Saturday 21 January 2012

Penge: Living on the edge...


Penge has always been defined by dislocation and what surrounds it...
The name itself is an anomaly in London, being one of the few Celtic place names that has survived to the present day with its earliest recorded use in a Saxon deed from 957 which mentions 'Penceat', a word derived from two other Celtic words; 'Pen' meaning 'edge' and 'ceat' meaning wood.
The location of Penge on the edge of the Great North Wood meant that it afforded valuable space for pasture away from the vast forest that bordered it and by the time it is mentioned in the Domesday book in 1086 it is noted as the home of '50 hogs' and having space for 'seven miles, seven furlongs and seven feet' of woodland pasture.
However, Penge itself never reaped the benefits of this agricultural boon, having been gifted as a detached hamlet to the ancient parish of Battersea and remained as such until it was placed into the district of Lewisham in 1855.
In the meantime the Great North Wood itself proved more valuable than the pasture around it.
Britain's growth as a naval power from the 15th Century onward meant that there was a tremendous demand for timber and, with the development of a road system that linked the shipyards of the Thames with the area that would become known as Norwood, Penge became a natural distribution hub.
So, sparsely populated, with limited agriculture or industry and with any taxes and profits being spirited away to Battersea there was very little scope for development for Penge for hundreds of years.
Eventually Britain's dominance as a naval power meant there was less actual demand for ships with their position largely unchallenged and few ships lost in action. This, coupled with industrial developments such as steam power, metal hulled ships and explosive munitions, meant that the demand for timber from Norwood slowed dramatically with Penge left lost in the wake.
With the opening of the Croydon Canal in 1809 it was hoped that the timber trade would again be lifted with the access to new national markets that a place on the canal network would provide. Unfortunately the design of the canal involved the use of 28 locks to successfully traverse the hilly regions of South London and made that stretch of the canal financially unfeasible.
The canal was closed in 1836 with the land sold to the London & Croydon Railway company which again lead to hopes that this new transport link would allow for Norwood timber to become a viable source of profit for the local economy.
This never happened though and Penge became a retirement spot for the trades that had come to work in the area.
In 1840 The Company of Watermen and Lightermen opened almshouses for men who had worked on the canals and the widows and families of other workers.
One of the criteria to qualify for a place in the Royal Waterman's Almshouses was a vow of temperance. Some of the lightermen found this easier than others and rumours persist in the area of a tunnel that linked the Houses with the neighbouring Crooked Billet pub, allowing the residents to travel from the almshouse to the public house undetected.
No evidence of any tunnel has ever been found...
Designed by George Porter in a Tudor Revival style these Almshouses are a dominant feature of the high street now and must have been even more remarkable at the time.
These were followed soon after by the opening of the King William Naval Asylum in 1848.
Funded by Queen Adelaide, the widow of King William IV, these were designated for the use of naval widows or the orphan daughters of naval officers.
Even with the opening of these two new residential projects the population of Penge in 1841 had stood at a mere 270 and the addition of 88 retirees, widows and orphans were not going to give the area much of a fillip.
What WOULD do was the opening of the Crystal Palace in neighbouring Sydenham in 1854.
Designed by Joseph Paxton, the Crystal Palace had been the centrepiece of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851 and its arrival in South London gave all the areas around it a lift.
Penge managed to adapt better than most.
Arguably the failure to properly develop the area previously meant that it had a massive scope for building and improvement, and the railway station, that had only really been put in to accommodate a level crossing to get across the high road, suddenly made Penge a viable tourist hotspot and it soon became famous for its 'twenty five public houses in one square mile.'
Tea rooms, music halls and boarding houses sprung up in the area and the population soon exploded from the 270 of 1841 to 5,015 in 1861 and 13,200 in 1871.
Penge finally had an identity.
Looking away from the Great North Wood and the instability of industry Penge became a suburban leisure resort that traded off its proximity to the Crystal Palace.
The destruction of the Crystal Palace by fire in 1936 would have put an end to Penge as a tourist attraction with the pubs, halls and tea rooms all being activities that people could enjoy in a number of places but as it was the area's reputation was destroyed long before that.
In 1877 Harriet Staunton, who lived in Forbes Road, Penge, was deliberately starved to death by her husband and his family. The details of her imprisonment in her own home and the tortuous method of her murder shocked Victorian society and the details of the Penge Murder became a matter of public record.
Visitor numbers dropped dramatically.
The area, by now dependent on the tourist trade, could do nothing to repair the damage to Penge's reputation.
Local authorities did what they could, going as far as to rename Forbes Road as Mosslea Road to deter ghoulish visitors who would come to find the site of the murder, unfortunately the only visitors the area could rely on now.
They also tried to insist that the murder had actually taken place in neighbouring Beckenham.
It didn't work.
Penge, which had relied for so long on being bordered by places that brought value to the area couldn't push out something that it had created itself...
Penge became little more than a word that would occasionally appear in passing in a book or on a television show, usually for comic effect.
The Goon Show, Terry Wogan and Robert Rankin have all used Penge as a reference on numerous occasions, inevitably as a shorthand for naffness.
The most famous reference in literature is probably in the 'Rumpole' books by John Mortimer, a series about a barrister who made his reputation in a case entitled the 'Penge Bungalow Murders' which again echoes Penge's lowest point.
A wander down Penge High Street today shows little more than a typical local South London high street, dotted with charity shops, supermarkets and newsagents.
The history of the area can be seen by glancing above the plastic shopfronts that advertise the current residents, where you can still see the remnants of the facades of the King's Hall and Essoldo music halls and the Victorian structure of the Police Station, which was London's oldest operational station until it was closed in 2010.
The building is due to be redeveloped into flats, joining the almshouses as private residences.
There is little to recommend to the visitor to Penge today. Much of historical or architechtural relevance has been obscured by development or moved into private hands, away from enquiring eyes.
But in a way this is fitting...
Penge began, and has remained, at the margins.
Surrounded by forests or palaces, occasionally linked by canals or railway lines, it has done its best to adapt and prosper but has always been subject to the fickleness of fate meaning that over the years it has only really moved from pasture to pleasure spot to now, finally, punchline...