Green Chain Walk D2.1: Woolwich - Falconwood

 

Woolwich Royal Arsenal Pier, octagonal guardhouses and Assembly sculpture.

The next phase of my tour of the complete Green Chain begins with this relatively short but fine walk climbing from one of London’s most impressive collections of heritage buildings, beside the river at Woolwich Royal Arsenal, to the summit of Shooter’s Hill, one of London’s loftiest points, and on into the luxuriant leafiness of Oxleas Wood with its much-loved café. Along the way there’s a sampling of Plumstead Common and a succession of breathtaking views from Salisbury Park, Eaglesfield Park and Oxleas Meadow.

The walk starts by the Thames Clippers pier at Woolwich Royal Arsenal, with an easy link to the Woolwich Ferry pier too. Shortly after the start you pass Woolwich Elizabeth Line station and Woolwich Arsenal National Rail and DLR station, which provide alternative ways to access the walk. There’s not another handy station until Falconwood (National Rail) at the end, but you’ll pass several bus stops. You might need them, as this is also one of the Green Chain’s more rugged stretches, with over 130 m of ascent, including some steep streets and paths and a flight of rough steps.

This walk covers all Green Chain Section 4a running roughly north-south from Waverley Crescent on Plumstead Common, where it leaves Section 4, to Oxleas Wood Café where it links with Sections 3 and 5 and the Capital Ring. I’ve topped and tailed it, starting at Woolwich then following Ring and Green Chain station links and parts of the (unsigned) Green London Way, except for a brief shortcut across General Gordon Square, to head south for the Fox and Hounds on Plumstead Common Road. Here you’ll pick up Green Chain Section 4 for a short distance east, duplicating part of my walk D3, to the start of Section 4a at Waverley Crescent.

At the other end, I use Section 3 (duplicating D4.1 and the Capital Ring) to Oxleas Wood Junction and Section 6 (duplicating D1.1, D4.1 and the Ring) to Welling Way bus stops, then a short unofficial station link to Falconwood. The walk is shorter than usual as, when combined with the second leg along the Shuttle Riverway to Bexley, there is no convenient station for breaking it into more even portions. But with so much to look at in Woolwich and all that climbing, it feels longer than it is.

See the Ramblers guide for directions on the central portion on Green Chain 4a, and my information sheet for the rest. The routes and places mentioned are shown on my Google map.

The Royal Arsenal

River Thames by Woolwich Royal Arsenal Pier: note the remains of various earlier piers.

London Underfoot has been to Woolwich before: it’s the official start and end point of the Capital Ring, so I’ve already gone into historical detail on Ring 1. But to summarise: a Celtic oppidum or fortified town stood on a modest rise beside the Thames at Woolwich from the Iron Age, the only one of its kind known in the London area. It was re-occupied in the later part of the Roman era as a fort protecting the approaches to London. In Anglo-Saxon times the place was most likely a quiet fishing village and officially became a market town in 1618. It was long considered a distinct sub-manor of Eltham, but had its own parish church likely from pre-Norman times. Historically, it was in the Blackheath hundred and the Sutton at Hone lathe of the county of Kent.

The overwhelming influence on the shape of the modern town is its long association with the military and the navy. Henry VIII chose Woolwich as the location in 1512 for one of his naval dockyards, and his flagship Henry grace à Dieu or Great Harry was built here in 1515. An area of riverside historically used as a rabbit warren to the east became a ropeyard which served the dockyard and by the 1650s a wharf next to this was used by the Board of Ordnance to store guns, which were tested on the warren. A gun battery was installed to protect the river in 1667, and in 1695 the site began producing explosives, fuses and shot.

Production of arms and explosives continued to grow over the following century, and in 1805 George III renamed the facility the Royal Arsenal. By then, as explained on D1.1, the site had already begun to expand downriver into Plumstead and Erith, occupying marshes drained by the monks of Lesnes Abbey, until the arsenal controlled practically the whole riverside between Woolwich and Crossness. World War I saw the Royal Arsenal at its peak, with more than 80,000 people working on a 5.3 square km site.

Activity declined in the interwar years, and though the arsenal also played a major role in World War II, it began downsizing soon afterwards in response to decline in demand for armaments, new technologies changing the way wars were likely to be fought in future, and new plants opening elsewhere. Some of the production facilities initially switched to making railway wagons and knitting frames, and the first patch of land sold off as surplus to requirements became an industrial estate in 1953. Subsequent disused chunks were used for social housing and industrial estates, and in the late 1960s the Greater London Council began developing most of the rest into a massive new town, Thamesmead, also explored on D1.1.

The Ministry of Defence continued to occupy most of the historic western portion of the site, closest to Woolwich Town Centre, until 1994. From 2003, this was progressively turned into an upmarket residential, commercial and cultural neighbourhood, which boasts one of the greatest concentrations of listed buildings converted for residential use in the UK. For all my reservations about the politics of privately led development on public assets and the legal status of ‘public-private’ space, the results here are splendid, at least in the core of the site which we’ll explore today. Much of the original fabric of this important historic location has been kept and is open to everyone’s view. If, like me, you remember it as a no-go area surrounded by forbidding walls and appearing as a blank space on A-Z maps, it’s a major revelation.

Strictly speaking, though the Capital Ring, Jubilee Greenway (which follows the same course as the Thames Path upstream from the foot tunnel portal), Thames Path and England Coast Path run through, there’s no Green Chain branch starting from Woolwich. But there is a north-south link, Section 4a, running from Plumstead Common, not too far away, to Oxleas Woods.

To bring this leg in line with the other riverside starts, I’ve suggested an extension from Royal Arsenal Pier to the common, passing some of the arsenal’s most important heritage buildings. It almost entirely follows part of Bob Gilbert’s unofficial Green London Way, which splits from the ring here on an extended loop through several Green Chain spaces. As far as Woolwich Arsenal station it shares the path with one of the Ring’s station links and from there it tracks an official Green Chain station link a short distance south of the town centre.

Thames Clippers catamarans, currently branded Uber Boat, regularly serve the pier, so this is a grand opportunity to arrive at the start by river, an ideal way of setting the context given the Thames’s importance to our story. You’ll need the RB1, which can be caught from Westminster, the London Eye, Embankment, Blackfriars, Bankside, London Bridge, Tower, Canary Wharf, Greenwich, North Greenwich and a few other piers, and continues to Barking Riverside. If this is inconvenient, or you’d rather not shell out the additional fare, the nearest station is Woolwich on the Elizabeth Line around 400 m away, with Woolwich Arsenal on National Rail southeastern and the DLR around 250 m further, though you’ll end up retracing steps in both cases if you don’t want to miss any of the heritage assets.

Royal Arsenal Pier is a modern structure, installed in 2002 to serve the redeveloped site, though between 1815 and 1931 there was a water gate here with steps. You can still see the remains of the steps under the pier if you look over the adjacent river embankment. But their role as the main riverside gateway was eventually superseded by three piers a little downstream which were rather bigger than the current one.

The T-Pier, constructed in the 1850s and named after its shape, was demolished in the 1990s though some of its supporting pillars still sprout from the river next to the current pier. The other two are still partially standing and visible if you look downstream, though derelict: the Iron Pier, also T-shaped, was added in 1869 for loading heavy iron guns onto ships, and the L-shaped Coaling Pier opened in 1917 as a delivery point for the 1,500 t of coal the arsenal was then consuming in an average week.

The steps were a recognised weak point in the security cordon, thus the two octagonal guardhouses that once flanked them (Grade II), also dating from 1815. The western one (building A41) was for officers, the eastern (A42) for artillerymen. Today, they’re used as a dog grooming salon and a café respectively. As first built, they had open bays, but were later enclosed. The body of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (1856-79), Prince Imperial of France and son of Napoleon III, lay in state in the western guardhouse after he was killed by Zulu forces near Ulundi in what’s now Zululand, South Africa, while fighting for the British army during the Zulu Wars. Though it was his own idea to join up, his death triggered rumours in France that the wicked British were to blame.

Also eye-catching is the Assembly sculpture installed in 2005 in front of the guardrooms, a small crowd of 16 partial body casts of human figures, made from gently rusting cast iron and arranged within a circle. It’s often assumed to be the work of Antony Gormley, who is also fond of simplified human figures, but it’s by Peter Burke (b1944), who intended to evoke both the human form and the heavy engineering and mass production that once went on in the surrounding buildings. To me it oddly combines a certain sombreness, particularly evident on dull days when few people are around, with a surprising sense of fun, as evidenced by its popularity with children and selfie-takers.

Along No 1 Street

The Royal Arsenal's only Grade I listed building, the former Royal Brass Foundry.

Your way is straight ahead along the main thoroughfare of the area, prosaically named No 1 Street. A patch of grass with a collection of mounted guns on the left (east), on a site previously occupied by a military police station, is called James Clavell Square, after James Clavell (1921-94), the Australian-born writer and film maker, who wrote the screenplay for The Great Escape (1963) and wrote and directed To Sir, With Love (1967) among others.

