Canal

In 1809 there was a canal that connected the southernmost part of London to the heart of the city in and around Deptford. The system of locks went right through Honor Oak Park which then was still in the country. It was Kent back then (or was it Surrey?) and after all the forests were cleared to build the fleet that discovered (or to invade?) the new world the land was given over to agriculture and farming. It was one of those idyllic ‘green and pleasant’ land type vistas – you know the kind that you saw during the opening ceremonies of The Olympic Games with all the sheep, the cricket games and the English weather. Actually it just occurred to me that they forgot to have a fox hunt as well. Yeah, get some blood sport in there. A great ‘idyllic’ English pastime! Anyway back to our wandering canal. For some bizarre reason the route of the canal decided to go against the local geography which meant that just before Honor Oak Park (if you were travelling south in a sedate manner on a barge) you needed to go through 6 locks to go UP the hill at One Tree Hill. Now why would your friendly local canal architect actually want to go UP? The lay of the land at this point dictates that you would continue along a more level geography (as is currently followed by the train) through HOP and on to Forest Hill. So anyway, just slightly north of our current Honor Oak Park Station there are the remains of the lock keepers cottage buried there under the weeds and trees. Perhaps in another 100 years or so somebody might dig it all up and marvel at the stupidity of 19^th century man and his quest to go up hills in narrow boats. I don’t have to point out of course that the canal went out of business because if the impractical war against physics and the advent of coal powered steam locomotives, demand for cheaper and faster transport into the centre of London and the rise of the restless, hungry and expanding Victorian age.

So it was goodbye to all this:

And hello to all this:

The Pub

There’s a good pub up the road, it’s my local. Well when I say ‘good’ I use the term advisedly. It’s not really a nice place to go because it’s a dump – it should have been condemned ages ago even years ago and they should have shut it down. It’s the worst pub you could ever hope to visit. The decor doesn’t look like it’s been cleaned for a hundred years and the carpets are all sticky and ripped up, worn and frayed. The toilets are not worth going into and if you did, you might not ever come out. You can smell the urinals throughout the whole pub – it’s really quite powerful – the smell. Still it’s a good place to go and drink some cheap Fosters or some other lager – a good place to escape to and if you like sports they have that on those wide screen flat screen TV thingys. There’s a pool table as well and that gets used, there’s a dartboard and a couple of those fruit machines that you put coins into hoping you might get them back or more of them back if you win. There’s a jukebox with all the usual shitty selections and the banter in the place is pretty depressing if you decide to eavesdrop on some of the conversations. It’s a hardcore working man’s South East London pub full of brickies, plasterers, sparks, louts, layabouts, unemployed, blokes (and a few girlies) running away from something or somebody (the wife maybe, the kids perhaps) and we go there. It’s one of those places that hasn’t changed or gone with the flow. It hasn’t been turned into a gastro pub and it’s still of the people, by the people and for the people. You know the sort, real salt of the earth stuff. If they don’t live round here they live in Eltham or in one of the council flats littered throughout Honor Oak. There’s always the flag of St George up if England play and just 2 weeks ago they had her maj stuck up over a window which was shattered, the cracks magically being held in place by Liz. So the regulars repair your toilet, fix your wall, paint your ceiling and build your fence and support Milwall FC. Slogan: “No one likes us, and we don’t care”. End of story.

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.