1) Study the Sydenham Mosaic
The best place for Sydenham spoilers is the facade of The Sydenham Centre, a community hub in the high street that's half taproom half Post Office. In 2013 it was decorated with eleven circular mosaics to celebrate local points of historic interest, each beautifully designed by artist Oliver Budd, many of which I'll describe further in what follows. It kicks off with the Croydon Canal (18), ends with Ernest Shackleton (16) and along the way celebrates cricket in Mayow Park (19), John Logie Baird (11) and the Crystal Palace Bowl (5). Between the upper windows is a representation of the Naborhood Cinema which once stood on this site and in circle number four is a kitten in a jug, a backstory thankfully explained on the mosaic's website. It turns out kittens were the favoured focus of Victorian artist Horatio Couldery who lived just down the road in Addington Grove, his work once described by John Ruskin as “Unsurpassable in its depiction of kitten meditation”. And he's not the most prestigious artist in the Sydenham Mosaic because the beardy bloke in circle number two is one of the most famous of the French impressionists (2)...
2) Follow in Pissaro's footsteps
In 1870 Camille Pissaro fled Paris to escape the Franco-Prussian War and spent a year living in Upper Norwood, SE19. Twelve paintings from that time survive, one of which is titled The Avenue, Sydenham. It shows a scene in early spring on a broad tree-lined thoroughfare lined by white posts, a bit like Dulwich Village looks today, with a horse and cart approaching and a church tower at the far end. That parish church is St Bartholomew's and 'The Avenue' is Lawrie Park Avenue, the centrepiece of one of Sydenham's finest estates. It's a lot fuller with parked cars than it was when Claude set up his easel but still recognisably the same vista. The National Gallery has the original.
3) Be bowled over by WG Grace
After WG Grace finished his county cricket career with Gloucestershire he moved to London to set up London County cricket club, a breakaway side who played at Crystal Palace. In 1899 he moved into a large villa nearby at 7 Lawrie Park Road and used it as a surgery where he continued his day job as a doctor. He played his last professional match in 1908 and moved the following year to Mottingham where his blue plaque is. It used to be here in Sydenham but the house was demolished the year after they unveiled it (!) and in its place today is a four storey block of flats with a local Lewisham brown plaque instead. The stubby cul-de-sac alongside has subsequently been called Cricketers Walk, although that hardly seems sufficient mitigation. n.b. Rolf Harris used to live round the corner at 4/4A Border Road in the 1970s, but unsurprisingly that's plaqueless.
4) See where a Booker Prize winner was written
In 1989 author Kazuo Ishiguro came to live in the top floor flat at 9 Charleville Circus, a fine villa owned by a colleague his wife had met at Lewisham Social Services. Here he wrote his Booker Prize winning novel The Remains of the Day, apparently in four weeks flat sustained by regular breaks for tea and Mr Kipling cakes with the Marshall family downstairs. The book is dedicated to Lenore Marshall who passed away soon after it was completed. No plaque has been added here either.
5) Make a pilgrimage to the site of Bob Marley's last UK performance
The vast majority of Crystal Palace Park is in SE19 but the northern edge for some reason lies in SE26, and it's here that the Crystal PalaceBowl was located. Here a semi-cylindrical stage faced a small lake with a sloping grass amphitheatre beyond, notionally seating 8000 but almost twice as many turned up for Pink Floyd in 1971. Others who performed here include the Beach Boys, Lou Reed, Elton John, Ian Dury and Vera Lynn, plus Bob Marley's final UK concert on 7th June 1980. The structure gradually fell into disrepair so in 2007 was replaced by an angled metal roof with a capacious platform underneath, the floor of which has itself recently been replaced in the hope of encouraging greater use.
6) Take the waters at Sydenham Wells
Medicinal springs were discovered in Sydenham in 1640 and many came to take the waters, including (many years later) King George III. But magnesium sulphate gave the water a bitter taste so the drinkers eventually headed somewhere nicer and the wells were removed in the mid 19th century. The site would have been built on had it not been for a local campaign group, hence 18 acres were transformed instead into a sloping park with broad paths, ornamental plantations and a chain of water features. Sydenham Wells Park is lovely but best not drink the water these days because there are an awful lot of ducks in it.
