Now despite growing up in Eltham, with Woolwich, Plumstead and Charlton just a bus ride away, I never visited Maryon Park.
And if I am totally honest I didn’t even know it existed, until I came across this picture postcard of the park.
I don’t have a date for the picture, and despite wandering up and down the surrounding streets using google street maps, I haven’t worked out the location from which the picture was taken. …But someone will and that is the fun of the blog.
In the meantime I shall fall back outrageously and lift a description of the park from Wikipedia, which quite correctly I credit.
“Charlton sandpits, which were originally part of an area known as Hanging Wood, were presented to the London County Council in 1891 by the Maryon-Wilson family, and one of the pits became Maryon Park.
Another pit became Charlton Athletic's football ground, The Valley.
The park was originally wooded and, together with what is now Maryon Wilson Park, was known as Hanging Woods.
This was a wild wooded area and formed an ideal retreat for highwaymen who robbed travellers on Shooters Hill and Blackheath.
Though it is popularly supposed that the wood was used for hanging those who were caught, a more likely explanation for the name is the wood's location on steep slopes so that the trees appear to hang from the slope.
Such woods are often referred to as 'hanging woods', the word 'hang' comes from the Old English 'hangra', a wooded slope.*
I could quote more but that would be stealing, so instead I will just include the link and point you towards another excellent site for information on the park, which comes from Charlton Parks Reminiscence Project which focuses on Charlton’s, “six distinctly different parks and open spaces, [which are] at the heart of their different neighbourhoods. This project looks at the history of each park, how they developed and stories relating their importance to local people over the past 100 years”.**
And I might well get more information about the bandstand which features in the picture.
As many will know, I am fascinated by bandstands and collect them. It all began with the one I passed on my way to school in Pepys Park back in the 1960s,and I never miss an opportunity to seek one out.
So, if the bandstand is still there I hope someone will take a picture of it and send it across.
Location; Charlton
Picture; Maryon Park, Charlton, date unknown from the collection of Kristina Bedford
*Maryon Park, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryon_Park
** Maryon Park Charlton Parks Reminiscence Project, https://www.charltonparks.co.uk/the-parks/maryon-wilson-park/
The large roof in the background is St Thomas's Church, on the corner of Woodland terrace and Maryon Road. It's the entrance onto Maryon Road. There is no longer a band stand there.
ReplyDeleteThis was the location for the scene in the 60s film Blow-Up where the photographer takes pictures which only when blown up reveal a man with a gun lurking in the bushes.
ReplyDeleteWhere the bandstand was , there is still a circle of grass with bushes in the middle
ReplyDelete