Underwhelming London: Pig Farm Alley, Worcester Park
Pig Farm Alley is a long straight path, off limits to traffic, in the London borough of Sutton. It runs from Trafalgar Avenue, off Stonecot Hill, to an edgeland nomansland by the Lower Morden Equestrian Centre. It's about a kilometre in length, all of it immediately alongside the boundary with Merton. It felt quite hemmed in by railings on both sides, with only a couple of exits along the way. This probably has a fascinating backstory, I thought. I may have been wrong.
It looked like it was going to run alongside the Pyl Brook, but that bore off too early. At one point a really tall fork lift truck poked over the highest part of the fence, because local sights include the Garth Road Reuse and Recycling Centre. The only people I saw along the path were cyclists, this no doubt a result of the alley being upgraded to a shared use path in 2014. The graffiti artist @worcesterparksfinest has been colourfully busy along one stretch of wall. A couple of pylons really added to the ambience at the far end.
My interest was piqued when I saw a sign saying this was PROW 1, i.e. Public Right Of Way 1, because Sutton like to use the PROW acronym on their footpath signs. Ooh, I thought, I could run a feature on the lowest numbered footpath in every Outer London borough. But when I checked for Public Rights of Way on Sutton's website all they have is a map with red lines on it, none of them numbered, so my footpath idea fell at the first fence.
What I've since discovered is that Pig Farm Alley was once the southern boundary of Morden Common, ancient grazing lands originally under the control of the Manor of Morden. Part was used for market gardening, including "a strawberry farm, where gooseberries and raspberries as well were grown in abundance". Part became a brickworks with stables, an engine house and moulding sheds, now replaced by the Garth Road industrial estate. Part became a cemetery, but not the big cemetery round here, the smaller one. Merton Historical Society published an excellent 8-page history of Morden Common in 1991 which is available to read here, but that still doesn't make the area especially interesting.
What the booklet doesn't say, because it's on the Sutton side, is that the Worcester ParkSewage Works at the northern end was closed in the 1990s and transformed into New England-style housing. You don't really see that from Pig Farm Alley because of the fencing. And the reason it's called Pig Farm Alley is because before World War Two there used to be a pig farm at the far end, nothing more, nothing less. As Underwhelming London goes, Pig Farm Alley is right up there.