7) Track down a rail tunnel ventilation shaft
London's longest railway tunnel, once you discount Crossrail, HS1 and anything that's ever been on the tube, is 1.96km long between Sydenham Hill and Penge East. That was a long way for steam trains to run underground so a ventilation shaft was added midway through the Penge Tunnel in the centre of what's since become a highrise housing estate. It's to be found on High Level Drive, a candidate for London's most motivational street name, where hundreds of SE26's poorer residents live around a cul-de-sac loop within a woody bowl. These days the shaft top is merely a pillbox-shaped concrete plug surrounded by recreational grass, so nothing intrinsically interesting, but people have made infrastructural YouTube videos about far less.
8) Spot a disused railway station Upper Sydenham was the penultimate stop on the branch line to Crystal Palace High Level station, added to the line in 1884 as surrounding suburbia grew. After the Crystal Palace burned there was reduced need for a surplus railway here so passenger traffic ceased in 1954 and the platforms were demolished in 1961. The station area was subsequently subsumed into the estate on High Level Drive but the roadside ticket office survives on Wells Park Road and is now a private dwelling.
9) Discover the origin of the screw propeller
Even as a boy Francis Pettit Smith was propulsion-obsessed, and in the 1830s took out a patent for propelling vessels by means of a screw revolving beneath the water at the stern. He went on to design the world's first screw-propelled steamship and was instrumental in getting Isambard Kingdom Brunel to abandon paddles for screws to power the SS Great Britain. Now a wealthy man he succeeded in cadging land from the Dulwich Estate and building a house on the flank of Sydenham Hill, and that's where you'll see his blue plaque on the front of Fountain House.
10) Admire further fine homes atop Sydenham Hill
Sydenham Hill's more a ridge than a summit, but as one of the highest points in south London it's attracted many a wealthy homeowner since Victorian times. As London's contours go, the richer you were, the better your view. One of the most unusual houses is Six Pillars, a modernist creation added to Crescent Wood Road in 1935 and designed by architectural practice Harding and Tecton. Its six pillars are spaced at uneven intervals to support an overhanging first floor, the high facade conceals a long south-facing roof terrace and the whole thing could perhaps be described as 'flat white'. I love the line in the Grade II* citation which says of the interior simply "severe, with detail deliberately suppressed".
11) See where John Logie Baird received all his bad news
In the race to deliver the world's first public television service, technological battle lines were drawn between EMI based at Alexandra Palace and John Logie Baird based at Crystal Palace. Baird duly moved into a house at 3 Crescent Wood Road to be close to his nascent broadcasting system. When services launched at the start of November 1936 the BBC alternated between the two technologies daily before swiftly concluding that EMI was better and ditching Baird. At the end of the month the inventor of television suffered further indignity when the Crystal Palace burned down, destroying his workshops if not his studio, and ultimately saw out his days in ill health in Bexhill-on-Sea.
12) Explore Dulwich Wood
The ridge slope beneath all these big houses remains dense oak and hornbeam woodland and is a pleasure to wander through. Some of the paths are seriously steep, some are timber-edged for natural protection and some have been surfaced by the Dulwich Estate so local residents can walk dogs year round without getting their shoes muddy.
13) Continue into Sydenham Hill Wood
Just as ancient but considerably flatter, Sydenham Hill Wood is a Site of Metropolitan Importance for Nature Conservation and leased to the London Wildlife Trust. They even had a small tent set up when I visited from which a volunteer hoped to flog merchandise and annual subscriptions. The railway north from Upper Sydenham station once passed through the wood and you can still see the tunnel portal below the precipitous footpath at the entrance, now safely sealed off and doubling up as a registered bat hibernaculum. It's amazing how much there is of interest in SE26 and we're only halfway through...
