs in Crystal Palace Park, so that's a win, and David Bowie obviously features because this is southeast London. To follow the trail it's best to download the Penge Heritage Trail leaflet, which I failed to do yesterday because the website was down, but the Wayback Machine has a copy so there's no excuse for not coming Penge-ing.
CROYDON - The shell of Allders
Allders department store left a blighted void when it closed to Croydon's shoppers 10 years ago. Its echoing floors were swiftly taken over by the Village Outlet mall - no prestige offering - before the council chucked them out in 2019 to progress a long-awaited Westfield mall. This too is now dead in the water, some would say thankfully, and the Allders end of the Whitgift Centre is increasingly a tumbleweed annexe you walk through to get to nowhere much more exciting. The latest wheeze, with council backing, is that the founder of Secret Cinema intends to open some kind of art experience called LOST within Allders later this year. Fabien says "LOST's aim as a cultural organisation is to reimagine the exhibition and distribution of physical experiences by designing a new format of entertainment", which suggests this might all be experiential bollox, but he has form in divesting punters of their cash so we'll see. I hope very much he manages to repurpose the dead cafe at the foot of the escalators into the obligatory mid-journey cocktail bar, rather than building one from scratch in the ruins of the soft furnishings department.
KINGSTON - The Fountain, New Malden
The Victorian fountain at the centre of New Malden's roundabout was first damaged in a car accident in the 1930s, then hit again, and was eventually replaced by a fibreglass replica in 1982. Even this no longer works, but when the Maldens and Coombe Heritage Society proposed replacing it they only raised £100 so the inactive column remains. I thought I remembered a pub here called The Fountain but nothing was forthcoming. The Wetherspoons on the corner is definitely called The Watchman, which it turns out is because it used to be the local police station. Meanwhile the Nando's opposite has never been a pub and Fountain House opposite that is only home to some solicitors. And then I twigged that it had in fact been on the fourth corner where a stack of 45 luxury apartments is rising, indeed they've even called the development The Fountain as a reminder, and even though it'll eventually include the facade of a "re-modernised pub" it all sounds less than promising.
LEWISHAM - Urban wildlife
The fox and the squirrel looked at each other, looked at me and scarpered. One leapt up the adjacent tree and the other ran down the alleyway past all the bins. They're getting more brazen, I thought, even more brazen than foxes have been getting since I moved to London. I paused to watch the fox slink off into the stripe of gardens behind the terrace... when suddenly wham, a chunk of branch landed heavily on the pavement beside me, artfully dislodged by the squirrel above. Sorry, it's not a very good anecdote, but it is the most interesting thing that happened to me in Lewisham yesterday
MERTON - Redeveloping Wimbledon Chase station
Plans are afoot to add eight floors of flats above Wimbledon Chase station, because no unlisted 1920s modernist entrance can withstand the onslaught of developers seeking somewhere to make a fast buck. It's an odd rather than alluring station, with a low curved frontage and a long passageway up to the platforms, so perhaps losable, but equally the developers say they can't afford to make any of the flats affordable and they don't have the money to add step-free access so also a diabolical capitalist liberty. Ian Visits has the full story. But what's now unmissable if you walk along the parade of shops outside is the bevy of signs pasted up to encourage locals to complain to the planning authority. Some are semi-reasonable, pointing out excessive height or the loss of parking spaces, but then they slide into raving nimby territory, moaning about An Electric Substation On-Site and 20 Bins Being Emptied Before The Crack Of Dawn, and I pretty much lost all sympathy for the campaign once they got to Our Sewer System Will Be Overwhelmed. Get a grip, it's 83 new flats, not Armageddon, so maybe focus on attacking the key points and stop whipping up all this mindless fury.
SOUTHWARK - The Royal Oak
A fine pub, but can we stop going on about it now, thanks.
SUTTON - Therapia Lane
Many tram stops are named after a road, most of them quite obvious. But I'd never walked Therapia Lane before, indeed I hadn't stopped to imagine quite where it was, nor how far it had fallen. Timewas when a quiet lane zigzagged across empty farmland, but then they built a cement works and a transport depot and then the whole area got swallowed up by the Beddington Industrial Area and now it's a scuzzy patchwork of warehouses and crumbling service units. The old lane has since been blocked a few metres down by a scrap metal yard, so instead you have to divert past a Veolia wasteyard and signs warning of reversing forklifts, then it's back on track between graffitied walls and metal railings avoiding discarded litter and abandoned whitegoods, then a sign opposite the council depot screams Danger Deep Water, and suddenly there's this terrace of a dozen well-tended cottages inhabited by people who don't mind living amid industrial despoliation, and I emerged at the far end wondering what the hell happened there.
WANDSWORTH - The Power Station stirs
It won't be long now (officially 'Autumn 2022') before Battersea Power Station flings open its doors in the hope that Londoners still have cash to splash on brands, hospitality and entertainment. But it's already possible to walk the loop road around its perimeter to see the doors through which they'll eventually be letting us in. Some entrances are solely for future residents, and one temporarily reserved for "VIPs and Visitors", but others at the ends of the building are plainly designed for mass funnelling. I walked down the first set of escalators into the southern amphitheatre, which is a bit wow, and peered in through the basement doors beyond which I saw yet more escalators leading up into whatever. I also managed to attract the attention of a security guard who thought perhaps I shouldn't be quite so interested yet, but that's massive foreign-funded private neighbourhoods for you, and BPS is going to be a spectacular example of that.
