A surprisingly high number of obscure London suburbs begin with L so this was hard to narrow down, but in the end I plumped for one of four in the borough of Bexley. It's large enough to have a park, a parish church and a residents' association, but also very much overshadowed by the town that bled into it. It's called Lamorbey, and today I'm pleased to be able to take you on the Lamorbey Town Trail[pdf] compiled by the Lamorbey and Sidcup Local History Society. Starting at Sidcup station.
The thing about Sidcup station is that it was originally in Lamorbey, not Sidcup. But when the Dartford Loop line opened in 1866 this was the closest the line came to the town, linked by a long country lane to the south, so they called it Sidcup anyway and Lamorbey's fate was sealed. At the time nobody lived inbetween but that mile was swiftly infilled so there are now essentially two Sidcup town centres, the one with the decent shops and the one with the trains. A lot of people feel the need to catch a bus from one to the other.
In 2012 a hideous goldbuilding erupted beside the station, The Fold, with a startling level of architectural bling for a borough more used to low-rise avenues. I was surprised not to be able to spot it given it really used to stand out, and then I noticed the drab brown building with a stripe of gold trim at rooftop level. It seems most of the frontage was brass which has oxidised and darkened to a deep chocolate colour, precisely as intended, while the curved brass façade was made from the same alloy as a £2 coin and has retained its colour. Across the street is an uglier concrete block called Marlowe House, this the tallest building in the borough, originally built in 1966. The Met Police bought it 20 years ago and amongst the units housed across its 17 storeys is the Metropolitan Police Museum (not the really grim exhibits because they're at Scotland Yard, and no you can't come in and look, and the whole building's smothered in scaffolding anyway).
When the station opened the closest buildings were those of a farm complete with oast houses, this being deep Kent at the time. In 1931 the farm was replaced by an Art Deco style Odeon cinema, then replaced again in 1964 by a swimming pool called Lamorbey Baths. The latest rebuild is a green-tiled block of 30 flats and you can probably guess which of the three previous incarnations they chose to name it after - deposits are now being taken at urbanpicturehouse.com. Refreshment opportunities along this end of the parade include the Chunky Teapot, the Hackney Carriage Micropub and The Iron Horse, a pig ugly pub on the site of the former Station Hotel. Tiny railway needs are taken care of by Invicta Model Trains, a walk-in emporium at number 130. And if things sound fairly drab so far fret not, Lamorbey gets older and more interesting as it nudges north.
The local chapel needed an upgrade in 1879 so they built Holy Trinity, a three-aisle Gothic ragstone number. It was meant to have a tower but they ran out of money, hence the bell still hangs in plain sight on the front of the building. The church hall across the road at least managed a spire but it's ridiculously thin and maybe only has space for a couple of pigeons. The main point of interest is that both church and church hall have boards outside saying 'Holy Trinity Lamorbey', thus confirming that this L-place really exists because up until now you might have been wondering.
Another name to throw into the mix is Halfway Street, formerly a hamlet on the backroad from Eltham to Sidcup, though not exactly halfway. It's special because it contains the oldest building in the borough of Bexley, a timber-framed yeoman's cottage dating from the 15th or early 16th century (so more Henry VII than Henry VIII). It has whitewashed roughcast infill, a hipped tile roof and wattle-and-daub partitions, also a ring of thick wisteria skirting above the ground floor windows. Neighbouring cottages are rustic but not as old, and Ye Olde Black Horse Inn may say 1692 on the exterior but is actually a rebuild from 200 years later.
The odd thing about Lamorbey Park is that it has no sign on the main road telling you it's here, just a gap in a low wall and a path leading off into the trees. They're excellent trees, many of them lofty pines with a scattering of cones on the needled grass underneath. They date back to 1926 when a Greenwich businessman bought the hotel beyond the lake and decided to create grounds worth staying in. Sorry I've not mentioned the big house yet but walking the Lamorbey Town Trail delivers all the sights in a narratively unsatisfying order. The big house is key to everything but also annoyingly bloody hard to see because it's shielded by fences, trees, more trees and an adult education college on almost all sides. I managed these really paltry glimpses across the lake, not helped by it being summer rather than winter.
The estate's first recorded owner (in 1495) was Thomas Lamienby, Deputy Reeve of the Manor of Bexley. He was originally from Lamonby in Cumbria and that's where the peculiar name of the big house originally came from. At least three 18th century owners had strong links to the slave trade, the last of these a Scottish laird additionally associated with the Highland clearances, confirming that aristocratic history is often murky. It was in 1837 that the manor house gained its finer Jacobean twiddles and an additional storey, and around 1910 that the owners lost interest and offloaded it as a hotel. That's the short version of the backstory but there's a 2000-word version here, the level of detail I suspect because the Lamorbey and Sidcup Local History Society started out as an evening class at Lamorbey House.
The coniferous stripe the public can walk through is called The Glade and features one old wall that used to be the edge of Lamorbey House's kitchen garden. You can't get out to the south because that's Chislehurst and Sidcup Grammar School, a purple blazered haven, and you can't get out to the north because that's the domain of the Lamorbey Angling Society. The long thin finger of a lake is a former tributary of the River Shuttle ornamentalised 250 years ago and the LAS have exclusive dangling rights on the opposite bank. The duck-infested water breaks briefly just before the golf course, which used to be 18 holes before the Chis and Sid halved it, and here our loop heads back.
The fortress-like boundary around Lamorbey House is because it's now the domain of Rose Bruford College, a drama school founded in 1950 by the eponymous Rose after the council offered her a peppercorn rent. Over 600 students now study for degrees in the performing arts here and the campus has since expanded into studios upon studios upon studios. The roll call is stupendous with alumni including Gary Oldman, Pam St Clement, Stephen Graham, Jessica Gunning, Anthony Daniels and Tom Baker. I checked the motivational message emblazoned across reception and it says PROCEED FOR HOPE IS EVERGREEN, this at the back of a very large car park, also term ends this week so expect Lamorbey's showboat quotient to reduce over the summer.
Burnt Oak Lane is a meandering leftover from the days when all of this was fields, now repurposed as a mile-and-a-half-long suburban wiggle. And on the first bend are grand gates into another world, because it's always good to have an 'I never knew this was here WTF' moment when you go exploring. In 1902 the grounds of a country house called The Hollies were transformed into the Greenwich and Deptford Children's Home, a self-contained workhouse village for 500 waifs and orphans. Boys were accommodated in three-storey houses while girls got cottages, all named after trees and arranged in institutional loops amid open coniferous parkland. The Home didn't close until 1989, after which the estate was transformed into really nice flats with modern infill and a slew of surrounding cul-de-sacs.
At the centre is a fat clocktower which originally contained water tanks, and alongside is the swimming pool where children got their exercise. In a sharp reversal of clientele the pool is now the heart of The Hollies Countryside Club, a private leisure establishment exclusively for residents of the estate complete with tennis courts, sauna and yoga classes. The estate's all very nicely done, if to modern eyes a shocking waste of space, and something of a contrast to the 1930s semis that abut on both sides. You may never have been to Lamorbey, nor felt the need to visit, nor even heard of it, but it's somehow comforting to know that London is so vast that everywhere are forgotten corners that a lucky few call home.
