Skyberries and Voidmelons or Voidberries and Skymelons

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For today's post I selected a six-figure grid reference somewhere in London, entirely at random, and then visited the selected spot. That'll make a change from posting about railways, I thought. But I thought wrong.

Random grid reference: TQ402727
Grove Park Nature Reserve Lewisham SE12



The whole of London to choose from and I landed in a six acre nature reserve with full public access, just to the right of these railway tracks. What's at the appropriate grid reference is essentially a lot of trees but also a chalk meadow, a rare tiny wasp, a nature trail, a potential urban park, a monument to a famous local apartheid campaigner and the site of an abandoned motorway, also the inspiration for a much-loved children's story and knicker-waving film. I thus apologise for the fact I'm going to have to mention the word railway thirteen times in what follows.



The South Eastern Railway opened their Tunbridge line in 1865, here through open fields overseen by a handful of farms. Grove Park gained a station in 1871 and a few large houses appeared along Burntash Lane, while a single footpath continued across the cutting for the benefit of a few farm workers. Those villas spread without ever backing fully onto the railway, leaving a stripe of land that would eventually become allotments, then in 1984 a nature reserve. The footpath survives as a key local connection via a twisty footbridge, from which my earlier photo was taken, indeed you may know it from Capital Ring section 3. And from here it's all too easy to wander off into the delightful patch of woodland at TQ402727.



The southern half of Grove Park Nature Reserve, closest to the grid reference, is mostly deciduous woodland. The ground cover's quite thick but a path weaves round the perimeter, stepping up onto a wooden boardwalk at the top end to ensure less squidgy progress in winter months. A terribly brief stream feeds a small pond where dragonflies and irises proliferate, according to the information board, with adjacent platforms added to aid pond dipping. The wildlife I experienced included butterflies and a squirrel, plus half a dozen young children in wellies engaging in mudplay encouraged by jolly parents who'd brought buckets and towels. A six-post nature trail with QR codes linking to a Wordpress blog can help guide you round.



Keep going and you soon reach a clearing on an embankment overlooking the railway, and this it turns out is the most consequential spot. The meadow here has a chalk soil, this because navvies dumped spoil here during construction of the railway, hence this is one of the only alkaline habitats in the borough of Lewisham. "Best seen in July" says the information board, but after the parched weeks we've had I fear tufted vetch and bird's foot trefoil failed to gain a foothold this summer. The long grass is however ideal for the six-spot Burnet moth, and thus also for the parasitic chalcidid wasp, one species of which was unknown in Britain until it was discovered here at TQ401728.



That weird green leafy sculpture on the bank is the Peace Pole, endpoint of the uncelebrated Grove Park Peace Trail. This leads from Chinbrook Meadows and was inspired by the frankly astonishing fact that the future Archbishop Desmond Tutu spent three years as the curate for St Augustine's Church just down the road. He even came back for the unveiling in 2009 when local schoolchildren sang him African songs and he told them how badly he'd been treated in apartheid South Africa. But the famous person who made Grove Park Nature Reserve her own was undoubtedly Edith Nesbit, the famous children's author, who once lived in a house by the top of the footpath, since renamed Railway Children Walk.



In 1894 E Nesbit used her early earnings as a writer to help fund a move to Three Gables, a desirable Queen Anne-style villa on Baring Road. She'd have had a good view of the railway from her back garden, the backdrop then just fields, and also been familiar with the path down the embankment which gave access to the tracks. She and her husband Hubert had a diverse and radical social circle, so for example George Bernard Shaw was known to drop by, and she also scandalised the neighbourhood by letting her children roam barefoot around Grove Park. The Nesbits had moved on to Eltham by the time The Railway Children was written, but it's often assumed the book was inspired by living beside the railway here, not least because Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis lived in a house called Three Chimneys.



