Welcome back to Londonist: Croydon Edit! Piloted by Londonist editor and Croydonian Will Noble, it's about all things in the borough of Croydon. In this free for everyone edition, I’m sharing an extract from my new book, Croydonopolis: A Journey to the Greatest City That Never Was, which publishes… TODAY!
‘We landed.’
‘Where?’
‘South Croydon. Hill View Road to be exact.’
If you’d been on a prim- looking housing estate in South Croydon in the summer of 1976, you might have seen a midnight- blue police box materialise out of thin air, and a young woman sporting candy- striped, star- spangled dungarees and a shaggy cream cardigan step out. OK, you wouldn’t. Not just because Doctor Who is widely considered to be a work of science fiction, but also because in this episode, ‘The Hand of Fear’, Tom Baker’s erratic Time Lord has punched some iffy coordinates into the TARDIS and dropped off his assistant Sarah Jane at the wrong location. ‘This isn’t Hill View Road . . .’ mutters the freshly- jettisoned sidekick as she surveys her surroundings and the time machine evaporates behind her. ‘I bet it isn’t even South Croydon . . .’ She’s right too; some 30 years later the show finally delivered the pay- off, revealing that the Doctor had accidentally left Sarah Jane not at her aunt’s place in Croydon but on the fringes of Aberdeen.
Still, at least Croydon was the intended destination, the end point, home. In real life, it is usually somewhere you pass through on the way to somewhere else – just as those archbishops were doing for centuries. To heavily paraphrase Judy Garland, there’s no place like Croydon. It inhabits a uniquely sweet spot, perched on the southern cusp of the greatest city in the world, while serving as a gateway to the rolling North Downs, the effulgent coastal south and, for those yearning for more exotic climes, Gatwick Airport, just 15 miles roughly south. ‘The town’s proximity to London places it in a most fortunate position,’ brags a promotional pamphlet for Croydon’s Grants department store in 1946: Frequent electric trains link it to main London stations, a journey which takes less than a quarter of an hour. In the other direction an equally frequent service of electric and steam trains transport travellers through the glorious countryside of Surrey and Sussex to the coast, to Brighton, Hove, Worthing and Eastbourne, in less than an hour.
Today any estate agent will furnish you with similar sales patter. ‘You can get into Croydon very quickly,’ Ashley Whitehouse, a sales manager at the local Foxtons, tells me, ‘and get out of Croydon very quickly, both by train and car with complete ease.’
It’s true. Croydon has an embarrassment of railway stations – East Croydon, West Croydon, South Croydon – plus a liberal scattering of others across the borough, all offering to take you elsewhere. There are mainline trains, Overground trains, trams, buses and Superloop services. Then there’s the A23, a perma-pumping artery flinging high- speed traffic back and forth between London and the South. The only time this changes is during the early hours of a November morning once a year, when hundreds of pre-1905 vehicles participating in the Veteran Car Run pootle through Croydon at yesteryear speeds. Even then, none stop in Croydon, unless they happen to break down.
Croydon’s throbbing through traffic has often proved an unwelcome distraction to the great and the good. At his home in Norbury, a residential neighbourhood just north of Croydon town centre, the composer Samuel Coleridge- Taylor was constantly discomposed by the trams, motor omnibuses and traction engines on the London- to- Brighton road, which ‘rattled and rumbled by with brief intermission, all through the twenty- four hours’, badly affecting his nerves, and giving him a recurring dream in which a grinning horse pulled a loaded vehicle up a slope. Still, at least he got some sleep. On the eve of her solo flight from Croydon to Darwin in Australia, the young aviatrix Amy Johnson was kept awake by traffic on the Purley Way (one of the country’s first bypasses). It was not the ideal start to a voyage that would end up lasting nineteen frazzling days.
Meanwhile, in the early 1900s an unfulfilled twenty- something teacher at Croydon’s Davidson Road School called David Herbert Lawrence was preoccupied by Croydon’s traffic in a different kind of way. During lunch breaks he would climb to the top floor of the school to watch the trains toing and fro-ing between Croydon and Norwood Junction. D. H. Lawrence, as he became better known, went on to use trains frequently in his poems and novels, observes the author Helen Baron, ‘to coerce – overtly or subliminally – the reader’s feelings and responses’. In ‘Kisses in the Train’, the incessant speeding of a train collides with Lawrence’s trademark lustiness:
And the world all whirling
round in joy
like the dance of a dervish
did destroy
my sense – and reason
spun like a toy.
Everyone wants to use Croydon. They just don’t necessarily want to stickaround. ‘It cannot be called a centre,’ wrote Eric Parker in his 1908 book Highways & Byways of Surrey: ‘for one returns to centres, and Croydon has little that would recall a traveller.’ Though it’s been described as a ‘dormitory town’ (that strange demarcation which suggests somehow it’s not a real town), for much of its earlier existence Croydon was more of a corridor or pitstop.
Ever since Roman times it had been used in this way; somewhere to refresh the horses/legionaries and get some kip for a few hours. The archbishops merely continued the tradition of using Croydon en route to somewhere else, as did pilgrims joining the famous Winchester–Canterbury route. But this ‘rest stop’ reputation was really confirmed in the mid- eighteenth century.
