'Past Lives'

Day 28

 

Denmark Hill - Deptford Bridge - Devons Road - Dollis Hill

 

Bit of a complicated start to the day, as my car's MOT is due and I need to drop it off at the garage near Boston Manor tube station before I start travelling. Also, I've got an audition for a TV commercial later this morning in Soho, which should fit in nicely between the first couple of stations on today's agenda - but will obviously add to the complexity of the route.

 

On top of all that, I'm writing all of this in my native Yorkshire accent, as the TV folk are looking for people with regional accents, and I need to get back into the swing of it tha knows...

 

***

I leave my car at Boston Manor and follow a rather circuitous route to Denmark Hill, involving a Piccadilly Line train to Earl's Court, followed by a District Line train to Victoria and finally an Ordinary Passenger Train to Denmark Hill.

 

The Ordinary Passenger Train, you may remember from previous posts, is not the same as the London Overground. The latter is really nothing more than an overgrown tube train, and its stations all appear on the standard Tube Map. The former is your typical British Intercity railway train, and very few of its stations appear.

 

Both networks pass through Denmark Hill, but to arrive here on the Overground line, I'd have had to add one or more further interchanges to an already complex journey - so the route from Victoria seems to make more sense.

 

Along the way, I pass the familiar chimneys of the former Battersea Power Station, and also the somewhat startling sight of a paddock with a few horses standing nonchalantly about. Not the sort of thing you expect to see in this urban landscape.

 

According to Google Maps, it's the Ebony Horse Club, and offers disadvantaged young people the chance to ride and care for horses, and as a by-product, improve their own life-skills and education.

 

Denmark Hill

A short while later, I arrive at Denmark Hill and, since I had an earlier start than usual this morning, I decide that my first port of call is going to be the station coffee shop for breakfast. The FCB (which stands for Flying Coffee Bean) Artisan Espresso Bar is one of a small independent chain of half a dozen coffee shops in stations across the South East. I'm a little bemused by the fact that the barista takes great pains lovingly creating the artistic flourishes in my latté's frothy surface, only to defeat the object by slapping a white plastic lid over the finished artwork.

 

Still, the coffee is good and the almond croissant is one of the best I've had in a long time (and I'm something of an aficionado).

 

Denmark Hill is a road in Camberwell, which over the years has also given its name to the immediately surrounding area. It used to be called Dulwich Hill but was renamed in honour of Prince George of Denmark, the husband of Queen Anne, who reigned from 1702-1714. Perhaps the most significant event in her reign was the creation of the formal Union between England and Scotland, resulting in the birth of the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

 

Given current events north of the border, the fact that I'm visiting a place with such a connection at a time when the Union could effectively come to an end, seems somehow significant.

 

William Booth - and his HQ

Immediately opposite the station is the solidly imposing structure of the William Booth Memorial Buildings - also known as the William Booth College.

 

It is the training college and museum of the Salvation Army, which was founded by Booth in 1878, and which grew out of his earlier 'Christian Mission'. Booth and his wife Catherine had been keen evangelists for several years but it was to be the Salvation Army that secured their place in history.

 

Mrs Booth -
the 'Army Mother'

Not merely preaching Christianity, but donning a uniform and conforming to a military-style hierarchy of soldiers and officers (with Booth as the 'General'), the Salvation Army soon spread worldwide. Social welfare, and in particular the problems of alcoholism and poverty, formed a major part of the Army's work - not entirely to everyone else's pleasure. Those members of the working classes who opposed the Salvation Army's denunciation of alcohol, set up their own rival 'Skeleton Army' to march against them. Clashes were frequent and violent.

 

Just up the road from the college is an odd little collection of animal sculptures. Odd, not because they are overly grotesque, but simply because there seems no particular reason for their being here in the first place.

"Run" by Leigh Dyer

 

There's a wolf, and across the footpath, a family of sheep - first a ram...

Do you ever get the feeling you're being watched...?

 

Then a ewe feeding its young lamb, oblivious to the watching predator...

Lamb for dinner anyone...?

 

I search in vain for an informative plaque or notice telling me more about them, but all I find is a tiny square of metal with the title "Run" (which at least makes sense) and the artist's name - Leigh Dyer.

 

There's nothing wrong with the sculpture, in fact I quite like it - I just wish there was a bit more information about it somewhere. Not even the artist's blog, which itself doesn't seem to have been updated since 2009, has any more than a passing reference to it.

 

Around the corner from this puzzling little menagerie is, so the estate agents would have us believe, the narrowest house in London. And it's currently on the market at £350,000.

 

Des. Res.?

87c Grove Lane is a 'one-bedroom house, with garden, high-quality fixtures and fittings'... and is a mere 99 inches wide.

 

 

Here's a picture of it. It's the bit on the left at the end. No, it doesn't include the bit with the bay window... It's just the lower bit stuck on the side. That's it.

 

 

 

And yet despite being the epitome of 'compact and bijou', it still, according to the estate agent's blurb, apparently manages - and I can hardly believe the cheek of this - to offer 'a spacious living area'.

 

Now, ok - at 99 inches (or just over 8 feet) it's big enough, as you can see, to allow for a narrowish door, and a narrowish window, plus a bit of wall to hold them up - but just picture, if you can, the room behind.

 

A sofa would instantly wipe out half the floor space. Add a coffee table and a TV on the opposite wall and the only way through to the kitchen at the back is swinging Tarzan-style from the light-fitting.



On the other hand, if you were to lose the TV remote control you could just lean forward and turn the thing off manually I suppose...

 

***

From Denmark Hill I divert briefly to my audition. It's the usual procedure, and I won't bore you with the details here.