The view out the back is far less sylvan now - four electrified railway tracks augmented by multiple approaches into Grove Park Sidings with its massive carriage shed. Also it was never as rural as you remember from the 1970 film because that was filmed on the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway in West Yorkshire instead. Alas Three Gables has long been demolished, the building on site today being a bogstandard three-storey block of flats called Stratfield House. I haven't been able to find out when and where it went, but I do know the two neighbouring semis were knocked down in 1969 to make way for a proposed orbital motorway called Ringway 2. This was a bold (some would say suicidal) plan by the GLC to replace the South Circular and would have wiped out 30,000 houses altogether. You can see how close it came to fruition.



Ringway 2 would have crossed the railway here, eradicating Cox's Wood and all the houses along Coopers Lane to make room for the multi-pronged Baring Road Interchange. Local residents were appalled when the GLC suddenly announced the route as a fait accompli, and joined a growing protest movement which eventually led to an electoral thrashing and the scrapping of the Ringways project. Here in Grove Park the new sense of activism found its voice with the opening of a community centre in the almost-demolished semi, and a cluster of prefabs slotted into the gap where the road would have gone. With a sense of ownership they called it The Ringway Centre, and on a Sunday morning I can confirm it thrives as The Redeemed Christian Church Of God Place Of His Presence.

In the woods out back they've recently set up an outdoor classroom area called Camp Nesbit where schoolchildren come for science lessons, writing workshops and sometimes the chance to walk down to Grove Park Nature Reserve and wave at trains. There are also much wider plans to create a three mile long 'Urban National Park' alongside the railway from here to Elmstead Woods, plainly overoptimistic in these cash-squeezed times but sometimes it pays to dream big. Edith's embankment amid Grove Park Nature Reserve could one day be part of something much larger, ideal for letting off steam, although inspiring The Railway Children will always be TQ402727's first class achievement.

» Grove Park Heritage Trail: map & leaflet

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Another Saturday, another significant station birthday. This time it's a 50th birthday and it's on the Underground, the anniversary station being Hatton Cross.



Saturday 19th July 1975 was ALSO the day a brand new rolling stock was introduced on the Piccadilly line, freshly fitted out with additional luggage space. The first such train made the inaugural public journey into Hatton Cross around 10am, and may well roll in again today 50 years later because TfL still haven't managed to introduce a replacement. I don't think any significant celebrations are planned.

Before 1975 the Piccadilly line terminated at Hounslow West but a drive to serve Heathrow Airport saw a sequential extension introduced, initially just to Hatton Cross and then in 1977 to Heathrow Central. Here's a poster from the time and here's the customer leaflet, both sides. Hatton Cross station was to serve "the maintenance areas on the south side of the airport and the large housing districts of North Feltham and Bedfont". Meanwhile "passengers for airlines and spectators" were urged to continue to alight at a remodelled Hounslow West and take the A1 Express bus from the station forecourt.



Being of mid-70s vintage, Hatton Cross has a certain brutalist aesthetic, or if you're feeling less polite looks like a concrete bunker. Its flat roof is because it was once meant to have a car park on top until the airport decided that might be a distraction to incoming planes, which do admittedly come into land incredibly close by. Look more closely and the ripples on the slabs round the perimeter of the roof are actually art, a concrete frieze by William Mitchell, although the artworks most people are aware of are the gorgeous mosaics down on the island platform.



Several of the tiled columns feature three stylised birds in flight, the 'Speedbird' motif of Imperial Airways/BOAC, gloriously picked out in blue against an orange background. If waiting for a train, perhaps changing for a looper to Terminal 4, they always brighten the soul. Meanwhile the roof is made from corrugated metal, the floor comprises panels of multicoloured terrazzo and the larger wall tiles are in shades of off-grey and subdued green. Note also the illuminated roundels, these now found only here and at Pimlico which had opened three years earlier. As a time capsule of mid-Seventies design the tube has no finer example.

