This brief Victorian sideroad was once well known across much of south London, indeed you may even have been born here. It's to be found in Thornton Heath (the pond bit rather than the station bit) and bears off London Road about a mile north of Croydon town centre. Look for Coughlans bakery at the end of the street, or else the faded peeling Saints and Sinners pub (which you can tell closed three years ago because it's still advertising a pint for £2.99). Perhaps dodge the ambulances. And here you'll find Mayday Road, the 300m-long street which juggles A&E with an implausibly broad collection of housing types. [map 1897][map 1954][map 2024]
The story of the hospital starts with an overflowing workhouse, specifically when the Guardians of the Croydon Union purchased land off May-Day Road in 1876 to expand their small infirmary. The new hospital consisted of four pavilions spaced out along a corridor a quarter of a mile long and could accommodate over 400 patients. In 1923 it was renamed the Mayday Road Hospital and continued to expand, adding surgical wings, maternity services, outpatients, clinics, specialist blocks, the whole shebang, until today it's one of the largest hospitals in south London. It was however renamed Croydon University Hospital in 2002, perhaps because someone decided 'Mayday' was an appalling brand choice, although the old name still lingers in the mindset of the populace.
The most recent addition is an enlarged A&E department, the only significant part of the sprawling mishmash complex still accessed from Mayday Road. It's evidently from the 'build a whopping grey cuboid' school of architecture, indeed could easily be mistaken for a multi-storey car park, although the rows of ambulances and police cars parked out front ought to be a big clue. Further up the street a clinical block is fronted with a frankly creepy photo of a headless sister under the caption 'could you be a Croydon nurse?', while the chest clinic can be found on the corner in a redbrick building which originated as the Offices of the Croydon Union so is likely suboptimal for modern NHS purposes. You don't have to look far to spot a masked orderly nipping out for a smoke or an elderly patient manoeuvring out of a minicab, even on a Sunday.
The last surviving business on the street is a car repair shop, formerly Thornton Heath Motors but now the considerably more appropriate Mayday Service Centre, based in a former coach house with a convenient central arch. Apparently they still have an 081 phone number. I thought there was a cafe opposite the hospital elusively called nys, which seemed proud to offer cocoa, ristretto, pizza and a Full English, but closer inspection of the front door revealed piles of litter outside and piles of undelivered mail within. It turns out much-loved Mannys is long gone, as is the Afro-Caribbean grocery nextdoor (whose demise is confirmed by a rotting mattress), as is Boydens Tiles (who've scarpered to Purley Road). In tough economic times, Mayday Road proved a sadly inauspicious location.
The remainder of the street boasts a ridiculously wide assortment of houses spanning 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. You'll find a brief prim Victorian terrace, a quartet of interwar semis and a tall timber-fronted villa. You'll find a single postwar eight-storey block of flats, a solid wall of 79 millennial apartments and a small brick-panelled lump of infill. You'll find a private close of bungalows whose front gardens are dotted with twee ornamental affectations and emblazoned with unfriendly signs. And if you walk up one particular alleyway you'll find 33 pastel-painted flats squeezed onto a former brownfield site hemmed in by umpteen cars their tenants cannot live without. Boydens Tiles is due to go the same way soon, reborn as 57 mostly unaffordable dwellings, as the diversity of tenure extends even further.
All human life is here on Mayday Road, either permanently in residence or visiting temporarily aboard a neenawing ambulance. Indeed if you're a TV documentary maker seeking to focus on a complete cross section of national issues you could do worse than base yourself here... and maybe call the series Mayday Mayday for good measure.
London's second Mayday Something lies in one of the more unsung corners of the Royal Borough of Greenwich, namely the unredeveloped end of Kidbrooke close to the foot of Shooters Hill, coincidentally behind another Victorian restorative institution. Most passers-by only see the front of the former Royal Herbert Hospital, now an imposing enclave of luxury flats, but if you head round the back you'll find a long residential street called Broad Walk. This was once a stripe of open fields roughly following the line of the Lower Kid Brook, bounded by the aforementioned hospital and Greenwich Cemetery, then inevitably succumbed to residential development. Mayday Gardens was added off Broad Walk on the cemetery side, sometime during the interwar period when pebbledash was inexplicably popular, and is lined by 100-or-so spacious semis along its sweeping crescent. [map 1897][map 1954][map 2024]
So wide are these semis that the bedrooms must actually be a decent size, and even then a few residents have had the builders in to add an asymmetrical loft extension. The chief design affectation is that the shared gable is half-timbered, although on some plots the architects went for horizontal boards instead. Porches allow more scope to display one's personality, be that minimalist bootrack shelter or full-on ebony makeover, while a few bay windows up the ante with small stained glass motifs. At the halfway point a brief green traffic island splits the roadway in two, and one lucky corner is blessed with a larger wedge of grass where fruit trees are currently in blossom. But the front gardens in Mayday Gardens have almost all been paved over for parking, alas, which along with an absence of street trees means the 'Gardens' label is now mostly fictional.
Most of the crescent is pretty quiet, the kind of place where an inquisitive pedestrian will raise suspicions. The only noise is residents jetwashing the crazy paving, mowing unseen lawns or driving off somewhere, and the majority of any action is car-related, be that loading, unloading or giving the Qashqai a jolly good Sunday polish. But the western end is rather livelier, in part thanks to a cut-through footpath and the passage of London Cycle Network route 25a, but mostly because it's the only entrance to Shootershill Sports & Social Club. They recently rebranded as The Venue on the Green because they'd really love you to hold your wedding reception here, even a wake, and the gin of the week is always £4 for locals who'd rather not be seen dead in an actual pub.
I'm obliged to journalistPeter Watts for providing the only interesting story I've found about Mayday Gardens, which is that it took a direct hit from an errant parachute mine during the Blitz damaging 27 houses, most of which remained derelict for years. 10 year-old Alan Lee Williams, who later became MP for Hornchurch, remembers his roof being blown off and the fire service plonking a large water tank in the blast zone which he and his brother used to swim in. What's unusual is that all the damaged houses in Mayday Gardens were later rebuilt exactly as they had been before, indeed I never guessed these weren't anything other than the originals, in sharp contrast to more working class parts of London where bombsites generally re-emerged as something new and different. This Mayday disaster, it turns out, had a happy ending.
See also
• Maypole(a hamlet in Bromley)
• Mayfair(a neighbourhood in Westminster)