In 1750, Richard Russell published A Dissertation on the Use of Seawater in the Diseases of the Glands, Particularly, the Scurvy, Jaundice, King’s Evil, Leprosy and the Glandular Consumption. It may not have had the pithiest title, but the treatise, which advocated bathing in sea water, as well as glugging a pint of it every now and again, became incredibly successful. So successful, in fact, that it turned around the fortunes of the clapped- out fishing town of Brighthelmstone, not yet known as Brighton. A whole faculty of dubious doctors was soon cranking out advice on thalassic health, and wellness-obsessed folk came tumbling into the Sussex resort to soak their bones inits briny waters.
Brighthelmstone’s stock rose further when, in the 1780s, King George III’s eldest son George (the one who’d later become the Prince Regent and ultimately George IV) began taking extended holidays here. Ostensibly this was to buff up George’s own health by partaking in saltwater therapy, although if, as the TV historian Lucy Worsley claims, George was scoffing ‘two pigeons and three beefsteaks, three parts of a bottle of Moselle, a glass of dry Champagne, two glasses of Port and a glass of Brandy’ for breakfast, there’s only so much good a paddle in the sea would’ve done him. Nevertheless, Brighthelmstone metamorphosed into Brighton, itself rebranded as the uber- trendy ‘London- on- Sea’, and Croydon, by dint of where it was on the map, became a glorified service station for the booming stagecoach industry.
In Memorials of Croydon Within the Crosses, John Ollis Pelton conjures up a Croydon High Street ‘with here a slow, grey- tilted carrier’s cart, and there a Brighton stagecoach, stopping to change horses, with the scarlet- coated guard on the back seat, equipped with post- horn and blunderbuss’. Guards on these stagecoaches tended to pack a piece due to the perils of highwaymen. This was the era of Dick Turpin and his gang – in fact, legend has it that Turpin lived in a cottage in Thornton Heath, a jot north of central Croydon, which had a secret staircase leading to the roof for swift escapes. Whether or not this was true, the threat of highwaymen was very real. A roving brigand by the name of O’Brien literally defrocked a Croydon vicar, after winning his canonical gowns in a game of cards.* In 1795, Jerry Abershawe, aka the ‘Laughing Highwayman’, was tried and sentenced to death in Croydon, becoming the last hanged highwayman to have his body put on public display – and a popular attraction it proved, too. Just before he swung, Abershawe kicked off his boots, thus disproving his mother’s prediction that he’d die with them on.
The threat of footpads patently didn’t deter most holidaymakers, because by 1815 some 100,000 were shuttling along the Brighton Road, and Croydon was ready for them. Inns like the Greyhound, the King’s Arms, the Crown and the George provided longer- haul travellers with somewhere to sleep before they got a wriggle on the next morning. The Greyhound had a large gallows sign straddling the entire street, much as a motorway sign might indicate a service station today. At the George, a nasty legend persisted that lodgers were murdered in their beds, with their remains boiled in a cauldron by the landlady, aka ‘Old Mother Hotpot’. (Another, more believable, story tells of an ‘Old Mother Hotwater’, a whizz at cooking and cleaning, who didn’t do away with any of her guests.) The Prince Regent himself once called in at Croydon on his way to one of his Brighton jollies, only to be booed and hissed at by a mob outside the Crown, of all places. Taking the altercation to heart, George made a point of never coming to Croydon again.
Early-nineteenth-century roads were sticky with mud and rutted with potholes. Even though the stagecoaches, given dynamic names like Comet, Vivid and Dart, only went about 10 miles an hour at top whack, it still made for a skull- rattling ride. Turnpike trusts were set up to improve the routes, and toll gates became commonplace, raising much- needed money for the roads’ upkeep. One of these toll gates was almost the death of a sitting prime minister. Riding back from a party hosted by Lord Liverpool at the Addiscombe Place mansion one evening, a squiffy William Pitt theYounger (likely to have sunk three bottles of port, as was his daily intake) charged straight through a gate at Croydon Common and was shot at by the nightwatchman, very nearly becoming the only British prime minister to be assassinated by accident. The toll- dodging PM, as it happens, is the same man responsible for introducing income tax to Britain.
Some industrious Croydonians pivoted to manufacturing carriages. Businesses like William Waters and Messrs Lenny and Co. churned out broughams, phaetons, clarences, wagonettes, stanhopes and Parisians. Eighteenth- century Croydon was the Motor City of its time – just minus the motors. The town even made its own brand of carriage, the Croydon Basket, which was, bragged Messrs Lenny and Co., ‘so famous throughout the world’ that they’d had to ‘greatly enlarge their premises’. In addition to their showroom in Croydon, the company had another in Park Lane, Central London – the same spot where BMWs and Aston Martins now beckon to petrolheads through the plate- glass windows. Croydon had dipped its toes into a love affair with wheels it’s still mixed up in.
I hope you enjoyed that read. There’s plenty more where that came from in Croydonopolis. I’ll be back next week, with another instalment for paid Croydon Edit subscribers. Until then!
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