Climb the stairs - Hatton Cross being the youngest tube station not to have lifts - and you reach a broad funnelling concourse. Beyond is a covered waiting area brightened by a glass lantern and several hanging baskets, where global travellers mingle with airport staff and perhaps take the opportunity for a nap. The shop unit still trades, although the name Newscafe is plainly out of date and they probably now sell more bottles and cans than anything else. The doors to the booking hall were originally operated by treadpads and opened automatically, which was proper cutting edge, but those to the bus station are more annoying as they all need pushing and one alas is full-on defective.



Hatton Cross got a spruce-up last year including the addition of vinyl artworks across many of the ground floor windows. The upper frieze features the Speedbird motif amidst a burst of colour, echoing back to designs downstairs, while below are Himalayan blue poppies and Shirui lilies, two species discovered by Frank Kingdon-Ward who once had a nursery close by. At the same time a so-called Energy Garden was added in the flowerbeds round the back and a few tubs out front. It looked dazzling in Ian Visits' initial report but the current reality is scrappy green plants in need of watering, so at best that means I missed their spring flowering but more likely suggests it's no longer getting the attention it deserves.

The station sits amid an oppressive urban environment with a major dual carriageway on one side and Britain's largest airport on the other. But look more carefully amid the sheds and hotels and the remnants of something older linger, because all of this has been built right on top of what was once a small quiet Middlesex village. Hatton was once a cluster of farms and cottages around a loop of country lanes, large enough for a pub and chapel but not a church or shop, surrounded by many acres of market gardening. Its misfortune is that in 1925 the Great South West Road was aligned straight through the middle, then brutally widened ten years later, and where the village got lucky is that when London Airport expanded it got no further than the A30, thus a few scraps of Hatton remain to the south of the main road.



If it helps you to orientate, the centre of Hatton is now occupied by the screamingly blue Atrium hotel, where you should never book an overnight room if it's Runway Alternation Week One. The older house across the road with all the vans round the back was originally called The Orchard while the feeder road outside, now Dick Turpin Way, follows the alignment of a brief back lane. A tad more of Steam Farm Lane survives, now somewhere taxis and coaches park up during pauses between airport transfers. The boarded-off hall here was originally Hatton Mission Chapel, an outpost of St Mary's East Bedfont whose vicar travelled by horse and cart to hold a service on Sunday afternoons, and which finally closed in 1992 for fear of fallen roof tiles.

Behind was Hatton Farm, largest of the local farmsteads, one of whose many barns survives as a timber ruin amid a scrappy paddock. Horses are still kept here and in other nearby fields, even those containing airport landing lights, because equine residents tend not to complain about aircraft noise. And a short distance down Hatton Road, a smidge beyond the car wash, are six old cottages still on their original footprint. It seems amiss to see an 1836 plaque on the front of the pebbledashed pair, unless perhaps they replaced something older, but the two teetering right on the edge of the flightpath look much more convincingly Victorian.



Hatton's oldest surviving building by far is The Green Man pub, allegedly Jacobean although its listing only reckons 18th century. It's a lovely higgledy building, formerly thatched, whose stables contain a highwayman's hide built into the open back of the chimney, now a feature in the Lounge Bar. If you're ever waiting a long time for a flight it looks a better place to enjoy chicken, chips and a pint than forking out for something fussier airside. For an even cheaper meal try Super Singh's, a no-frills cafe in a blue and white shed on Faggs Lane specialising in vegan pizza and eggless cakes. As for the business park across the road this replaced an extensive Catholic orphanage, the St Anthony's Home, which packed its dormitories tight but fled the area in 1962.



Close by is Hatton's only 20th century residential street, a cul-de-sac of houses and bungalows looped round a patch of parched grass called Hatton Green. In this brief enclave of neat hedged gardens and satellite dishes you could be anywhere in outer London, at least if you visit like I did during the half of the day when planes aren't thundering over. The penalties for living here are obvious but the benefits include a free parking space many visitors to Heathrow would kill for, plus the gift of a tube station a short walk away. It may have been built for the airport but it unintentionally best serves the village Heathrow half-destroyed, by the busy crossroads known as Hatton Cross.



Happy 50th!

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