He was a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery during World War II and was taken prisoner by the Japanese in Java in 1942, later drawing on that gruelling experience for his novel King Rat (1962). He’s commemorated here as his widow sponsored the library attached to Firepower, which once occupied the adjacent building as explained below. The biggest weapon on display is the hefty 40 t Gibraltar Gun, installed as part of Gibraltar’s coastal defences in 1902. It was rescued from a scrapyard in the 1980s.

The surrounding buildings collectively formed the Royal Laboratory. The term is misleading to modern ears: when the first ‘laboratory’ was established at the Warren in 1695, it was a workshop making ammunition, the beginning of such manufacturing on the site. On the right is Building 41, otherwise known as New Laboratory Square, or the Pedimental Building after the pedimented style of the range facing towards us (formerly buildings A22, A25-32 and A34, Grade II).

There are three more ranges around a rectangular courtyard: the oldest is the west range on the other side, built in 1805, with the east (facing us) and north added five years later. When the south range completed the quadrangle in 1878, it was built with a cast iron frame, clearly visible when you poke your head round the corner: many arsenal buildings of the period used this technique but this is the sole survivor. By the end of World War I, the central courtyard had been infilled with workshops and a boiler house, since cleared.

Opposite, just beyond James Clavell Square, is Building 18 (formerly A44, Grade II), completed in 1856 as offices for the Royal Laboratory. Building 17, the yellow brick building south of this, part of the same block and built at the same time, is the former Paper Cartridge Factory (Grade II), which was later converted to make metal cartridge cases, some for early machine guns.

Royal Arsenal boardroom, with the cast iron-framed south range of the New Laboratory right.

Opposite this is an open square with a particularly handsome Grade II*-listed Baroque building at the far end, built as the Royal Arsenal Boardroom between 1718-20 on the site of the Lieutenant General of Ordnance’s official residence (Building 40). Part of it was used by the Royal Military Academy before this moved to Woolwich Common (Ring 1) in 1806. The architect is unknown, but it’s been attributed to two big names, Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736) and John Vanbrugh (1664-1726), who were both active on the site, and fits with both their styles. The lion and unicorn above the entrance originally stood over the northern entrance to the original Royal Laboratory around what’s now Pavilion Square, roughly where the single-storey part of the new flat block is, to the left as you look at the boardroom. They were transplanted here following various 19^th century developments.

In 2001, during the early stages of the current redevelopment, parts of New Laboratory Square and the offices became the Royal Artillery Museum, branded as Firepower and widely recognised as one of the most important military museums in the UK. The Greenwich Heritage Centre, also with a museum as well as visitor information and an archive, opened in the iron-framed southern range of the square in 2003. Firepower struggled to cover its costs and closed in 2016: it’s not yet found a new home and its collection is currently in storage.

Greenwich council subsequently converted the buildings into a ‘cultural quarter’ known as Woolwich Works which curiously didn’t include the heritage centre, kicked out at short notice in 2018.  New Laboratory Square now has various performance and events spaces, including the 900-seater Fireworks Factory, mainly used for music. Open air events are now held in the courtyard, which has been named Workers’ Yard, and there’s a recording studio in the west wing.

Immersive theatre company Punchdrunk is based at the Paper Cartridge Factory, while another theatre is under construction in the Laboratory Offices. The Royal Arsenal Boardroom is now Academy Performing Arts, a rehearsal and teaching facility. The council originally promised to return the heritage centre to the site after all the work was completed but then reneged on this amid considerable local protest. The collection is currently in storage in leaky Charlton House (Ring 1) with no future public facility yet confirmed.

The lengthy and imposing façade visible along Duke of Wellington Avenue, to the left after the Paper Cartridge Factory, is the north range of the New Carriage Store (Grade II), built between 1802-05 for making, maintaining and storing the carriages for big guns.

The oldest part of the Royal Laboratory is on the right just past this corner, the site of the original 1690s gunpowder factory, also arranged around a courtyard. Two 21^st century flat blocks now flank the north and south, known as Tyger House and Amphion House respectively, but a pair of historic pavilions (Grade II), built in 1695 and likely the oldest extant ordnance buildings in the UK, still stand to the east and west, with the former fronting onto No 1 Street. Note the range of five large windows intended to provide plenty of natural light to a top floor workshop. In 1855 the courtyard behind was roofed over to create what was then the largest milling machinery space in the world. It’s since been opened to the air again as Pavilion Square.

The only Grade I-listed building on the site has dominated the view ahead since leaving the pier. It has an imposing central block with a large door surrounded by contrasting brick and plaster bands and topped by an elaborate representation of George I’s coat of arms, with dormer windows emerging from a tower topped by a leaded cupola, flanked by two much lower single storey wings. This is the original Royal Brass Foundry, Building A4. Opened in 1717, likely to designs by John Vanburgh, it was the first arsenal building designed for making guns, in this case large field guns cast from brass.

According to its listing, it’s a ‘rare, early and little-altered example of a purpose-built foundry and workshop, reworked at the start of the industrial revolution’. It continued in its original use until around 1870, after which it was used as storeroom. It’s been the archive of the National Maritime Museum (based in Greenwich on D5.1) since 1972. Leaning against one of its side walls facing No 1 Street is a Roman sculpture of a barbarian known as Deus Lunus (‘moon god’), dating from between the 1^st and 3^rd century CE and looted by British troops in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1801.

Spoils of Empire: Deus Lunus casually leaning against the foundry wall.

You walk over the Elizabeth Line just before No 1 Street kinks slightly left in front of the foundry to pass another of the site’s older buildings, and one of its most idiosyncratic. This is the Dial Arch or Building A57 on the left. Built between 1717-20 as a frontage and machine shop for the later Royal Brass Foundry, which occupied the space behind, it’s almost certainly the work of Hawksmoor. It’s a fortunate survivor, as most of the foundry, known variously over the years as the Great Pile, Foundry Square or the Dial Arch Block, was demolished and rebuilt in the 19^th century, demolished again in 1969 and covered with flats in the early 2000s.

Dial Arch, Royal Arsenal Woolwich.

There are numerous delightful decorative touches to lighten what’s otherwise a solid industrial building, particularly around the central arch, which is flanked by two pylons topped with pyramids of shot and surmounted by the bronze sundial that explains the name, added in 1764. It now functions as a large pub and café, opened in 2010.

The Dial Arch overlooks the open space of Dial Square, a name familiar to historians of association football. In 1886, a group of arsenal workers formed the Dial Square Football Club, renaming it Royal Arsenal FC the following year. They played at various locations in nearby Plumstead before settling at the Manor Ground, adjacent to the arsenal site near Plumstead station, in 1888, and became the first London team to turn professional in 1891. Known for a while as Woolwich Arsenal FC, the club became simply Arsenal FC when it crossed the river in 1913 to a new stadium in Gillespie Road, Highbury, where it remains today. This history is commemorated by a modest memorial on the pub patio right opposite the main entrance, a plinth topped by a football, installed in 2005.

Dial Square monument, Royal Arsenal. North London got the Arsenal while south London got Millwall...

A little further along on the right is a much larger piece of public art, a sculpture of the goddess Nike by Greek artist Pavlos Angelos Kougioumtzis (b1945), gifted to Greenwich by the people of Olympos in 2012 to mark the London Olympic and Paralympic Games. It stands in the front yard of the 1788 guardhouse, Building A83 (Grade II), in stock brick with an outsized Portland stone Doric portico, now also used as a pub.

Opposite, across Dial Square, is Woolwich Elizabeth Line station, opened in 2022. It was a long time coming: the first known proposal to link main line railways west and east of the capital with a full-sized tunnel beneath central London was in 1941, and the idea was adopted in the utopian County of London and Greater London Plans in 1943-44. The Central London Rail Study recommended a ‘crossrail’ tunnel connecting Paddington and Liverpool Street in 1974 and the idea was subsequently promoted by British Rail and the GLC, but rejected in 1991 by a government hostile to public transport. The project was finally approved in 2008 with construction beginning the following year, though as often the work took rather longer and cost rather more than expected.

The section from Paddington through the central tunnel to Canary Wharf and Abbey Wood, passing under our feet, opened around 3½ years behind schedule, with the full service between Reading or Heathrow in the west and Shenfield or Abbey Wood in the east starting in 2023. It’s unique in London’s transport network: though managed by Transport for London and branded very much like a Tube line, it’s technically part of the National Rail network rather than the London Underground – like the London Overground, in fact, though it’s not part of that either. Woolwich station wasn’t in the original plans and was only added after the council lobbied hard and Royal Arsenal developer Berkeley Homes coughed up £162 million to pay for it. It’s notably more modest than the other new stations on the line, though has an attractive bronze-clad frontage and glazing to allow natural light to reach the platforms.

