Pictures of an older Eltham and memories by a boy from Peckham

The Old Woolwich Road, 1896

This is the Old Woolwich Road in 1896 which ran from Eltham to Woolwich.

It had long since become known as Well Hall Lane and is now Well Hall Road.

Originally it had a more devious route starting a little west of the church, following the route of the modern Sherard Road down to what is now the station before heading off north past Well Hall House and onto Shooters Hill and the woods.

When the picture was taken much of the road north of the station was still open fields and yet within the living memory of those born in the second half of the 19th century much of it was to become an urban landscape.

Our house on the Progress Estate had been built in 1915 and when we arrived just under fifty years later it was hard to imagine that it had been anything other than neat terraced and semi detached properties.

And yet for me this spot was still pretty much as green as you could get it. Not only had the estate been laid out in the style of the Garden town with its large grassed areas and open greens but you were close to the common and at the start of the woods.

So for a boy from Peckham this was something new.  Now where I had come from we did have a few parks but they were hemmed in by tall Victorian buildings and when each week we went with school to play football it was a coach ride away in leafy Surrey.

And Eltham was different in other ways. Its church  still looked like an old parish church with its crumbling headstones in the graveyard and an ancient history stretching back into the Middle Ages.

A bit of Gravel Pit Lane, 1909

It was a while before I discovered the Tudor Barn and the Palace but both just served to deepen that sense that here was somewhere very different from where I had been born.

And it was always reemphasised when the train took that long curve from Kidbrook towards Well Hall with Shooters Hill in the distance.

Now this may seem so much nostalgic tosh but underneath I suspect is that simple observation that even given fifty years of urban growth there was quite a bit of that old rural Eltham left if you knew where to look.

Which leads me to a new series of stories looking not at the Eltham of the 1840s and 50s but at the Eltham which was about to enter the 20th century.

And in a way just like “no one expects the Spanish Inquisition” I doubt that many expected what was just around the corner.

Picture; from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm