The nowhere adventure ........ out of Peckham and on till morning

Now I say on till morning, but the adventure will have started sometime just before mid day and would have all been over in a few hours.

Me in 1959

Our trip to the small park on East Dulwich Road is all but a vague memory but then it was almost sixty years ago, and I have no recollection of whether we made a deliberate decision to go there or it was just the end of a long walk.

And a walk it would have been, starting from Lausanne Road, and by degree, along Evelina Road, past Nunhead Green, and Peckham Rye.

Back then, walking was what we did, often with a vague idea of a destination but not always.

On this day we may have been heading for the Common, and then just pushed on with that optimistic observation that “it is always better to travel than arrive”.

What we found was a small Corporation play area, with a mix of play furniture.  There will have been a roundabout, a rocking horse which seated eight, a seesaw, a slide and swings.

I do remember it was wet and having exhausted all the damp attractions we headed home.

That water trough,  1928

Now, anyone who has ventured “out of district” will know that there is always a slight tension in that you are on someone else’s turf and while kids are kids and just want to get on with playing there can be those sticky moments when you are seen to be “on the trespass”.

That and the dampness will I think have done for the adventure.  After all we were at the limits of our known world, and there was always the long walk back, which I now know was not that long.

When I started the story I assumed the distance between our house on Lausanne Road and the park was quite some distance, but it is only just over a mile and according to the AA Route planner would take just six minutes in a car.

Banfield's, circa 1960

Of course it would have taken us longer, more so because of the obligatory stops along the way which will have included the horse trough at the start of Evelina Road, Nunhead Gardens, and a lingering look at the coaches in the depot by Banfield Road.

And no nine year could ever pass Peckham Rye Common without a couple of races, and roll in the grass.

Such was the nowhere adventure.

Location; East Dulwich

Pictures; me, aged ten, 1959 from the collection of Andrew Simpson &Evelina Road, circa 1920-26, and Banfield  Garage, circa 1960s supplied by Adrian Parfitt

Drinking Troughs I have known

The drinking trough was one of those bits of street furniture I took for granted.

A water trough I knew .... St Mary's Road, date unknown

Thinking back they were all over the place and given the number of horses in use until the middle of the 20th century that is no surprise.

But they owed their origins as much to cattle as horses.

In the middle of the 19th century  cattle along with other livestock were still being walked into our city centres and while the days of bring them in from the country were over they were still being walked from main railway stations to dairies and abattoirs.

As late as the 1950s my old friend Oliver Bailey had the job of transporting pigs from our local station to his farm through the streets of Chorlton-cum-Hardy and the family still kept a herd of cattle on a patch of land in the heart of the township.

So the water trough during the years I grew up in Lausanne Road was still in use although by then its use was pretty much limited to offering water to the horses pulling the milk floats and the rag and bone man’s cart.

An on Bexley Road a water trough with flowers

And if I think hard enough the one on the corner of St Mary’s Road and Evelina Road was more often dry and a place for us lads to sit in and be silly getting our clothes dusty and a tad grimy from the accumulated muck which was a mix of dried leaves, the odd discarded crisp paper and street grit.

Some troughs can still be found like the one in Eltham, others were taken over as flower beds before finding their way into Corporation Yards and finally broken up as rubble.

Now I have decided to begin looking for them and plotting their presence around the area where I grew up.
And to help me I have fallen back on an excellent set of historical maps of Southwark.*

The trough on St Mary's Road, 1953

They cover the period from 1896-1953 and offer up a fascinating resource more so as the later ones cover my own time in Lausanne Road.

Added to which there is the facility to compare them with modern street maps and switch to contemporary street scenes.

From which I know that my water trough at the top of St Mary’s Road has long gone.
And as you would expect the story behind the maps is a tale in itself.
They were found in a cupboard by Mr Carter in the council offices who decided to have them digitized and made available on line.

That Peckham water trough again

They represent an invaluable resource for any one engaged in family research or like me have been drawn back to write about the place I grew up.

All too often my memory is hazy to the point where I wonder whether they actually happened.
So trying to track where my old friend Jimmy lived proved almost impossible.

I knew it was a street off Queen’s Road between Mona and the fire station.  Sadly google street maps offered no help but there on the 1953 map was the place and by using the electoral roll I found him and his house all over again.

And the same 1953 map offered up the corner of St Mary’s Road with Evelina Road that water  trough which was good because despite Adrian’s picture I had come to doubt that I had ever sat there.

All I have to do is find the rest.

Tomorrow, Ghost signs on Evelina Road .............. along with an old telephone kiosk and much more

Picture; St Mary’s Road with water trough, date unknown supplied by Adrian Parfitt, water trough, Bexley Road, 2015 from the collection of Jean Gammons and detail of St Mary’s Road 1953 historical map extract courtesy of Southwark Council at Historical map extract courtesy of Southwark Council at http://maps.southwark.gov.uk/connect/southwark.jsp?mapcfg=Historical_Selection&style=historical&banner=historical.
 with mapping provided by Landmark Information Group

Walking down Nunhead Lane on Christmas Day 1958

Now I was reminded of that oft quoted line “you can wait for a 21 from Lewisham and then three come along at the same time” which could apply to any bus anywhere in the world at some point, usually when it’s raining and you are late.

