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Published: December 19th 2017
Waterwheel
Grove ParkDear All
Greetings! Greetings from… Croydon…! This blog entry is going to take a bit of explaining, but may be the start of a few more similar blog entries to come.
I am now around four months into my return from West Africa, and have settled down very much into my life again. As I expected, many of the negatives of my travels in West Africa have since faded from memory, although unlike India with its similar types of negative travel experiences, I doubt the desire to return to the region again will resurface at any point soon. I am currently in that place which could be referred to as “Traveller’s No-Man’s Land”, the long distance of time between travels, which have over the last few years only been once-a-year as opposed to three-times-a-year in my pre-mortgage days. And since buying my house five years ago, I’ve rather taken to some local walks and explorations to satisfy my wanderlust in the meantime. Indeed, when the school holidays come, as well as visiting my wonderful family up in Sheffield, I take the time to explore more of London, its suburbs and the beautiful countryside around, with a few walking guidebooks
Winter Berries
Carshalton Park to guide me on my way.
Well, we broke up for the school holidays last week, and British Gas (again!) postponed their visit to fix my faulty thermostat this morning, due to it being of a “non-urgent” nature (grrr!). I instead decided to pick up a walking guide and hit the walking trails around London once again. This time however, I have finally succumbed to also writing a travel blog entry out of it, following the inspiration of a couple of fellow travel bloggers on here, that although perhaps writing about “travels” around one’s resident region may not be proper hit-the-road-with-a-backpack travelling, it is indeed “exotic” travel writing for anyone not from my area, so I’ve decided to give it a go.
And here it is – my first travel blog entry on “travels” within my local area.
Whilst London has been my home for around 20 years now (with the exception of three years of overseas living), I do not intend to write about the usual tourist experiences of London, as I have experienced these many times. My walks in and around London take me to off-the-beaten track areas, and hopefully in my writings here I
may cover the parts of this wonderful city and its surroundings which other travellers may not reach. Thus, perhaps indeed such travel blog entries are explorations and pioneering travel journeys in themselves. Who knows really, I guess we’ll see…!
So, after the afore-mentioned disappointment of British Gas’s postponed visit this morning (although the experience was greatly lightened by a positive response to my request for some form of remunerative compensation…!), I packed one of three walk leaflets I recently picked up from my local library, and headed off to the nearby London suburb of Carshalton to explore one of the source areas for the tiny 12.5-mile Wandle River, one of numerous tributaries of the mighty Thames river, and an area of renewed historical interest and restoration. I felt excited to be exploring once more!
A short walk from my lovely Victorian terraced house in Croydon brought me to West Croydon Station, site of one of the worst-hit areas of the anarchic London Riots in the summer of 2011 (I happened to be travelling in Zimbabwe at the time, but can still recall the worrisome strength at which the unrest grew and spread around the country, and the anarchic
nature of the hoodlums who took part in it – fortunately then Prime Minister David Cameron brought the situation under control relatively quickly). West Croydon is still a bit of a dodgy area, and has an edgy feel to it I’ve never felt comfortable with, but hopefully with the current regeneration of Croydon underway, along with the approval of the building of London’s third Westfield Shopping Centre, due for completion here in 2022, things may start to improve for the area. Indeed, the rest of Croydon, particularly around East Croydon, is developing very nicely indeed, and my house price has risen considerably since I bought the place in 2012.
Upon arriving at the station, however, I noticed both that the next train I planned to get was cancelled, the following train not being for another 25 minutes or so (flipping Southern Rail again, for anyone reading this familiar with their striking nature…!), but also that the station I intended to start from, Carshalton, was not reachable from West Croydon – I had it confused with the station of “Carshalton Beeches” which was indeed on this line. Fortunately, a quick scout around the local area turned up a bus route,
the 157, which headed directly in that direction and would take me to Carshalton Station in about 20 minutes – yay!
So, 20 minutes later, after a fine journey on the top-deck of a London double-decker, I disembarked at the quiet suburban rail station of Carshalton, to begin my 3-mile exploration of the area. Carshalton is a fairly affluent suburb of South London, with leafy tree-lined streets and large semi-detached houses surrounding a surprisingly beautiful central area of old mill-ponds, quaint antique shops and narrow winding alleyways. I descended downhill from the station and took a left into Grove Park, one of numerous recreational areas in these parts, which also sported my first sighting of the Wandle River, which was to be my focal point for most of the walk. The river here was still running, a pretty little stream home to numerous birdlife, including ducks, Canada Geese, swans and coots. Passing a disused waterwheel, I was reminded of the area’s industrial past, and how 18
th and 19
th century industrial development here saw the Wandle being used to harness power for the making of flour, leather, copper, gunpowder, snuff, paper and linseed oil in the mills along the river.
Most of the mills and waterwheels have since disappeared, but this one was still in place, and a clear reminder of the area’s industrial days.
Walking around the park led me through two old river channels, which have now dried up due to the expansion of the local population and their thirst for water. Indeed, a little further on, I was able to walk along the dry river bed of part of the Wandle River, which still houses the former weirs and bridges used to span the channel. After having my photo taken here by a local pushchair-wielding father, my walk took me to two fascinating areas of the dried up river in Carshalton Park. The first is called “The Grotto”, and seemed to form one of the river’s many sources as it began its short journey to the Thames. The Grotto is a man-made pool dug into the hillside and designed to tap into the groundwater of the area, built by a gentleman named Thomas Scawen II in 1724. It once boasted intricate ironwork gates featuring the Scawen family crest, marble pavements, and walls decorated with shells. Most of it was now gated off, and seems like the
kind of place dodgy teenagers would hang around after, or probably even during, school. A short walk uphill from here brought me to the most impressive site of this walk, a natural chalkpit with springs along its southern edge, called “The Hog Pit”. This seemed to be another of the Wandle’s many sources, but again like many others, has also since dried up. I correctly guessed, having researched this just now upon my return home, that the pit is used for a huge bonfire during Bonfire Night, a British “festival” held on the 5
th of November (remember, remember!) every year, to “remember” the fact that Guy Fawkes and his crew very nearly blew up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, and was hung, drawn and quartered for it shortly after. The date is traditionally remembered, along with fireworks, sparklers and toffee apples, by a stuffed figure of Guy Fawkes being placed on top of a bonfire, and then burned. The blackened remnants of a huge fire at the bottom of the pit were indeed quite evident.
Incidentally, and actually quite amazingly to those interested in fluvial systems and geology, the Wandle River is one of only 200 remaining chalkstreams
worldwide. In fact, the whole area south of London sits upon a huge area of chalkstone, stretching from the city’s southern suburbs and down to the southern coasts of Sussex and Kent, to include the famous White Cliffs of Dover. Both the North Downs and the South Downs are upland areas which cut across this chalkstone area in two waves from east to west, and make for some quite unique habitat and wildlife areas. Some of these areas are actually quite ecologically fragile, given the thin top layer of soil which forms above the chalkstone layer. And rivers such as the Wandle which run through this area are also quite rare, given that water generally permeates through chalkstone. Thus, the Wandle River is indeed quite unique, running through a similarly geologically unique area of the country.
After a well-deserved and refreshing cup of tea at the top of and overlooking the Hog Pit, from my trusty thermos flask which I take on my walks, I resumed my walk again back downhill and back towards Carshalton centre. My walk took me through Carshalton High Street, which boasts numerous little antique shops and quaint village-style pubs, and on to the All
Saints Church beautifully positioned above the two Carshalton Ponds. I was in luck as the church was open during my visit, and apparently only opens to the public outside of service times on Tuesdays – this was really good news, as the nearby Honeywood Museum housed in a beautiful Grade II-listed Edwardian building on the other side of the Ponds, is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays (today being Tuesday), so I felt that this was good compensation.
An enthusiastic parishioner greeted me at the entrance and welcomed me to the church, and I spent a very calm few minutes on one of the pews, admiring the beauty of the church’s interior and enjoying the Christmas music they were playing at the time. I learnt that while most of the church building was built only around 120 years ago, the church tower is believed to have been there before the Norman Conquest in 1066 (a date drummed into all English schoolchildren, as the founding of the country of England as we pretty much still know it today, and a date since which this country has never been invaded again!). A walk around the church’s graveyard was also wonderfully evocative of
a byegone era, peaceful, and actually very beautiful with its moss-covered stone pathways and slabs, and two very fine yew trees. Old English churchyards will generally have at least one yew tree, an extremely long-living tree, native to the UK, Europe and North Africa, and sometimes living for up to 2000 or even 3000 years. I learnt in my childhood that since churchyards are very rarely changed in terms of land use, the yew trees there can live for centuries, if not millennia! In fact, there are ten yew trees in Britain which are believed to predate the 10
th century. English churches and their history, sometimes going back 1000 years, are phenomena I very rarely appreciate, until things like writing this travel blog entry on my walk today make me realise just how much history lies behind this beautiful country of mine.
A short walk from the church led me to what is called “Anne Boleyn’s Well”, where legend has it that Anne Boleyn, the ill-fated second wife of Henry VIII, was riding along here one day when a blow from her horse’s hoof caused a spring to appear, forming another of the many sources of the Wandle River
around here. From here, a walk past the traditionally-styled Greyhound Hotel towards another Wandle source, the since-dried out Margaret’s Pool, led me past a very old and traditional stand pipe, where presumably people in the olden days used to draw their water from, again presumably before many of the water channels around here ran dry.
After a short walk through the nearby Sutton Ecology Centre, a small nature and wildlife reserve, I returned to the start of my walk, and back to the bus route of the 157. And amazingly, no sooner had I arrived at the bus stop, than a bus arrived and whizzed me all the way back to Croydon and my lovely little house, where I sit writing this travel blog entry as I speak.
An interesting day indeed. Mainly as it enabled me to get out and explore another off-the-beaten-track trail here in London, but also as I learned more about the Wandle River and its chalky origins. Indeed, the theme of the day has been water, both in its existence and non-existence, from the ponds of Carshalton to its industrial mills, from dried-up river channels, to a legend about Anne Boleyn. An interesting
day, and also an interesting experience to write up my first travel blog entry on my local area.
Perhaps there may even be more to come, before my summer travels of 2018…!
All the best, and thanks for reading.
Alex
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Home and Away
Bob Carlsen
I will enjoy reading your blogs about....
the non-touristy areas around London.