Just what did Blackheath have do to get a decent mention in Bradshaw’s Guide to London?

Now if I was a resident in Blackheath in 1861, who had just gone out and bought my copy of Bradshaw’s Illustrated Hand Book to London and its Environs, I might be miffed that where I lived was accorded just 79 words.*

It is there in the chapter on Greenwich which runs to eight pages and gets less of a look in than Woolwich,  or Eltham.

Not only that, but the entry ignores the fine buildings, the church on the heath or the railway station which in 1861 was just eleven years old.  

 Instead the reader is taken through the “large gateways of open ironwork , largely substituted for a small doorway in the wall at the southern extremity of the park, near the keeper’s new Gothic lodge, we pass on to Blackheath, where Wat Tyler assembled the Kentish rebels in the reign of Richard II., where Jack Cade  and his fellow insurgents are said to have held their midnight meetings in a cavern which still remains , though so chocked up as to be considered nearly in accessible”. 

And that is it.  Even Lee gets a sentence. 

But for those who still wish for more on Blackheath, our guide does offer up, a bit more as it heads along the old Dover Road crossing the Heath, on Shooters Hill taking in ‘a rustic little hostelry on our left distinguished by the peculiar title of the ‘Sun-in-the-Sands’ which was the haunt of quite a few 19th century writers who took advantage of an open balcony from which a pleasant view may be obtained of the surrounding country."

And from there we are directed up to Shooters Hill and told that it "commands an expansive prospect [from which] 'the mighty mass of brick smoke and shipping’ as Byron calls the view of London from this point, is well contrasted with the foliage of the wooded country extending towards the south beyond the vale of Eltham.”

But that is a bit of the guide I have already written about but will return to.

All of which just leaves me to compensate the tardy entry with extracts from the OS map of London for 1862 to 1872, which is a bit more than Mr. Bradshaw  gave us, starting with the heath and ending with a stretch of Shooters Hill and the old Dover Road and the Sun-in-the-Sands. what is now the British Oak.

Location Blackheath

Pictures; Blackheath in 1872, from the OS map of London, 1862-1872, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ 

* Bradshaw’s Illustrated Hand Book to London and Its Environs, 1861