Getting into local history

History
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I’ve been looking forward to kicking off our history category and I had to give it a great deal of thought. Rather than try to write a blog style post about one topic right away, I wanted to just start us off with a few ramblings to show some potential continuity between this and other forums, previous and current, including blogs, podcasts and social media.

So the very first thing is to say thank you to everyone who has posted about local history. It has been such a joy to read everything that has been posted that was possible to read/watch/listen given the sheer volume. Because I had never joined any online forum right up until now, I mostly read your posts as part of searching for local history. After a few years I got to know who was interested in what and so on, and after a decade I wondered how I could get involved myself.

So I answered an advert posted on a lamp post to join the Friends of Albion Millennium Green back in round about 2012 I think, and I started to wonder how all the information I was reading in the local forums (and by that I also include Dulwich, Norwood, Penge and so on) would help our Green interpret local history. Eventually I was invited to chair the Friends and got to know the other park user groups in the borough. My dear friend Alona from Mayow Park encouraged me to get involved, and I’m so grateful that through a chance meeting at Crystal Palace Station, Alona invited me into a newly formed book group based on a network of individuals around Transition Towns Brockley. Through that process we started to triangulate between ideas about nature writing, sustainability and the arcs of history.

Although I stepped down from chairing the Friends of Albion Millennium Green, I am still focused on developing our interpretation materials especially as they relate to historic individuals nearby, the canal, the early railway history, Sydenham Common and the Great North Wood etc.

One of the penny drop moments in this progression was being on a walkabout with Steve Grindlay and when we stopped at the end of Westbourne Drive he told us that the Hollywood actor Leslie Howard (Gone With the Wind) had been born in that road. And I thought is that really true, I just didn’t believe it straight away. I had a similar experience when I first heard the poet Byron had been to school for a short time in Dr Glennie’s School on the site of The Green Man pub which had become a Harvester, opposite the entrance to Cox’s Walk into Sydenham Hill Wood. In both cases I thought what else is out there that is still yet to be uncovered?

My response was to start collecting every book on local history, then books about each individual who had lived, stayed, visited or been born or died in a radius covering a good 100 minute walk from Forest Hill centre.

The next penny drop moment happened during the lockdowns, I finally got round to using the genealogy websites and saw the proof of who lived at what address, and that’s when I began to do original research based on primary evidence.

I hope that by sharing my experiences with you, and hearing back from you, that we can start to scope out what this new forum could achieve in acting as a friendly convener of local history.

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This morning I discovered Mathew Frith had died last year in August. I had known of Mathew’s incredible work through all the times he had been mentioned here and there over the years. Many of you will know he was instrumental in establishing the epic organisation needed to take on Sydenham Hill Wood and more recently Dulwich Hill Wood. I am grateful to Daniel Greenwood (once of Sydenham Hill Wood) and Mike Keogh of Quaggy Waterways Action Group for helping me situate something about the fundamental role Mathew had played. I did see him several times at various events. Eventually by chance I got to meet him properly when we were sat at the same table in an event in The Sydenham Centre. At my instigation we talked about the role of social and cultural history in how the interpretation scheme at Sydenham Hill Wood was conceived. My interest was to determine how and why it had appeared so relatively late in site interpretation schemes across the sites covered by The Great North Wood. And to my delight he conceded that its importance had been overlooked earlier, and we agreed that it has now been appropriately integrated to reflect the context in which human impact has shaped the natural environment with greater emphasis on local stories. And today we can see from the more recent interpretation boards at the Wood what a wonderful job the London Wildlife Trust has done in that respect.

Sometime soon I will be detailing Perry Trail, a walk from Mayow Park to The Capitol which samples a cross section of local history par excellence. On that trail we will cover important connections to Darwinism through Captain Fitzroy, the perry orchards, and the designer Alexander McQueen. I can now add to this analysis of Darwinism some example of plant speciation through Impatiens frithii named for Mathew Frith who was a fellow of The Linnean Society. I will be using this also to demonstrate the methodology of THINK OUTSIDE which I have started to blog about here in a dedicated topic.

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