Friday 24 February 2012

Anerley: A quest for quietude...


Anerley began as a desire for solitude…
William Sanderson, a silk merchant from Scotland, had become tired of the hectic nature of life in the London of the early 19th century and yearned for the peace and quiet that more rural areas afforded.
An Act of Parliament in 1827 saw the creation of a road to connect Elmer’s End Road and Church Road in Norwood running through The Great North Wood and cutting across the area of Penge Common.
This road would make the very centre of the North Wood accessible but undeveloped, which proved to be irresistible to Sanderson. He built a house on the edge of Penge Common which would edge onto this new road, allowing him to travel into London to deal with his business matters while allowing him to retreat to the tranquility of the suburbs of an evening.
Built long before the advent of post codes, and with nothing in the way of other landmarks to guide any postman, Sanderson took to giving his address out by emphasizing its unique nature.

‘It’s between Norwood and Elmer’s End… In the middle of the wood… It’s the only house around.’

With his rich Scottish accent ‘only’ was usually heard as ‘annly’ and this is what people began to reference in their correspondence to him.
Letters began to be addressed to ‘William Sanderson, The Annly House, between Elmer’s End and Norwood.’
Derivations of ‘Annly’ developed with the word being written as ‘Annly’, ‘Anly’, ‘Annerly’ but it was ‘Anerley’ that became the default spelling and the version that Sanderson adopted when he began to hand out his address in a definitive form.
Eventually the road itself became known as Anerley Road (now Anerley Hill) and the area around it became known as Anerley.
Sanderson’s desire for solitude became compromised as the practicalities of life in the suburbs came home to him.
With the failure of the Croydon Canal in 1836 its land was sold to the London and Croydon Railway Company and the opportunity came to build a railway line that would link Croydon with central London running through what was now Anerley.
Sanderson was given a choice. The land that the rail company had brought didn’t give them access to his land but their preferred route for the line ran right across it.
Given Sanderson’s initial desire for isolation it’s entirely conceivable that he could have refused his permission to allow the line to run close to him and preserve the isolation of the Anerley House.
Instead, Sanderson allowed the line to run and asked for one thing in return; that a station be built next to his house, allowing him speedy access to the centre of town.
Once the path to Anerley was cleared it became tempting for other forms of transport to try and extend their reach into the suburbs.
An atmospheric railway, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was opened in 1845 but didn’t survive for long. The hilly nature of the land around Norwood meant that any form of transport had to be able to traverse varying levels of terrain easily and soon it was just the railway that offered Sanderson the easy access to town that he desired.
Of course this traffic didn’t only run one way and Anerley, now served by a railway station that went into the centre of London, became a desirable residential area. Other houses were built and with them came hotels, pubs and public gardens. The local boating lake became a popular spot and the relocation of the Crystal Palace from Hyde Park to the top of Sydenham Hill in 1854 saw the area of Anerley entirely lost to tea rooms, dance halls and huge new houses.
By 1878 the area had become populated and developed to a point that a Vestry Hall was built on Anerley Road to allow for the proper regulation of the business of the region.
The Local Government Act of 1899 saw this designated as a Town Hall and by 1900 Anerley is recognized as part of the Penge Urban District of Kent.
During the Second World War Anerley suffered from the policy of British Intelligence to feed to the enemy false information about the targeting of their bombs, usually deceiving them into aiming further to the South than they intended. This protected Parliament, the Royal Family and the City of London, as well as the Docks along the Thames, but ensured that South London would be particularly badly hit, despite there being nothing of strategic value to the war effort there.
Anerley was hit by 5 V1 bombs with 13 fatalities overall, an astonishing number given its location relative to targets that the enemy may have actually been aiming for.
By 1965 Anerley, now part of the London Borough of Bromley, had become essentially a residential area. The grand houses of the 19th century were either bombed out during the war or converted into flats and larger housing estates being built for the new residents that moved in after the middle classes moved out with the destruction of the Crystal Palace and the devastation of the War.
Anerley today is still served by the same railway station that Sanderson demanded, and the opening of the Overground link in 2010 saw Anerley connected directly with East London and the London Underground system. This, along with the array of buses that serve the area, mean that Anerley is more accessible from all over London than at any time in its history.
Anerley Hill itself, home to the train station and town hall, is otherwise lined by some shops and businesses but is dominated by housing of one form or another.
Some of this is in the form of large houses, the kind of which William Sanderson may still find familiar if he saw Anerley today, but the majority is in the form of flats and estates and, most striking of all, the development of large scale retirement housing in blocks along Anerley Hill.
Sanderson may have accepted the practicality of the development of housing alongside his House, and may have even seen the appeal of Anerley as a spot to retire to, but the sheer density of population in an area that appealed to him on the basis of its solitary nature would surely leave him bemused.
But, of course, he’s the one who wanted a station…

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