14) Admire St Antholin's Spire
This is one of south London's proper peculiarities, a sight so incongruous that its backstory has to be extraordinary. Why on earth is there an old church spire on a plinth in the middle of a tiny housing estate? It started out on top of St Antholin's, one of the 51 churches in the City of London rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire. Several of these churches later proved superfluous, and in 1875 St Antholin's was demolished to make way for the development of Queen Victoria Street. In 1829 the top of its spire had been deemed unsafe and was duly snapped up for £5 by a builder called Robert Harrild, who had it moved to the garden of his house in Sydenham. That house too became derelict and in the 1960s its plot was replaced by a dozen very ordinary townhouses. The other houses on Round Hill look quite smart, then you turn off and there's a single cedar tree from Robert's garden, and behind that a glinting weathervane on a stunted spire atop a raised terrace faced by bins and uPVC windows. The stonework was restored by the Heritage of London Trust in 2019 so looks splendid, but I can't imagine what it's like to open your curtains every morning and see a Wren spire in lieu of a daisy lawn and dog mess bin.
15) Go shopping where A-ha recorded Take on Me
Read that again because yes, this iconic Eighties song was recorded in Sydenham. Norwegian band A-ha moved from Oslo to London in January 1983 in search of a record deal and somewhere to record a demo. They plumped for Rendezvous Studios at 107b Kirkdale, run by producer John Ratcliff, supposedly enticed because it had a Space Invaders machine in the corner. Morten, Mags and Pål used after-hours time to lay down four tracks including 'Lesson One', whose title would later be changed to Take on Me. The trio rented a room just round the corner at 221 Dartmouth Road and, being proper lads, commuted to the studio every day by bounding across the intermediate rooftops. Their demo attracted the interest of A&R Records who requested three extra songs and a re-recording with a different producer, then brought in another new producer after the sure-fire hit only reached number 137 in the charts. It was Alan Tarney's version that finally hit the big time in 1985, boosted by a brilliant animated video, and very little of Sydenham remains in the final mix. But if you pop into Paro International Stores, hunting high and low for a wrapped snack, that's where A-ha's greatest hit first saw the light of day.
16) Spot an Antarctic blue plaque
These days you need to have been dead for 20 years before English Heritage will give you a blue plaque, but polar explorer Ernest Shackleton got his in 1928 just six years after his icy demise. His family moved from Ireland to Sydenham when Ernest was just ten, and father Henry maintained a doctor's surgery here at 12 Westwood Hill for the next 30 years. Ernest meanwhile undertook three heroic expeditions to not-quite-the-South-Pole, the second of which resulted in the Endurance being crushed by sea ice and the last of which alas kicked off with a fatal heart attack. His fine-looking childhood home is now subdivided into four flats and his blue plaque is hard to read because it's almost icily shiny.
17) Buy a pint in a rebuilt pub TheGreyhound looks too new to be a Victorian pub and that's because the original caught fire suspiciously in 2007 while plans were afoot to convert the site to 60 flats. The developers waited until 2012 to knock it down, alas without permission, and were subsequently forced to rebuild the pub in its original form because sly bastards don't always win. The brickwork's much too fresh and the interior far swisher than it ought to be, but head to the alley round the back and there's a really nice tiled artwork of a giant greyhound on the wall, so well done all.
18) Catch a train on a canal
SE26's most central station is plain Sydenham, opened in 1839 on the alignment of the former Croydon Canal. Its platforms both used to be south of the main road but were later shifted north, one in 1844 and the other in 1982. If you've ever caught a train here it should be obvious which is which.
19) Play cricket on a heritage oval Mayow Park isn't just a pleasant greenspace, it's the borough of Lewisham's oldest recreation ground. Local grandees grew concerned at the potential lack of open space while the surrounding suburbs were being developed so donated large sums to buy up 17 acres of fields at half market price. The landowner received £8500 and also the honour of having the recreation ground named after him, though thankfully not his full name because Mayow Wynell Adams Park would be a proper mouthful. It's thus a lot more pleasant than some later recs, indeed several of the mature oaks around the central cricket pitch mark the location of former field boundaries.
20) Purchase the original fried chicken Morley's is the quintessential name in fried chicken south of the river, and increasingly north of the river too, and it all began here in SE26. Kannalingam Selvendran opened his Sydenham store in 1985, initially as a restaurant with takeaways before pivoting to a takeout model with limited seating. By the turn of the century his empire had 30 stores and these days it's nearly 100, oft used when a big name rap star needs an edgy backdrop with on-set catering. You can still buy crispy poultry from the red & white checked haven at number 95 Sydenham Road, a high street where KFC haven't even bothered to turn up.
21) Play for Seymour Villa
You'll have been to Alexandra Recreation Ground if you've ever walked Capital Ring section 3, possibly quite unimpressed, but you could spend a lot more time here if you join the local football team. Only children get to be part of Seymour Villa FC, founded in honour of a promising 16 year old called Danny Wandangu who was stabbed in Anerley in 2001, but if you're the father of a player you can join Seymour Villa Vets instead. Plans to revamp the scuzzy changing rooms (in conjunction with the local bowls team) await necessary funding.
22) Take a seat at Sydenham Literary Piazza
Back in 2013 someone thought it would be a good idea to revamp the space outside Sydenham Library as a nicer place to sit down and a potential outdoor classroom. £75,000 of funding from the Mayor and the council helped clear some vegetation and add some wooden benches carved with bookends (Hornblower, Tarka The Otter, The Big Sleep, etc). And a dozen years later Sydenham Literary Piazza looks a busted flush, a tumbleweed corner with not a scrap of information nearby to explain its purpose bar a title on a noticeboard. The former Carnegie library is now on its second community owner, and the piazza cash should perhaps have been used to pay for librarians instead.
23) Stand where Bill Wyman grew up
Rolling Stone Bill Wyman initially lived in Forest Hill, moved to Nottingham during the Blitz and then returned to two different houses in Penge, but for a few months in 1943 was based at 38 Miall Road in Sydenham. Alas for Stones sightseers the entire terraced street was demolished postwar and replaced by some fairly anodyne cul-de-sacs so don't come looking, you'll get no satisfaction.
24) Buy stuff in a gas works
That's the former Bell Green gasworks, a huge site since repurposed as a retail park. You could buy an airfryer from Argos or Curry's. You could buy hot cross buns from a rack beside the entrance to the utterly enormous Sainsbury's. Or you could buy a flat on the site of the demolished gasholders, an up-and-coming development some marketing gibbon has christened Lightmakers to try to obscure the fact it'll look as tediously generic as you'd expect.
25) Throw a Sainsbury's trolley into the Pool River
It'd look right at home beside the plastic bottles, dumped roadsign and half-submerged Lime bike.
26) Play a few ends at Lewisham Indoor Bowls Centre
Their massive shed is really conveniently located beside Lower Sydenham station where the home side hope to thrash Bethlem at mixed triples this afternoon. And yes my list of things to do in SE26 has started to scrape the barrel somewhat the further down I've come, but well done to Sydenham because I found more genuinely interesting things here than I ever managed in SE23, SE24 or SE25.