 

Instead - fast forward an hour or so - and you'll find me arriving at Deptford Bridge.

 

***

Deptford Bridge

Deptford Bridge, my next stop, is on the DLR near Deptford Creek just south of Greenwich, and - like Greenwich - has seen it's fair share of maritime and non-maritime history.

 

Not that you'd necessarily know it from wandering its streets. Like so many pockets of London I've encountered, and no doubt will encounter on this journey, it's all looking a little dilapidated.



The station itself is named after the short stretch of the A2 of the same name. This runs between New Cross Road to the West and Blackheath Road to the East, and historically was the site of the decisive battle that put an end to the Cornish Rebellion of 1497.

 

The good folk of Cornwall took exception to the war-taxes imposed upon them by King Henry VII to finance his campaign against Scotland (before, the time of Queen Anne's Union - obviously) and some 15,000 of them, led by a blacksmith named Michael Joseph, marched to London, via Devon and Surrey.

 

Eventually, having reached Blackheath, they were engaged by the King's troops, and - partly through being outnumbered, and partly through lack of coordination - they were roundly trounced and eventually surrendered. The ringleaders were, of course, executed.

 

None of this is evident here today of course - it's just a collection of crumbling brickwork and peeling paint.

 

However, the location of another historical event - or at least, it's aftermath - does still survive, and it's here I'm headed after leaving the station.

 

The event in question was the death of the Elizabethan playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe. He was killed, according to legend, in a tavern brawl over a disputed bar bill, and St Nicholas Church, which lies some way to the north of the station, is where his body was buried.

St Nicholas Church

 

Very welcoming, I'm sure 

Unfortunately he was buried in an unmarked grave, but the gates to the churchyard seem appropriately macabre for the author of Doctor Faustus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alas, poor Marlowe...

 

 

I wander round the peaceful churchyard, but with little else to guide me I'm left with nothing but my imagination to mentally locate the mortal remains of the great man somewhere beneath the neatly trimmed grass.

 

 

 

 

Somewhere under here perhaps?

 

 

***

Devons Road is another DLR station, located in another rather shabby part of London - but sadly without the redeeming features of historical rebellions or literary deaths to appeal to the casual visitor.

Devons Road

 

There is history here of course - as there is everywhere, if you dig deep enough - and in this case, it's related to the pub that stands just a short distance along from the station.

 

The Widow's Son was built in the early 19th Century and is now a Grade II Listed Building.

The Widow's Son - don't complain about the buns being stale whatever you do...

 

 

It is also the location for a quaint little tradition that takes place every year on Good Friday. Legend has it that the old widow whose house once stood here, had a son who went off to fight in the Napoleonic Wars. He wrote to her often, like a dutiful son should, promising her he would be back home for Easter - and asking her to make sure she had baked some of her lovely Hot Cross Buns for his return.

 

Of course, he never did return, but the widow continued to bake him a fresh Hot Cross Bun every Good Friday, presumably on the off chance that he would be a bit peckish if he ever did come home.

 

After her death, the people entering her house were surprised to find a huge collection of stale and untasted Hot Cross Buns hanging from the ceiling in a net.

 

Of course, it's probably all a load of old codswallop, but this hasn't stopped the tradition being continued by the pub - to the extent that every year a sailor from the Royal Navy has the rather dubious honour of placing a fresh bun into the net that now hangs above the bar.

 

It's a diverting tale, but not enough to keep me on Devons road for more than ten minutes or so - so it's off to the final stop today: Dollis Hill.

 

***

Ah, Dollis Hill...

 

Dollis Hill

I always feel a bit sorry for the last station of the day, as I'm aware that tiredness and wanting to get home and put the kettle on can often skew my judgement and leave me with not very much to say about them.

 

It's particularly the case when what would, under any other circumstances, be a perfectly pleasant place to wander about - with neatly decorated houses on leafy tree-lined streets leading to what seems to be a popular bit of parkland - gets labelled in my mind as either 'sleepy' or 'dull', simply because it's a bit quiet.

 

The station, which is on the Jubilee Line, sits between Burnley Road to the north, and Chapter Road to the south and the platforms are like a little desert island surrounded by a sea of railway tracks. There are more tracks than usual here because the stretch between Finchley Road and Wembley Park is also shared by the Metropolitan Line, but the trains on that Line don't stop at all between those two stations, and therefore pass by on the outer tracks at high speed.

 

A narrow passageway leads to Burnley Road, and a couple of shops and cafés sit serenely on the quiet street corners. A car service station has its shuttered doors wide open, but no sounds of mechanical labour emanate from within. It's all very peaceful, and... dammit - sleepy!

 

I walk along one of the roads heading north from Burnley Road to the park I mentioned earlier. This is called Gladstone Park, after the Victorian Prime Minister, who was a regular visitor to the country house that once stood at the northern end of the park. The house is no longer here, having been left derelict for many years, largely destroyed by fire, and eventually demolished.

Gladstone Park - green and pleasant land

 

The park however is a pleasant spot, with the usual collection of dog walkers and pushchair-wielding mothers, and I enjoy a brief stroll along its pathways. Eventually though, I decide I've seen enough, and make my way back to the station.

 

It's been a funny day. A day of peeling back the cracked and flaky surface and revealing the turbulent history beneath. Murder, rebellion, religion, Cornish Peasants, Victorian Prime Ministers and Hot Cross Buns have all played their part. But at the end of the day, all I really want is to put my feet up with a cup of tea...

 

***

Still, I shouldn't be too downbeat about it, after all the one thing Dollis Hill can claim, which no other station can, is that it's the last station listed under the letter 'D'. I've finished another letter! The 'D's are d-d-d-done!

 

BOOM!!!

 

(As the young people say.)