All of which is a contrived way of saying thank you to Adrian Parfitt who sent me  a shedful of new pictures from his mum’s photo album including heaps of Peckham Health Centre, the park at Rye Lane and Austin’s furniture store.

And among them was Banfield’s depot on Nunhead Lane which I had written about only recently and will lead someone to mutter about waiting for a coach garage and finding three in the same day.

Despite lots of thinking I still don’t remember the place although I must have seen it almost every day during the year I was at the annexe on Old James Street.

And I will have passed it on a Christmas Day morning sometime between 1957 and 59.

Now I can be pretty sure of those dates because I remember being fascinated by the newly rebuilt St Anthony’s church which was finished in 1957 replacing the one destroyed in 1940.

Although to be accurate it was the figure of Christ beside the church notice board which attracted me.

Looking back fifty seven years I could of course be mistaken but I am fairly sure that is what I saw.

It is an image that has stayed with me and like so many recently has bubbled up to the surface.

I was with my dad, and Uncle George and I think also my twin sisters who would have been two and it was one of those pre Christmas dinner walks that people went in for at the time.

We will have walked up to Rye Lane Park in the morning after opening the presents and the trip was mother’s way of emptying the house so she could prepare the dinner.

All of which will have placed us at the corner with Carden Road around 11.

Any later and we would not have been back to have settled down had dinner and cleared away ready for the Queen’s speech which I am also fairly confident we would have watched on the telly.

Like so many of the memories from when we lived at Lausanne Road I had begun to think many were just my imaginings but Adrian’s picture has brought it back and confirmed what I thought.

Added to which it also brought back one of those more shameful episodes when not much older and in the company of two friends I shocked an elderly couple on Nunhead Green with a series of foul outbursts which even at the time I knew were wrong and in the face of their disapproval I blushed.

What interests me more than the memories is that simple fact that as more pop up each in turn is confirmed by an old picture or by someone else.

So the cocoa factory on Kender Street, the tally man who called on a Friday and the wool shop on New Cross Road have all been vouched for which means more than a little of my life in Peckham and New Cross really did happen the way I thought it did.

Nor is this some silly little piece of nostalgia because it points to that important lesson in sharing our history especially if that history happened a long time ago and for some of us those memories are separated not just by time but also geography.

We left Lausanne Road in the spring of 1964 and when I returned six years ago much of the area was unrecognisable which I know is only to be expected but I bet with that change much has been lost.

Still that said the clock tower of the garage is still as is the church even if the ownership has changed and that row of houses don’t look so different.

Picture; Nunhead Lane, date unknown, from the collection of Adrian Parfitt

Looking for Kay's sweet shop on the corner of Old James Street and Scylla Road

Now I went looking for Kay’s sweet shop recently.

It was on the corner of Old James Street and Scylla Road and like so many childhood memories of over 50 years ago it has long since gone.

Today it is just an open space enclosed by a wall and full of lock up garages.

But back in 1961 it was one of those slightly run down corner shops which offered everything including Kay’s homemade ices and lollies.

Compared with the famous brands they failed to cut the mustard but on a dinner time in early June having sneaked out of the school gates her lemon ice served in greased paper was a treat.

Not that this is one of those nostalgic jaunts through the foods I ate as a child.

Thinking back there was a lot I would now turn my nose up at from apple and sugar sandwiches to meat paste and black pudding, along with suet dumplings and overcooked limp cabbage.

That said I fondly remember all those home made products like Kay’s ices which I suspect contravened a shedful of health regulations and the way so many products were served loose or in paper.

Of course that way led to temptation and even now I have flashbacks of that grocery shop somewhere on Evelina Road whose open tins of biscuits in front of the counter were too much of a challenge to a gang of lads on their way home from school.

On the upside it meant you could buy as much or as little as you wanted or needed, unlike the pre packaged supermarket products which always come in a size too big for immediate use.

The downside was that the quality, the freshness and the variety on offer were sometimes suspect.

From memory Attin’s the grocer’s on Queens Road sold two types of cheese........... red or white and sometimes the bits they sold me were hard at the edges with those cracks of age.

And while I reflect on how it was, I still yearn for fruit and vegetables which looked like they have come from the ground and not some factory which has sorted and graded each pepper, pear, apple and carrot to look the same.

I like the stuff I buy to look like nature made it with perhaps the earth still clinging to the sides of the potatoes and the odd bumpy bit to the parsnips.

All of which should lead me into a plug for the local organic shop and the supermarket in Varese where Tina’s parents live.

Italian supermarkets, even the up market ones are not afraid to display food that looks like food, but I fear this is a long way from Kay’s on the corner of Old James Street and might well just sound like the start of a travel story, so I shall close with a request for anyone who has a picture of that shop.

Picture; advert from Eagle May 30 1959, and from a supermarket in Sardinia, 2015 from the collection of Andrew Simpson