For today's post I selected a six-figure grid reference somewhere in London, entirely at random, and then visited the selected spot. That'll make a change from posting about railways, I thought. But I thought wrong.
Random grid reference: TQ402727 Grove Park Nature Reserve Lewisham SE12
The whole of London to choose from and I landed in a six acre nature reserve with full public access, just to the right of these railway tracks. What's at the appropriate gridreference is essentially a lot of trees but also a chalk meadow, a rare tiny wasp, a nature trail, a potential urban park, a monument to a famous local apartheid campaigner and the site of an abandoned motorway, also the inspiration for a much-loved children's story and knicker-waving film. I thus apologise for the fact I'm going to have to mention the word railway thirteen times in what follows.
The South Eastern Railway opened their Tunbridge line in 1865, here through open fields overseen by a handful of farms. Grove Park gained a station in 1871 and a few large houses appeared along Burntash Lane, while a single footpath continued across the cutting for the benefit of a few farm workers. Those villas spread without ever backing fully onto the railway, leaving a stripe of land that would eventually become allotments, then in 1984 a nature reserve. The footpath survives as a key local connection via a twisty footbridge, from which my earlier photo was taken, indeed you may know it from Capital Ring section 3. And from here it's all too easy to wander off into the delightful patch of woodland at TQ402727.
The southern half of Grove Park Nature Reserve, closest to the grid reference, is mostly deciduous woodland. The ground cover's quite thick but a path weaves round the perimeter, stepping up onto a wooden boardwalk at the top end to ensure less squidgy progress in winter months. A terribly brief stream feeds a small pond where dragonflies and irises proliferate, according to the information board, with adjacent platforms added to aid pond dipping. The wildlife I experienced included butterflies and a squirrel, plus half a dozen young children in wellies engaging in mudplay encouraged by jolly parents who'd brought buckets and towels. A six-post nature trail with QR codes linking to a Wordpress blog can help guide you round.
Keep going and you soon reach a clearing on an embankment overlooking the railway, and this it turns out is the most consequential spot. The meadow here has a chalk soil, this because navvies dumped spoil here during construction of the railway, hence this is one of the only alkaline habitats in the borough of Lewisham. "Best seen in July" says the information board, but after the parched weeks we've had I fear tufted vetch and bird's foot trefoil failed to gain a foothold this summer. The long grass is however ideal for the six-spot Burnet moth, and thus also for the parasitic chalcidid wasp, one species of which was unknown in Britain until it was discovered here at TQ401728.
That weird green leafy sculpture on the bank is the Peace Pole, endpoint of the uncelebrated Grove Park Peace Trail. This leads from Chinbrook Meadows and was inspired by the frankly astonishing fact that the future Archbishop Desmond Tutu spent three years as the curate for St Augustine's Church just down the road. He even came back for the unveiling in2009 when local schoolchildren sang him African songs and he told them how badly he'd been treated in apartheid South Africa. But the famous person who made Grove Park Nature Reserve her own was undoubtedly Edith Nesbit, the famous children's author, who once lived in a house by the top of the footpath, since renamed Railway Children Walk.
In 1894 E Nesbit used her early earnings as a writer to help fund a move to Three Gables, a desirable Queen Anne-style villa on Baring Road. She'd have had a good view of the railway from her back garden, the backdrop then just fields, and also been familiar with the path down the embankment which gave access to the tracks. She and her husband Hubert had a diverse and radical social circle, so for example George Bernard Shaw was known to drop by, and she also scandalised the neighbourhood by letting her children roam barefoot around Grove Park. The Nesbits had moved on to Eltham by the time The Railway Children was written, but it's generally assumed the book was inspired by living beside the railway here, not least because Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis lived in a house called Three Chimneys.
The view out the back is far less sylvan now - four electrified railway tracks augmented by multiple approaches into Grove Park Sidings with its massive carriage shed. Also it was never as rural as you remember from the 1970 film because that was filmed on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway in West Yorkshire instead. Alas Three Gables has long been demolished, the building on site today being a bogstandard three-storey block of flats called Stratfield House. I haven't been able to find out when and where it went, but I do know the two neighbouring semis were knocked down in 1969 to make way for a proposed orbital motorway called Ringway 2. This was a bold (some would say suicidal) plan by the GLC to replace the South Circular and would have wiped out 30,000 houses altogether. You can see how close it came to fruition.
Ringway 2 would have crossed the railway here, eradicating Cox's Wood and all the houses along Coopers Lane to make room for the multi-pronged Baring Road Interchange. Local residents were appalled when the GLC suddenly announced the route as a fait accompli, and joined a growing protest movement which eventually led to an electoral thrashing and the scrapping of the Ringways project. Here in Grove Park the new sense of activism found its voice with the opening of a community centre in the almost-demolished semi, and a cluster of prefabs slotted into the gap where the road would have gone. With a sense of ownership they called it The Ringway Centre, and on a Sunday morning I can confirm it thrives as The Redeemed Christian Church Of God Place Of His Presence.
In the woods out back they've recently set up an outdoor classroom area called Camp Nesbit where schoolchildren come for science lessons, writing workshops and sometimes the chance to walk down to Grove Park Nature Reserve and wave at trains. There are also much wider plans to create a three mile long 'Urban National Park' alongside the railway from here to Elmstead Woods, plainly overoptimistic in these cash-squeezed times but sometimes it pays to dream big. Edith's embankment amid Grove Park Nature Reserve could one day be part of something much larger, ideal for letting off steam, although inspiring The Railway Children will always be TQ402727's first class achievement.
