We live in Forest Hill.

We live in Forest Hill...

...or to be more precise the Honor Oak Park end of Forest Hill.

 Let’s start at the station where you would get off the train if you were coming for a visit.

It doesn’t look like much does it? You can’t complain though. From here it’s just a few minutes to ours or 12 minutes to London Bridge or 20 minutes to funky Shoreditch.

HISTORY

Forest Hill is in South East London. Many years ago it was indeed a forest. Now it’s more of a hill with houses and council flats rather than trees. The forest of the 16^th century was used by Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I to build the fleets that sailed around the world. The woods were cleared and the lumber dragged down the hill to the dockyards at Deptford to build the ships that would give England the empire it ran for 300 years. It’s the same empire that Hitler admired so much. So this area was used to help to discover (or invade – depending on your viewpoint) the new world of North America and here I am back, having come full circle. An ex-colonialist come back to have a look at what they did with the place.

History is a funny thing. It’s a bit slippery and elusive if you just look at dates and the pictures. You need to get into the stories, the subplots and the contexts of the people caught up in the history that shaped who we are, where we are and how we got here. It’s not really ‘his’ story but your story as well. As a kid I guess I just saw the thick history books and all those paintings in the boring museums as not very inspiring. My daughter has been on a few school trips to northern France and Belgium. I doubt she really appreciated what she was looking at when they spent a few days visiting the trenches of the First World War or the Normandy countryside. Maybe however it was the Auschwitz trip to Poland and talking with a camp survivor when she was able to begin to join the dots. Just yesterday she was studying for her GCSE exams – the Great War and all that. She was telling me about what she had to revise, about the German bombers and Zeppelin’s that moaned and drifted over the skies of South East London trying to find their targets, or any targets for that matter. She told me how the people of South East London were terrified of these huge Gotha bombers and the massive dirigible balloons which would force them to shelter in their basements or under their stairs. It’s strange to think that the family who lived in our house might have cowered under the staircase as the Zeppelins rained death from above. The Navy had built a string of gun emplacements on the highest points in SE London. I told her there was one on our nearest hill. It’s called One Tree Hill, 5 minutes from our front door. “We’ll go up there if you’d like and have a look”.

Of course back in 1915 they must have cleared all the trees (except for one of course) from One Tree Hill so they could get a clear shot at the first form of mass terror from the air. According to the plaque next to the emplacement they weren’t sure if they ever hit one these German bombers but they did manage to hit a tram in Peckham by accident.

There’s also a replicated beacon up there. These beacons were used to warn the locals of impending invasion by the Spanish during those fearful and uncertain years of the Spanish Armada. It was used just a couple of months back to celebrate by fire the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

Back in 1602 the first Queen Elizabeth decided to have a picnic lunch at the top of One Tree Hill very close to where the current Oak Of Honor is still. There were also huge riots about a hundred years ago close to this spot as the local citizens rejected plans to make the area a golf course.

As with everything and everywhere in this country there’s always some history outside your front door, around the corner and down the road. There’s always a good story to be told.

Even though we have stood on that forgotten brick platform on One Tree Hill before and looked at that ignored beacon Laura didn’t really twig what they meant until she read it and learned about it in school. Now she knows what it must have been like to stand next to that gun looking up for those bombers and out over the City Of London out there about 6 miles to the north.

Here’s a pic of the gun platform, the beacon and a bench for relaxing. You’ll need to relax after climbing up the hill because it’s pretty steep and a couple of hundred feet above sea level.

And here’s the view looking north: St Paul’s there on the left and The Shard about 6 miles away.