For my next alphabetical visit to unsung suburbs we're off to Downham, an enormous LCC estate built 100 years ago to rehouse escapees from city slums. It sprawls across 500 undulating acres at the southern end of the borough of Lewisham (plus a sliver of Bromley), a web of interwar avenues with a fair few trees intertwined. The east side's near Grove Park station and the west side mostly untroubled by trains, so a rather harder commute, which may be why the place is mostly off-radar. It took me an hour and a half to circumnavigate yesterday and I was utterly soaked by the end, more like Pissing Downham, so when viewing the gloomy photos remember it doesn't always look like this.
Until 1924 all this was just two farms off the main road between Catford and Bromley. As perfectly undeveloped land it drew the attention of the London County Council seeking sites for overspill estates in southeast London, spurred on by government funding, so they bought up Holloway Farm and Shroffolds Farm and brought the diggers in. The first turf was cut in 1924, the King turned up for a public opening in 1927 and the whole place was finished in 1930 which isn't bad for a brand new suburb with six thousand homes. As no previous settlement existed the new estate was obsequiously named after Lord Downham, Chairman of the LCC. Houses were pleasant but lowly, generally two-storeys and run together into brick terraces of four or more, but a world away from what the new tenants had left behind. They loved the bathrooms, back gardens and semi-rural setting - definitely better than being sent to Becontree - and paid their 12 shilling rent with pride.
Planners essentially had a blank canvas and drew lines on their maps with gusto. A swooshing spine road called Downham Way linked the existing main roads to either side of the estate, this wide enough for trams, with a web of backstreets added beyond. Shops were eventually added at each end with a lesser parade in the centre, ten schools were liberally scattered and every Christian denomination got its own church. Greenspace was retained where appropriate, with the hilltop preserved as part a long sausage-shaped recreation ground. But it took a long time for some of these promised facilities to actually get built which wasn't ideal for a rapidly burgeoning population, and several early residents grew tired of the isolation and moved away. [1930s map]
A good place to start might be The Downham Tavern, the single watering hole at the heart of the estate, which with such a large catchment to serve was briefly the world's largest pub. Its monumental brick exterior contained two saloons, a public lounge, a beer garden, a ‘lunchroom’ and 34 bedrooms packed upstairs, all finished off with a dance hall nextdoor. It's said the two longest bars were both 45 feet long, which would help explain how the pub got a licence to serve 1200 people. Alas by the 1990s it was beyond refurbishment so Courage sold it to the Co-op who built a supermarket in the car park, then demolished the pub to create a larger car park. As part of the deal they built a rather smaller pub in the corner of the site, barely characterful apart from a squat wooden clocktower, and in 2024 even that dubious establishment closed down. Peering in you can almost imagine the tables set for Sunday lunch with Sky football blaring, if only it weren't actually Sunday lunchtime and patently obvious no cleaner's been inside for months.
Across the street were once Downham Baths and Downham Library, now combined as Downham Health and Leisure Centre. Lewisham council consolidated local services into one megahub 20 years ago, and whilst their intent was efficiency the resulting facility has all the aesthetic appeal of a recreational warehouse. Keep walking up the slope to reach the all-weather pitches, which I can confirm were thoroughly defeated by yesterday's cloudburst and firmly locked. And beyond that the hilltop opens out to reveal a grand vista looking across repetitive rooftops towards the Crystal Palace ridge and all the way round across Bromley. I don't think you can see the City from the summit of Durham Hill but I confess visibility yesterday was very poor, also paths are few and far between and I wasn't willing to squidge across the grass from the community orchard towards the broken bench and check fully.
But traipsing around Downham mainly involves an awful lot of residential streets. The finest face onto linear greens planted with mature trees, but most are part of long residential chains in brick (and occasionally pebbledash). They're nothing special but the architects did imbue them with sufficient variety to add character, perhaps a teensy porch or a geometric flourish in the masonry, though never a bay window or a garage, it being the 1920s rather than the 1930s. The local contours inevitably add more visual interest. What stands out is the uniformity of the living space within, this being an egalitarian estate where nobody got a one-bedder and nobody got four, just homes fit for the families of wartime heroes. The lack of parking spaces does mean most people have to park in the street, but equally those streets are capacious enough and don't feel too clogged.
One of the more dubious chapters in Downham's history involves the 'class wall' at the foot of Valeswood Road on the Lewisham/Bromley boundary. Back in February 1926 the developer of the adjacent estate resented the arrival of a council estate alongside his private development so built a seven-foot wall topped with broken glass across the top of Alexandra Crescent. It meant cutting off direct access to the local park but it also kept the plebs out so was deemed social necessary. Shamefully the wall remained in place until 1950, neither council willing to step in, and only a need for fire engine access finally reopened residents' convenient shortcut to Bromley town centre. All you'll find here now is the derelict shed of the Downham Gardens Guild, no longer dispensing horticultural supplies every Sunday, and some slightly nicer houses than anyone in Downham got.
You might know Downham from the Capital Ring, specifically the start of section3. This swoops in across the railway to pass the fire station... hang on no, Boris Johnson closed that in 2014 and it's been replaced by a long block of flats (a true 3-storey rarity round here). Next comes the Total Garage... hang on no, it's now Shell and with a whopping phone mast planted by the car wash. But beyond that everything's much as it ever was, including the other local recreational highlight which is the Downham Woodland Walk. This ¾-mile path zigzags round the back of umpteen houses and was originally a field boundary, hence all the mature trees. It's a bit of a rustic mirage because only this narrow strip got saved, but still a pleasant stroll and the best place locally to walk a dog. Yesterday however weather conditions were so atrocious that I met nobody for 15 minutes, bar a sporty Dad who'd brought his son to the playing fields for a kickabout only to find the gate locked so they drove straight home.
So comprehensively was Downham developed 100 years ago that it's rare to come across anything substantially new. One of the most jolting intrusions is a massive crescent-shaped wedge resembling either a driving range and/or an electric heater, this the result of a secondary school rebuild in 2005. But generally there isn't anything left to replace, just streets and streets of dependably average houses with modest back gardens in an appreciably green setting. It's no Garden City, as one local journalist optimistically wrote in 1930, but many Londoners would happily swap their stunted flats for a basic dwelling with a front door and proper neighbours. We don't build Downhams any more, London no longer has room, but a lot more large tracts of bogstandard social housing wouldn't go amiss.
10 things I didn't manage to shoehorn into the narrative: The Go Go Cobblers, a chip shop called Rock'N'Roe, the Greenwich Meridian, the somewhat elongated frontage of St Barnabas, the Spring Brook, Downham's slightly rounded streetsigns, Glenda Jackson's son's eye, the meandering 336 bus, His Glory Arena, the Glenbow Road traffic filter. Suggested title for clickbait journalists cannibalising today's blogpost: The Secret Suburb Where You Can Buy A Co-op Limited Edition Spicy Tuna Sandwich On The Site Of The World's Largest Pub Ds I considered going to but didn't: Dartmouth Park, Dormers Wells, Drayton Green, Ducketts Green, Ducks Island, Dudden Hill