To the right of the station is Verbruggen’s House, Building A85 (Grade II), completed in 1773 as a home for the newly appointed Netherlands-born Royal Arsenal master founder Jan Verbruggen (1712-81) and his son and successor Pieter. Verbruggen had done a similar job for the Dutch admiralty and was also a noted painter of seascapes and shipping. The house, a smart two-storey building, later served as a boardroom and is now offices.

Our trail leaves the current Royal Arsenal site through Marsh Gate, where, just a few paces right and round the corner, one of the few surviving fragments of the early 18^th century wall can be seen behind the guardhouse. This wall originally continued in a straight line to connect with the original landward main entrance, Beresford Gate, still standing but now severed from the main site by the busy A206 Beresford Street ahead of us. The road opened in 1982 as one of the cumulative encroachments, replacing the previous much narrower Beresford Street which ran on the other side of the arch. To compensate a little for the redundancy of this ceremonial gateway, the more modest piers and gates of Marsh Gate, a subsidiary access point further east along Plumstead Road, were transplanted here.

You’ll appreciate Beresford Gate better once you’ve crossed the road and looked back at the side facing the town. The current Grade II-listed structure (Building A80) dates from 1829, with the bell tower added in 1859 and the upper parts in 1891. If you look carefully, you’ll see the insignia of George IV and decorative mortars on the parapets flanking each side. There are also two cattle troughs, but they were moved here in the 1990s.

The arch and the adjoining street and square are named after William Beresford (1768-1854), who rose to the rank of Field Marshal commanding the British army against Napoleonic France in Portugal during the Peninsular War, and in 1828 was made Master-General of the Ordnance, with overall responsibility for the arsenal. When the gate was detached from the rest of the site in the early 1980s, the interior was found to be so riddled with dry rot that it had to be entirely replaced. It’s since gone through two restorations and is currently being renovated again as part of the improvements to Beresford Square, which will enable its central gates to be opened for the first time in 25 years.

Woolwich town centre

We're with the Woolwich: General Gordon Square with Equitable Building, teacups, Keir Starmer on the telly and no more smoke.

I’ve covered Woolwich town centre, now largely a conservation area, in some detail on Ring 1. Historic Beresford Square, on the other side of the arch, has long been home to Woolwich Market. At the time of writing, it was in the final stages of an improvement project, with the provision of new seating, plantings and a water feature and the market traders shunted off to the west side, where our route runs. A new market pavilion café and toilets in a striking building designed by architects Studioweave is under construction adjacent to the arch. At the far end, the projecting single storey section of the Elephant and Castle pub obscures a much older two storey building with attic behind it, an early 18^th century Grade II-listed house.

Past this is the main entrance to Woolwich Arsenal Docklands Light Railway (DLR) station, opened in 2009 (see Ring 15 for more on the DLR). It’s notable for its colourful Street Life mural by Irish artist Michael Craig-Martin (b1941), covering two landings and composed of 2,500 individually screen-printed ceramic tiles.

Michael Craig-Martin's distinctive tiling brightening Woolwich Arsenal DLR station.

Reaching General Gordon Square, the roadway to your left covers the first railway to reach Woolwich, the South Eastern Railway’s North Kent Line, which we also crossed on the approach to Lesnes Abbey on D1.1. When first opened in 1859, it ran through an open cutting here, rapidly nicknamed ‘the Smoke ‘Ole’ as it was used for venting smoke from steam locomotives, much to the discomfort of residents, shoppers and market traders. The nuisance persisted until 1928 when the line was electrified and covered over, creating a small public square named after General Charles George Gordon (1833-85), who was born in Woolwich and died during the Siege of Khartoum. The imposing building running along the left side is Equitable House (Grade II), built as the head office of Woolwich Equitable Building Society in 1935.

The station link heads alongside Equitable House to Woolwich Arsenal National Rail station, the building with the glass rotunda ahead, which also has access to the DLR (and its own artwork, a 1993 relief sculpture called Workers of Woolwich by Martin Williams (b1954), alongside Platform 1). But if you’re continuing your journey into territory previously uncharted by London Underfoot, it’s simplest just to cross to the square itself.

The square is now much bigger than it originally was. The western part was built up until the 1970s when it was progressively demolished to make way for a redevelopment scheme that later collapsed. In 1983 the council decided to convert it into a temporary public space, but it rapidly became an informal focal point. Its status was confirmed as permanent in 2009 when it was refurbished and improved in preparation for the Olympics. The current layout dates from then: the giant telly in the eastern corner, a BBC Big Screen, was installed as one of the Olympic ‘live sites’ in 2012.

Ich bin ein Woolwicher: Buddy Bear with appropriately nautical and military additons.

The most direct path across the square will bring you face to face with the Buddy Bear sculpture, a fibreglass Berlin mascot decorated by artist, musician and performer Michèle Petit-Jean (b1954) and students of Eltham Hill School. It was installed in 2016 to mark the 50^th anniversary of the twinning agreement between Greenwich and Reinickendorf borough in the northwest of the German city. The main artwork commemorates the area’s maritime heritage, while the surprisingly aggressive black images of guns on Buddy’s paws nod to the arsenal.

Turning left, the Tramshed theatre and arts centre is prominent ahead. It wasn’t originally a tramshed but an electricity substation built in 1910 to serve the LCC’s tram network. Doubtless it powered the last of the first-generation London trams, which departed Woolwich for New Cross in July 1952 on a route lined with grieving crowds. The council bought the redundant and now part-derelict substation 10 years later and converted it to a theatre, though it’s opened and closed several times since. Greenwich and Lewisham Young People’s Theatre was founded here in 1971, and in 2011 the company returned to take over the building.

The site on the right as you follow Woolwich New Road was for many years another temporary public space created by the collapse of development plans and would have made a pleasant extension of General Gordon Square, offsetting the hideous Tesco superstore that overlooks it. But as of spring 2025 it’s become a construction site for yet another private-shared ownership housing development. 89 Woolwich New Road, at the next corner with Anglesea Road, includes a fragment of a Georgian townhouse, although it’s been much rebuilt.

Our route skips to Brookhill Road, passing the substantial flat blocks of the Walpole social housing estate in their green, though private, surrounds. This was built in the mid-1960s on terraced streets demolished as ‘slum clearance’ in the previous decade. Opposite is the rear of St Peter’s Roman Catholic Church (Grade II), which fronts onto New Road. It’s a substantial example of its type, built in 1843 to designs by renowned Gothic Revival architect Augustus Pugin (1812-52), best known for the Elizabeth Tower at the Palace of Westminster, better known as Big Ben.

You leave the conservation area as you reach the crossing with Sandy Hill Road, where you also part company with the Green Chain station link. This is mainly intended for walkers approaching from the west from Charlton Park who want to break at Woolwich, so it stays on Brookhill Road to join Section 4 (D3) about 250 m west of where we do.  Our route sticks with the Green London Way for a while longer by turning left alongside the Victorian terraces of Sandy Hill Road. We’ve already been climbing modestly, but now the ascent begins in earnest. Across the mini roundabout, on the far corner of Frederick Place, you cross the old parish boundary from Woolwich into Plumstead.

Plumstead Common

Howitzer Brigade memorial on Plumstead Common.

Plumstead was only just east of Woolwich: indeed, most of the platform length of Woolwich Arsenal station is on land that was once in Plumstead. It was not just a separate parish but in a different hundred: Little and Lessness (introduced in D1.1) rather than Blackheath. It’s mentioned in 960 when lands in the area were gifted to St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, and it remained in the abbey’s hands until that institution was dissolved in 1539. It was particularly noted for its extensive common and its marshes, the latter subsequently occupied by the arsenal. Substantial fragments of the former survive today, as we’ll shortly see, though only because local people took action to save them in the 1870s. But as we’ll explore a lot more of Plumstead Common on D3, I’ll save a more detailed history until then.

The street name Burrage Road on the left is a reminder that this area was once part of the Burrage estate, which in the mid-14^th century was effectively a sub-manor of Plumstead that spilt into neighbouring Woolwich. It was held by royal councillor Bartholomew Burghersh the Elder (d1355), whose names comes from Burwash in Suffolk where he also held lands: round here the name was corrupted to Burrage. By the mid-18^th century, it was in the hands of the Pattinson family, who had links to the nearby Royal Military Academy, and there were commercial sandpits on the higher ground towards Plumstead Common Road, thus the street name Sandy Hill Road.

Nathaniel Pattinson sold the southwestern part to the Royal Board of Ordnance in 1808, and he and the Board jointly funded the laying out of Brookhill Road. His son James, a city merchant, capitalising on the demand for housing the ever-increasing numbers of arsenal workers, initiated the development of the rest. By the 1850s strings of terraces had begun to line the steep streets that climbed the hillside, many of them still standing today as we can see. Initially the area was promoted as Plumstead New Town but became known as Burrage Town. The remains of the country estate were parcelled out and sold by the last private owner in the early years of the 20^th century.

The attractive former Sandy Hill Infant School, Plumstead.

As you climb the hill you may notice that the housing gets posher, as wealthier residents were prepared to pay a premium for the cleaner air that comes with height, escaping the fumes and smells of the arsenal and other industries in the valley. Past no 115 on the left is the rather attractive Grade II-listed building of the former Sandy Hill Infant School with its three elegant gables and the tall windows of the assembly hall in its central bay. Built in 1899 for the London School Board, it was the infants department of a larger school site which stretches east to Bloomfield Road, thus the central plaque reading Bloomfield Road School. It remained in school use until 1999, latterly part of Woolwich Polytechnic School, but has since been converted to flats.

Sandy Hill Road meets Plumstead Common Road, one of the old main highways through the area, by the Fox and Hounds pub in a modest Victorian corner building. There’s been a pub here since at least 1840, around when the development of Burrage Town began. Along the main road, now on Green Chain Section 4, you enter Plumstead Common Conservation Area, which largely retains its Victorian character. Trinity Methodist Church on the corner of Burrage Road, dates from 1863, but was badly damaged during the Blitz in 1940 and was largely rebuilt in striking modernist style in 1972-73. There are more handsome late Victorian gables ahead of you at the junction with St Margarets Grove: the imposing building there was once the Prince of Wales pub, closed in 2011 and now flats.

It’s here that you enter the common, which has an active Friends Group. The memorial (Grade II) commemorating the World War I casualties of the locally based 8^th London Howitzer Brigade was installed in 1923. A howitzer is a medium-sized artillery weapon somewhere between a field gun and a mortar: guns like this were made at the Royal Arsenal by Jan Verbruggen in the 18^th century and similar designs continued in use into World War II.

The Dog Rocks, Plumstead Common: even 50 million year old rocks can't escape the Lime bike.

Just past this, opposite the adventure playground, is a terraced shrubbery on the site of a quarry dating from before 1866. Here you can observe the so-called Dog Rocks, an exposed layer of Blackheath Beds puddingstone laid down in the early Eocene epoch around 50 million years ago when this area was under the sea. It consists of flint pebbles bonded by the calcareous remains of small sea creatures. The beds are similarly exposed just inside Beckenham Place Park on D1.2 but the examples here are more extensive. The rocks are clearly visible opposite the playground entrance, or you can climb the terraces for a closer look at the largest specimens.

Across Blendon Terrace is another section of common which takes you past Plumstead Common Nature Reserve on the left, a wooded ravine noted for its trees and butterflies that was part of the vicarage garden attached to St Margaret’s Church. The church itself was built in the 1850s to serve the increased population but demolished in 1974 when the costs of upkeep became uneconomic. A combined church, St Mark’s and St Margaret’s, was then built on the site of St Mark’s church further east: you’ll pass it on D3. A block of flats now stands on the St Margaret’s site, towering over the trees of the nature reserve.

Between tennis courts, a bowling green and a dog walking area, you reach a Green Chain junction on Waverley Crescent, on an area of common that’s particularly suffered from the incursion of roads. From here you can see a stumpy tower behind the Old Mill pub across the grass ahead. This is what is left of Plumstead Windmill, built in the early 19^th century but disused from 1848, after which the buildings became a brewpub and later just a pub. A crowd of around 1,000 local people gathered in front of the Old Mill in 1876 to protest efforts by the landowner, by then Queens College Oxford, to build a luxury estate on what was left of the common. This was an angry demonstration that, though it resulted in arrests and convictions for riotous assembly, triggered the political process that resulted in the conservation of the remaining open space under the Plumstead Common Act of 1878.

Surely one of London's best looking Coop stores: The Links, Plumstead Common.

Green Chain Section 4 continues ahead across the common: we’ll get to that on D3, but for now our way is southwest along Section 4a back to Plumstead Common Road. On the main road, slightly left, is a parade of shops sprouting a large and striking gable framing a two-storey bay window, decorated in mock-Tudor black and white half-timbering and topped by a clock tower. This stands on the site of a big house known as the Links, which in the late 19^th century was the home of a wealthy businessman, William Dawson, who owned an adjacent brickworks. He began building and selling upmarket homes on the extensive parkland surrounding his house, and at the start of the new century closed his works too, opening a wider area south of the road for development.

The Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society (RACS) built the present Links in 1905 as a smart shopping parade to serve the new housing. The RACS, founded at the arsenal in 1868, was the biggest and most active such coop in London and became a significant developer in its own right, as mentioned on D1.1. A short distance off our route, right (east) along the main road, is the Star pub, a modestly handsome part Victorian, part interwar structure that scrapes into the National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors thanks to its surviving 19^th century bar counter, back bar, dividing screen and gas light fittings.

Shrewsbury Park and Shooters Hill

The spectacular view from Shrewsbury Park, Plumstead.

On the other side of Plumstead Common Road, you soon leave the conservation area along Ennis Road, and begin climbing steadily alongside the terraces built on William Dawson’s land. A very sharp right takes you along Upton Road and up steps through the 2.38 ha of ‘emergent woodland’ that now tops Dot Hill. The land here, and for a long way south to Shooters Hill, was owned in the 18^th century by the Lidgbird family, who had grown wealthy from a claypit and pottery they operated a little west on the other side of Plum Lane.

In the 1930s, Dot Hill was still farmland, attached to Clay Farm which had also been part of the Lidgbirds’ property. Plans to develop it were interrupted by World War II, when it was given over to allotments as part of the Dig for Victory campaign. Some allotments remain on the western side, passed as we enter the site, but the rest was allowed to return to grassland following the war and eventually became managed as part of Shrewsbury Park, of which more below. In the 1990s it was designated as a community woodland and planted extensively, mainly with oak and hawthorn but also willow and cherry. It’s clearly still a young woodland but developing nicely. The site includes some older and possibly ancient woods to the east, off our route.

Approaching Shrewsbury Park from Dot Hill.

Crossing Dothill Road, at this point a path following an old field boundary, you enter the former country estate of Shrewsbury Park. This was the grand location of the Lidgbirds’ family home and became even grander in 1789 when Charles Talbot (1753-1827), the Earl of Shrewbury, leased the land and built a mansion, Shrewsbury House, surrounded by landscaped parkland.

Only a decade later, it passed to George, the Prince Regent (1762-1830), later George IV, who used it as a home for Charlotte, Princess of Wales (1796-1817), his three-year-old daughter by his estranged wife Caroline von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (1768-1821). The poor child became something of a pawn in a vicious marital dispute, but the house provided a neutral space where both parents could visit without bumping into each other, particularly handy for Caroline who lived in Blackheath. As his only child, Charlotte was George’s heir apparent, but predeceased her father, dying in childbirth and opening the succession to her cousin Victoria.

Shrewsbury House remained a private home until 1851 when it became a boarding school and then a children’s convalescent home in 1879. Some of the grounds had a more unusual educational use between 1908 and 1929, as the London County Council’s (LCC) Open Air School for ‘delicate children’ with heart, breathing and malnourishment problems. Intended to help prevent the spread of tuberculosis, this was one of the earliest such schools in Britain, following a model established in the Berlin borough of Charlottenburg in 1904 as the Waldschule für kränkliche Kinder (‘forest school for sickly children’).

Classes were held in open-sided temporary buildings known as ‘Döcker sheds’ after their Danish inventor, and there were numerous other invigorating activities including an open-air pottery workshop. The school moved to Charlton Park in 1929, by which time there were over 150 such institutions in Britain. The movement had declined by the early 1960s following overall improvements in public health, and the Charlton school closed in 1962.

Meanwhile Shooters Hill Golf Club began playing on part of the park to the east in 1903, later buying the freehold of this and adjacent land. The house was sold in 1916 to local businessman Fred Halse (1879-1966), later Mayor of Woolwich, who in 1923 demolished the old house and built a new one a little to the south. Halse was a keen supporter of public open space, so in 1928 was pleased to sell a tranche of the parkland to the LCC as what became today’s Shrewsbury Park. He then sold the house and its garden to Woolwich Borough Council in 1933 as a library and museum.

It never became a museum but is still in use as a community centre with a small library, now managed by an independent charity. It’s since been separated from the park and surrounded by residential streets developed by builders John Laing on the rest of the estate between 1934-36. Inspired by the Garden City movement, these were marketed as ‘unsurpassed for healthiness and beauty of position’. The neighbourhood still has a distinctive character and is now a conservation area: it reminds me a little of Hampstead Garden Suburb (Ring 11), though is notably less varied, mainly comprising big semi-detached houses with bay windows and gables. The Laing estate has a busy Residents Association, while the park has an active Friends Group.

We’ve been climbing for a while now and are soon to be rewarded with several excellent views. The path follows the edge of a woodland: the western part likely dates from medieval times and was conserved as part of the 18^th century parkland, while the swathe nearest to us is more recent. On the right is an open grass hillside: it’s worth making a slight detour to some strategically placed benches at the top of the ridge to admire the view northeast across the Thames Valley towards Upminster and Essex, with the modern buildings of Crossness Pumping Station and the towers of Thamesmead clearly visible. The band of trees on the other side, beyond the benches, marked the boundary of what was once a large field.

Approaching the backs of houses on Shrewsbury Park Estate, the Green Chain turns left to follow the park perimeter, but there’s another opportunity for a rewarding detour if you continue ahead along the woodland edge. Look behind you from this path for another good view, then continue through a car park, the site of a barrage balloon installation during World War II, to another renowned viewpoint northwest towards Charlton, Hackney and Barnet. It’s just inside the park fence, overlooking the junction of Plum Lane and Brinklow Crescent.

If you have the time, around 200 m left down the lane, covered in tall grass and surrounded by railings at the junction with the other end of Brinklow Crescent, is one of the oldest remnants of human settlement in the area. The Shrewsbury Barrow is a pre-Celtic burial mound or tumulus dating from the Bronze Age around 1500-2000 BCE. Now a Scheduled Ancient Monument, it’s the only survivor of a group of six placed so they would have been visible silhouetted against the sky from the bottom of the hill: the others have long since disappeared beneath the houses.

Back on the trail, there’s a further view left across the field before you leave the park, with Shooters Hill Golf Club’s course visible through the fence to the left on the narrow footpath, and briefly follow the streets around the eastern edge of the conservation area. You pass Bushmoor Crescent on the right: Shrewsbury House, if you want to visit it, is just a short distance off the route here, behind magnificent wrought iron gates. Designed in Jacobean style with a nod to Robert Adam, it’s now Grade II listed, with a café and a pleasant garden, including a rockery thought to contain masonry from the house’s predecessor.

The current Shrewsbury House.

Behind it, fronting onto Mereworth Drive, is a curiously squat white one-storey building known as Green Garth, built as an HQ for air raid wardens when the main house was used for civil defence purposes, taking advantage of the elevation. Greenwich council subsequently leased Green Garth as a private home, but it’s been empty and derelict since 2016. The charity that runs the community centre has long tried to acquire it, but as of 2025 the cash-strapped council has decided to sell it off to private developers, amid much local controversy.

Eaglesfield Park, looking to the summit of Shooters Hill, the 10th highest spot in London.

Leaving the conservation area, its boundary marked by wooden gateposts, you pass the multiple courts of Shooters Hill Lawn Tennis Club, founded in 1927 as part of the golf club but independent since 1967. Opposite is Eaglesfield Park, which covers the 132 m summit of Shooters Hill. A tree just south of the play area, just a few steps off the trail, marks the summit itself, and from here you can see great swathes of Kent, as far as the Medway on a clear day. Originally a field likely named after the two eagles on the Lidgbird coat of arms, it was long a popular informal viewpoint and beauty spot. By the late 18^th century, some of the land was part of a pleasure garden attached to the Bull Inn on Shooters Hill, of which more below, including a pond created out of a claypit active earlier in the century.

In 1907, the field became the first portion of land in the area acquired by local authorities as public open space. Woolwich Metropolitan Borough Council and the LCC each paid half the cost, and the renowned Colonel J J Sexby (1847-1924), head of the LCC Parks Department, designed the new layout. The park was landscaped and hornbeams and oaks planted round the edges, with the pond refashioned as a decorative lily pond. The pond was restored in 2012 as a wildlife pond with the help of the Friends Group: it’s a little off our trail to the south, slightly downhill to the left of the summit as you approach.

Eaglesfield Park Wildlife Pond, a reminder of the previous pleasaure garden and claypit.

The 10^th highest point in London, Shooters Hill also gives its name to a stretch of Watling Street, the Roman road that runs straight across it towards Canterbury and the Channel ports. The name refers to the practice of archery on the hill during the Middle Ages, although it’s often assumed to derive from the road’s reputation as a haunt for highway robbers. I’ve gone into more detail at Woolwich Common on Capital Ring 1, and we’ve crossed Watling Street numerous times on other sections of trail, on London Countryway 1 near Gravesend, Countryway 16 at St Albans, London Loop 1 at Crayford, Loop 15 at Elstree, Ring 10 at Hendon and Green Chain D1.1 at Welling.

You approach this ancient highway along Cleanthus Road, with a major local landmark obvious ahead. The Shooters Hill Water Tower, built in 1910 at a cost of £3,256, is a looming octagonal pile of red brick 40 m tall, in a style that’s partly Gothic revival, topped by a spiky spire though pierced with Romanesque arched windows. It’s still in use today, storing water pumped from chalk wells in Orpington which then falls by gravity to an Eltham pumping station for distribution to local taps.

Shooters Hill Water Tower, with no wizards in residence.

Turning right along the main road, you pass a weathered block of Portland stone shaped into three steps. This is an 18^th century mounting block for climbing onto horses, now Grade II-listed. It was doubtless used by customers of the Bull, a little further along at the corner of Shrewsbury Lane, a coaching inn first opened in 1749, though replaced by the current handsome red brick building, also Grade II, in 1881.

One of London's oddest listed buildings: the mounting block on Shooters Hill.

The Green Chain crosses just before the Bull to Kenilworth Gardens opposite. A little further right here is the entrance to Memorial Hospital, opened in 1927 by public subscription as a working memorial to the fallen of World War I. It was built as a cottage hospital, later used as a military, general and geriatric hospital, and is now a day hospital for older people with an attached mental health unit. It still incorporates a memorial hall housing two books listing the war dead of Woolwich and Bexley.

Oxleas Wood

Green Chain stalwart the Oxleas Wood Café: no longer 'alpine' but still with a fabulous view.

I introduced Oxleas Woods in detail on Ring 1 so I’ll only summarise here. At over 133.5 ha, this is one of the most extensive and lushest wooded areas in London, much of it ancient natural woodland that likely partly dates from the end of the last glacial period. It’s designated as a Local Nature Reserve (LNR) with over half considered a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). It’s made up of various patches of wood with their own names, though the term Oxleas Woods is also applied to the whole complex, also represented by a Friends Group.

The woods were once part of the vast estate attached to the royal palace at Eltham, remaining wooded as poor soil and steep slopes deterred clearance for farming, though they were useful for rough grazing and sticks from coppiced trees. In 1679 the woods became privately managed as a commercial enterprise providing timber, including for shipbuilding in Deptford and Woolwich dockyards. The environment was also unattractive for housing development, but from the late 18^th century some big houses began appearing along the edges, particularly along Shooters Hill.

By the early 20^th century, the woods were more appreciated for their recreational value and councils began buying them as public land from 1924. They were already somewhat carved up by roads and railways when in the 1980s the environment was infamously threatened further by a proposal to drive a motorway through the woods, eventually cancelled in 1993 following vociferous opposition.

Immediately on leaving the main road along Kenilworth Gardens and Crown Woods Lane, you cross the old parish boundary between Plumstead, in Little and Lessness hundred, and Eltham, back in Blackheath hundred. The track here was the entrance drive to Nightingale Hall, one of the earliest big houses built within the woods in the 1780s. It was replaced in 1811 by a new house, Wood Lodge. The road name may refer to the woodland’s former status as part of the royal estate attached to Eltham Palace. About a third of the way along on the right is The Lodge, originally a lodge for a later desirable residence, Jackwood House, built in 1863. Both houses were demolished by the LCC in 1927, though Jackwood’s terraced gardens became part of the public park and are passed on Ring 1.

The lane takes you directly to the LCC’s replacement for Wood Lodge, the much-loved Oxleas Wood Café with its spectacular views across the open grass of Oxleas Meadow and over the Cray valley, with the North Downs rising in the distance. Originally known as the Alpine Café when it was opened in 1934, it’s likely the best surviving example of a 1930s LCC park facility in this style. It’s been an important junction and popular watering hole on the Green Chain network since its inception, though sadly no longer displays the original artwork for the first Green Chain map on its walls.

Section 4a terminates at the fingerpost beside the café, along with two other Green Chain sections. Section 5, and Ring 1, approach from the right (west), from Charlton and Woolwich Common, with the Ring having followed a more roundabout route from Woolwich. Section 3 leaves left (east) into Oxleas Wood itself and one of the patches designated as an SSSI, with Ring 1 also hitching a ride. This is our way too, one of those duplications that can’t be avoided in walking the entire Green Chain network.

At the bottom of the hill, by one of the ditches that collects the headwaters of the river Wogebourne, is another big fingerpost marking another Green Chain junction. Section 3 turns left (northeast) towards Welling, East Wickham and Thamesmead, while Section 6 starts by branching right (southwest) towards Falconwood, taking the Ring with it. If you’ve walked my route D1.1, you’ll have approached along Section 3 and continued along Section 6, so I’m afraid you’ll be treading the next 350 m three times if you follow all my suggestions. That's not too much of a hardship in such surroundings.

One of the main tracks through Oxleas Wood.

The path gives you a glimpse of the meadow right and passes a pond on the left to leave Oxleas Wood onto Welling Way by its junction with Rochester Way. I’ve explained the development of these roads, the legacy of successive bypasses of Watling Street, on D1.1. The Green Chain and Ring continue on a wiggly route to Falconwood through Shepherdleas Wood across the road, but as we’ve already walked that way, I suggest using the more direct path just inside the wood, parallel to Rochester Way, for 400 m to finish today’s walk at Falconwood station.

Falconwood

When the Bexleyheath Railway (see Welling on D1.1) opened in 1895, there was no point in providing a station here in what was then a deeply rural area. It remained so until the 1930s when New Ideal Homesteads, who will figure extensively on D2.2, built an estate on the cleared woodland of Westwood Farm, east of the borough boundary in the former parish of East Wickham. But the developers preferred the name of a field on the Eltham side, Falconwood Field (now also part of the public space, but off our route), so called their estate Falconwood Park.

The Southern Railway, by then the owner of the Bexleyheath line, opened Falconwood station to serve the estate in 1936, and its name was soon applied to the wider area. The station was originally on the Eltham side, but the boundary has since been tweaked to follow the railway and Rochester Way, so it’s now in Bexley. By finishing here, you’ll be entering that borough for the first time today: the rest of the walk has been entirely in Greenwich. And as most of our next walk is in Bexley, I’ll say more about it then.

Green Chain Walk D1.2: New Eltham - New Beckenham

Geese at the Tarn, Eltham.

Today’s walk threads through the hinterland of Eltham, Bromley and Beckenham, linking a typically varied selection of Green Chain sites. Small, local parks, including hidden gem the Tarn, and a surprising expanse of open fields provide reminders of the old rural estate of Eltham Lodge and Middle Park. Substantial patches of woodland link Mottingham with Sundridge Park, then the trail crosses the high ground between the rivers Quaggy and Ravensbourne (passing from the eastern to the western hemisphere) to reach one of London’s loveliest, but lesser-known, large parks at Beckenham Place. Though there are several street-based sections, they reveal more than their share of hidden gems.

Though there are numerous ups and downs, the going isn’t as rugged as parts of the previous walk. As well as the National Rail stations at each end there are four others on or near the route, and numerous bus stops, so splitting up this relatively short section further is very easy.

This walk combines several official Green Chain sections. It includes the rest of Section 7, begun in D1.1, to Middle Park, Eltham; a short part of Section 6, also the Capital Ring, to where it ends on Mottingham Lane; and all of Section 9 to its end in Summerhouse Hill Wood, Beckenham Place Park. We then follow the end of Section 8 to Stumps Hill Road, Beckenham, and a short length of Section 10 to New Beckenham station, both also part of the Ring, with a couple of suggested diversions to vary the route.

See the Ramblers guides for directions on the official sections, and my information sheet for stretches not covered in these. The routes and places mentioned are on my Google map.

New Eltham

Greenwich civilisation's last hope? The bunker in Southwood Park, New Eltham.

New Eltham was once a rural hamlet known as Pope’s Street or Pope Street amid farmland to the south of Eltham. It stood on the Maidstone Road, now Footscray Road, running from Eltham via Foots Cray into deepest Kent, where this crossed a minor road, then also Pope Street, now Avery Hill Road, linking with the Bexley Road at Avery Hill.  The old name is commemorated by the Pope Street Bar, in a 19^th century building on the southwest corner of the junction, though this is a recent renaming.

When the South Eastern Railway (SER) opened the Dartford Loop Line through the area in 1866, trains ran through without stopping. The main purpose of the line, which ran from the SER main line at Hither Green via Sidcup to Slade Green where it rejoined the existing Dartford line, was to relieve congestion on the latter. The station, originally also named Pope Street, opened in 1878, and a scattering of new houses followed, rather large and grand ones intended for wealthy middle-class commuters. Scenting potential for passenger growth, the SER renamed the station New Eltham in 1886 to encourage the idea of an exclusive suburb, and the old name began gradually to fall out of use. The area kept its upmarket character until the early 1930s, when Woolwich borough council facilitated the development of much of the remaining agricultural land as cheaper, denser and more modest housing.

Much of the streetscape visible today is interwar. A good example stands next to the station drive: the neo-Georgian New Eltham Library in stern red brick, separated from Southwood Road by a prim stretch of hedges and shrubs. It was built in 1931 as part of the municipally sponsored expansion. Immediately adjacent is a smallish park, Southwood Park, added around 20 years later to serve the growing population.. Prior to this, it was farmland, apart from a cricket ground to the west which, although in Woolwich, was owned by Bromley council. The railings and strip of shrubbery parallel to the road retain their 1950s flavour.

The Green Chain Walk enters the park, and as you follow it past exercise equipment, note the windowless and near-featureless rust-coloured blockhouse behind the library, with a large radio antenna sprouting from its flat roof. This is a rare Cold War remnant, built in 1954 as 51C1 Woolwich Borough Civil Defence Control, where selected local council officers would in theory have kept calm and carried on in the event of a nuclear war, reporting to a regional HQ in Chislehurst. Although above ground, it has extremely thick concrete walls and two reinforced blast doors and was equipped with an air filtering system and a diesel generator. It became part of Greenwich’s civil defence infrastructure when the boroughs merged in 1965.

As I mentioned when passing a similar installation at Gravesend on London Countryway 1 original route, I can’t help thinking that such facilities were little more than performative propaganda, and the people who commissioned them knew full well they were woefully inadequate for keeping any kind of civilisation going following a nuclear apocalypse. This one was at least intended for use in other emergencies too: it was last occupied during a 1976 exercise to prepare for potential flooding while the Thames Barrier was still under construction. The GLC declared it unfit for use in 1980, after which it was sealed and a new control centre constructed in the basement of council offices in Woolwich, though this was only completed in 1991, by which time the Cold War was over and the civil defence network was being dismantled.

By 2003, security measures had deteriorated to the extent that members of urban exploration group Subterranea Britannica gained access, posting photos and a report online. They found something of a time capsule with the generator still intact, alongside phone switchboards, radio equipment, maps and paperwork and a kitchen with a 1950s cooker and electric kettle. Among the equipment was a radio console intended for relaying four-minute warnings and activating sirens and other alerts. After this the building was sealed again and it’s likely nobody has been inside since. I’m not sure why it still stands: presumably, demolishing or repurposing such a solid and specialised construction would be difficult and expensive.

The trail makes the first of several doglegs here, following the park perimeter before returning to Southwood Road. Much of the space is rather dull open grassland, but it’s at least green and airy, with a band of trees separating it from the railway line. There’s a larger patch of planted elm woodland marking the boundary of the old cricket pitch in the far corner. The pitch itself is now used for football, leased by the London Girls Football Club, alongside the pavilion which you pass on your way out of the park. Just by the exit, the Friends group has installed a rainbow-themed memorial to victims of the 2020-21 Covid-19 pandemic, incorporating a collage of flowers on the fence and, ingeniously, a string of cheerfully painted wooden posts.

Turning off Southwood Road onto Park View, you’re only a short distance from the busy Fiveways Junction on the A20, here very much a 1920s suburban trunk road lined with semidetached houses, apartment blocks and shopping parades. The block on the left corner of the main junction at the end of Southwood Road is known as Southwood House, though it’s not the original Southwood House that gave its name to both street and park: this is to the northeast at Avery Hill, now part of the University of Greenwich site, and we’ll pass close by on D2.2. Meanwhile the Green Chain stays on the south side of the A20 for some time as it ventures into the old estate of Eltham Lodge.

Eltham Lodge

The deciduous woodland in Fairy Hill Park. Fairies not included.

This stretch is something of a street-based trudge, so it’s hard to imagine that Green Lane, which you cross at the end of Parkview Road, really did once live up to its name. The land on its opposite side (west) was royal property since at least the mid-11^th century, and by the early 1300s was part of Eltham Great Park, the vast hunting estate attached to the royal palace at Eltham which at its fullest extent stretched from Shooters Hill to Chislehurst. I’ve covered the general history of park and palace in more detail on Ring 1, but this tranche eventually formed a distinct part of the estate.

In 1650, during the Commonwealth period following the English Civil War, the whole estate was confiscated and ended up in the hands of prominent Parliamentarian Nathaniel Rich (c1620-c1702), a former colonel in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. Rich tore down much of the woodland, selling the timber for shipbuilding and creating farmland, with this corner becoming Chapel Farm. Following the Restoration in 1660, the estate was returned to royal hands and in 1663 leased to John Shaw (c1615-80), a confirmed Royalist who had used his considerable mercantile wealth to bankroll Charles II in exile in France.

In 1678, Shaw created a new, modern country estate in the east of the park, centred on Eltham Lodge, a Palladian mansion on the site of an earlier and more modest lodge. It was designed by architect Hugh May (1622-84), one of the pioneers of the English Classical revival. By the 18^th century, Eltham Lodge was associated with horse racing and a racetrack ran from the house to Chislehurst.

Eltham Lodge has a curious connection to modern Irish history. Between 1845-89 it was the home of Anne Wood, who later shared it with her niece, Katharine “Kitty” O'Shea (1846-1921). In 1880, O’Shea began an extramarital relationship with prominent Irish nationalist politician and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-91), who fathered three of her children. Although the affair soon became the subject of political gossip, it was kept from the public with the quiescence of Kitty’s husband William O’Shea, also a committed Irish nationalist whom Parnell had supported as an MP.

Kitty even acted as a liaison between Parnell and UK prime minster William Gladstone in negotiations over Irish home rule, and in 1886 Parnell moved into Eltham Lodge to live with her. William finally lost patience in 1889 and filed for divorce. The resulting scandal caused a split in the nationalist movement which was to have repercussions for decades afterwards, with the Roman Catholic hierarchy arguing Parnell was no longer a fit leader while more secular campaigners continued to support him. The church was successful in forcing him from office in 1891: he married Kitty the same year but died just months afterwards.

Wood helped determine the way the area was subsequently carved up by successfully arguing that the South Eastern Railway should build the Dartford Loop Line through the south of the park, well away from the house. In winter, you might be able to glimpse the red brick mansion, now Grade I listed, through the trees and across the railway to your right as you finally return to green space in Fairy Hill Park. The mansion is used a clubhouse by Eltham Golf Club, which leased the land from the Crown in 1892 and turned the surrounding park into a course.

As the successor of Blackheath Golf Club, the club claims to be the oldest in England. It traces its history to 1603, the year of the Union of the Crowns, when ‘goff’, as the game was then known, travelled south from Scotland with James I and VI’s courtiers. They took to playing it on Blackheath, conveniently close to the king’s residence at Greenwich Palace. The Blackheath club merged with the Eltham one in 1923 when the incursion of cars and other recreational users drove golfers from the heath.

Fairy Hill Park is named after Fairy Hall, another mansion originally within the Eltham Lodge estate, though curiously this is well over 1 km to the west: we’ll pass it later. The park was once the fields of Chapel Farm, with the racetrack passing through, and in the early 20^th century was used as a rifle range. The A20 carved up the estate further in 1923 and the land between it and the railway line could easily have been developed for housing like the surrounding streets, but the London County Council recognised the need for green space and bought it from the Crown for £7,250 as a public park.

A little like Southwood Park, it’s largely mown grass, but is much loved by locals and benefits from the attentions of a keen Friends group. It’s well-kept enough to enjoy Green Flag status and includes a new community woodland, with around 1,000 trees planted on the southern and western perimeter in 2011-12, including willow, elder, hornbeam, poplar, hazel, buckthorn, rowan, cherry, downy birch and ash. In the northwest corner is a patch of conifers with a ‘conifer trail’ threading between them: there’s an easy detour along this which gives you a closer view of the golf course and a glimpse of the house.

Mottingham station on the Dartford Loop Line, almost opposite when you reach Court Road, is technically in Eltham rather than Mottingham and indeed was named Eltham on opening in 1866 despite its location on the very edge of the district. It was renamed Eltham & Mottingham in 1892 and became plain Mottingham in 1927, by which time the present Eltham station had opened on the Bexleyheath Line closer to the town centre. Some of the original white clapboard structure is still visible today.

The Tarn

The Tarn: a particularly bright hidden gem.

Crossing the railway, the Green Chain makes its most extreme detour. Stand by the fingerpost that points you through the gate of the Tarn on your right and you can see the junction of Middle Park Avenue, which carries the trail to Middle Park, just 20 m ahead along the road on the left. But this corner is almost 500 m away by the official route. Thankfully the extra distance is more than justified as the Tarn is one of southeast London’s most delightful hidden gems (though if you’re walking with a dog you’ll miss out as they’re banned from the site).

This small but atmospheric and charming 3.6 ha public park takes its name from the lake which forms its centrepiece, ‘tarn’ being a northern dialect term derived from Old Norse tjǫrn, meaning a small lake. Likely, though, this an early 20^th century affectation as the lake is shown on older maps as Starbucks Pond, after a local farming family in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. The lake is fed by various streams that rise in the golf course, forming part of the catchment of the river Quaggy. It was originally a farm pond that was extended and reshaped into a decorative feature when Eltham Lodge was refurbished and expanded in the 18^th century.

The lake and the remnant woodland surrounding it weren’t included in the golf course and by the early 20^th century were leased separately from the Crown. In 1935, by which time the lake had become overgrown and stagnant, Woolwich borough council bought the property as a public park, creating the current layout with winding paths and a wooden bridge on round brick piers across the eastern end. The site was restored with a lottery grant in 2001, including measures to mitigate pollution from runoff water from the nearby A20, which was adversely affecting wildlife. A Friends group established in 2008 has made further improvements and holds regular volunteer maintenance days.

Bridge over untroubled water: The Tarn, Eltham.

The trail first tracks the southern lakeshore until it reaches the entrance to a recent Friends project, the Butterfly Garden. This is worth a quick detour as a delightful hidden corner with a bench surrounded by trees and rich vegetation, equipped with a wildflower meadow, bird nesting boxes and bee homes. Following the signs across the bridge, it’s worth pausing halfway across to take in the view to the left of the placid waters surrounding two artificial islands with a fountain beyond, and bird life which includes mallards, shelducks, Aylesbury ducks, Canada geese, swans and occasional herons and cormorants. When the light strikes the trees in a certain way, the effect is curiously dreamlike. On the other side, a toe of the lake reaches towards the golf course, visible through the trees.

You return along the north shore, passing woodland to the right which has long been fenced off as a bird sanctuary, popular with a wide variety of garden birds. Overall, 73 species have been recorded here. The brick hut with its veranda overlooking a lawn likely dates from when the site was first converted to a park: it’s used for open air events like afternoon teas organised by the Friends, education groups and volunteering. It also contains toilets, but these are kept locked except for organised events and activities.

Past this, it's worth taking a few steps down from the trail on the left to admire the marshy gardens that surround a stream flowing westwards from the lake towards Eltham Middle Park. This is the Little Quaggy, the first of several tributaries of the river Quaggy that we’ll encounter today. There’s one more feature of interest just before the park exit: a Grade II-listed brick ice well from around 1760, originally serving Eltham Lodge. Before artificial refrigeration, ice was cut from the lake on freezing winter days and packed in the well, insulated by a double layer of brick, so it could be used in warmer weather. The original domed brick roof collapsed in the 1960s while being stripped of ivy, and its replacement has a cutaway section that reveals the interior.

18th century ice house at the Tarn, Eltham.

Back on Court Road, originally a country track between Eltham Palace and Chapel Farm, our hairpin detour is almost complete. But first step a little right to note no 133, Tarn Lodge, built for the keeper of the site around 1905 when it was still in private hands to replace an earlier keeper’s lodge. It’s an attractive locally listed building broadly in Edwardian mock-Tudor style but with some unexpected Classical flourishes in the columns that support the first-floor gable.

Eltham Middle Park

Two of the Blackheath Donkeys at Eltham Middle Park with no buildings in sight.

Eltham Great Park was originally subdivided into three sections: Upper Park stretching northeast from the palace to Shooters Hill, Middle Park immediately south and west of the palace, and Lower Park further south towards Chislehurst. Significant parts of Middle Park remain as open land today, and the Green Chain now explores some of them, an incongruous patchwork of fields and hedgerows with fine views on the south-facing slope that descends from the palace to the Little Quaggy valley, preserving features of the agricultural landscape created by Colonel Rich after the Civil War.

Middle Park owes its survival partly to its continued status as Crown land, with little economic motive to develop it. Much was still leased as farmland until World War II, then between 1945 and 1992, the Royal Army Educational Corps was based at the palace, retaining the land nearby as open space in case it was needed for military use. Today the Crown leases out some of the fields as horse paddocks, while others are managed by Greenwich council as public open space.

Since 1971, the golf course, the Tarn, Middle Park, the palace itself and the surrounding streets have been designated as the Eltham Palace Conservation Area. By then, the not particularly attractive late 1950s flat blocks on the south side of Middle Park Avenue had already appeared: they’re described in the official conservation area character assessment as ‘an unwelcome intrusion’, but we’re soon past them, suddenly transported into a fragment of rural Kent on a rough and sometimes muddy path that climbs the hillside through a strip of woodland grown out from a hedgerow. This, it will turn out, is another dogleg detour that you wouldn’t want to miss.

The path takes a westward turn, emerging from the trees through an original late 1970s Green Chain kissing gate to run between two horse paddocks, with a stretch where there are no buildings whatsoever in sight. Shetland ponies often graze in the northern field on the right, but they’re upstaged by their neighbours to the south, the Blackheath Donkeys. This is a small drove of 10 donkeys who are so-called because in the early 2000s, they provided rides for children at the Blackheath Gate of Greenwich Park. When off-duty, they were kept in a field by Woodlands Farm and the garden centre on Shooters Hill (passed on D1.1).

They retired at the end of the 2011 season as the park was due to become an Olympic venue the following year and have lived here ever since. As you’d expect given their background, they’re a curious and friendly bunch and often approach passing walkers, doubtless hoping for a treat or two, though notices ask you to feed them only carrots, and not whole ones. They’re much loved locally and regularly attract small crowds of admirers at the junction of our path and King John’s Walk, in the northwest corner of their paddock. They even have their own Facebook fan page.

Green Chain Section 7, which we’ve followed since New Eltham, ends at the junction, where we join Section 6 and the Capital Ring (D4.1) downhill, with Eltham Palace itself in the opposite direction. I’ve said a lot more about the palace and the next section of the route on Ring 2 so I won’t repeat it here, except to say that King John’s Walk, an ancient path that once connected the palace with the lower park, was likely named after Valois king Jean II of France (reigned 1350-64), also known as John the Good, who was held prisoner at the palace following his surrender at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. Vista Field on the right is part of the public open space, so named because of its views: a Green Chain alternative runs right past the viewpoint, but we’ll explore this on walk D5.

King John’s Walk returns us to Middle Park Avenue then crosses a triangle of grass by Joan Crescent, another vestige of Middle Park, leaving the conservation area. It crosses the Dartford Loop Line on a footbridge then finally takes us across the A20, the current incarnation of the road from London to Ashford and Folkestone which branches from Watling Street (the Kent Road) at New Cross. The highway originally ran though Eltham as the Bexley Road which we crossed in the last section at Avery Hill. This new alignment, the Sidcup Road, is sometimes claimed to be the first modern bypass. It opened in 1923, running just over 5 km from Lee to Kemnal Corner in Sidcup, avoiding the bottleneck of Eltham High Street. This was just as the Ministry of Transport was introducing its road numbering scheme, so the section we cross has always been designated A20.

Mottingham

Eltham College, the former Fairy Hall, not yet disappeared into a sinkhole.

Across the road, King John’s Walk crosses the Little Quaggy, which follows the A20 a short distance further before joining the Quaggy itself where the road bends north. We’re now officially in Mottingham: the stream became the boundary when the parish was carved out of Eltham in 1866 in anticipation of an increase in population following the opening of the railway the same year. When Eltham became part of the London County Council area at the end of the century, Mottingham remained in Kent, before joining the London Borough of Bromley in 1965. This is still the point where the Green Chain (and the Capital Ring) leave Greenwich and enter Bromley. I introduced the latter borough on London Loop 2, and as we’re still sharing a route with the Capital Ring, there’s a bit more about Mottingham under Ring 1.

King John’s Walk continues as a fenced path between more fields used as horse paddocks, attached to Mottingham Stables over on the right, and then between houses to end on Mottingham Lane. The fingerpost at the junction marks the end of Green Chain Section 6 and the start of two further branches. The Capital Ring (D4.1) follows Section 8 right, past various large Victorian villas noted on my Ring post, and we’ll meet it again towards the end of today’s walk in Beckenham Place Park. But for the moment our way is left, along Section 9.

The rather forbidding wall to the right encloses independent day school Eltham College and the main buildings begin to reveal themselves as you reach the roundabout. This is the original Fairy Hall, mentioned earlier in Fairy Hill Park, which was named after it. It was established as a country estate around 1700 when the big house at its core was built, although the house has been much altered and expanded since. The magnificent plane tree in front of the right-hand side of the house was probably planted as an original feature. In 1771 the estate became the London home of lawyer and high Tory politician Henry Bathurst, Baron Apsley (1714-94), who held the office of Lord Chancellor.

The estate subsequently changed hands several times, in 1889 becoming the home of the Royal Naval School, a boarding school for the sons of naval officers. This was founded in New Cross, on the site where Goldsmiths College is today. In 1904 the school added the rather attractive chapel visible close to the gate, but closed in 1910, with Eltham College replacing it in 1912. The present institution traces its roots to Walthamstow in 1838, where it was founded as a school for the children of missionaries, and had also been based in Camden and Blackheath.

Since 2012 the school has hosted the Gerald Moore Gallery, established by the like-named old boy Gerald Moore (1926-2018), who had a varied and colourful career as a qualified oral surgeon, medical entrepreneur, visitor attraction operator and sometime actor as well as an artist. The gallery, which is open every Saturday, displays his work alongside changing exhibitions by others and runs art classes and other outreach activities.

One of the adjacent fields was the likely location for the ‘marvellous accident’ in Mottingham in 1585, recounted by Thomas Fuller in his rather anecdotal book The History of the Worthies of England (1662):

Betimes in the morning the ground began to sink, so much that three great elm-trees were suddenly swallowed into the pit; the tops falling downward into the hole: and before 10 of the clock they were so overwhelmed, that no part of them might be discerned, the concave being suddenly filled with water. The compass of the hole was about 80 yards [73 m], and so profound, that a sounding-line of 50 fathoms [91.4 m] could hardly find or feel any bottom. Ten yards [9.1 m] distance from that place, there was another piece of ground sunk in like manner, near the highway, and so nigh a dwelling house, that the inhabitants were greatly terrified therewith.

Fuller makes the incident sound almost miraculous, but it was likely a sinkhole created by an underground stream, of which there are several in the area.

Mottingham’s commercial centre is a little off the route to the left at the roundabout, along Mottingham Lane. It boasts an unusual hexagonal war memorial in the form of a Roman Doric temple, designed by local architect George Hubbard (1859-1936), unveiled in 1920 and now Grade II-listed. But our way is south, straight across the grass expanse of Mottingham Sports Ground. This was an agricultural field until World War II, bought after the war by Chislehurst and Sidcup Urban District Council as a public open space to cater for the large social housing estate the London County Council had begun building on what was once Court Farm to the east. It’s still known locally as Foxes Field.

Mottingham Woods

Elmstead Wood in spring.

The Green Chain now passes through a chain of woodlands which aren’t quite so luxuriant as some of those on other parts of the trail. They were in commercial use until relatively recently, mainly growing oak standards as timber for Thames shipbuilders, with some cultivation of sweet chestnuts for food. The oldest trees standing today are thought to be around 200 years old. But the woods are nonetheless an invaluable and well-kept green resource and make for very pleasant walking.

Though the useful information boards dotted along the trail here refer to the whole complex as Mottingham Woods, historically the woodland was divided into two sections in two different parishes. The northern part, where we enter, was in Eltham and was once known as Crown Wood, suggesting it was part of the Eltham Palace estate, although Mottingham manor was controlled since the 12^th century by St John’s Priory in Rochester. When Henry VIII dissolved the priory in the late 1530s, he passed the estate to the Bishops of Rochester, who had owned Elmstead Wood, the southern section of the woodland, since before the Norman conquest as part of their manor at Bromley.

The surviving woods, like the field, were acquired by the council in the 1950s as public green space. A keen Friends Group spearheaded various improvements in the 21^st century, including the information boards, two additional short circular trails and some public art. There’s a website but it hasn’t been updated recently.

Source of the Grove Park Ditch in Lower Marvels Wood, Mottingham.

Entering the first woodland patch, Lower Marvels Wood, you’ll likely soon hear running water to your right. Follow the sound a few steps off the trail and you’ll find a brick water outlet in a trench. This is the source of another tributary of the Quaggy, the unprepossessingly named Grove Park Ditch, which joins the main stream just northwest of here, where Ring 2 and Green Chain 8 follow the Quaggy out of the Old Elthamians rugby ground. The flow is usually remarkably vigorous, indicating some subterranean engineering that collects water from a little further up the hillside, where several now-vanished ponds appear on old maps.

Lower Marvels Wood continues across Dunkery Road, followed by a brief urban interlude as a finger of the 1930s LCC Court Farm Estate extends between the woodlands. Pleasingly, a green strip, Calcott Walk, was retained as part of the design, and we’re soon in Marvels Wood, also once part of Crown Wood. You’ll encounter the shorter of the circular trails here, the 600 m Mottingham Wild Walkabout, which shares some of its route with the Green Chain. It’s designed to be wheelchair accessible, with hard but not sealed surfaces.

This area also boasts some interesting public art: a chainsaw wood sculpture of a bizarre face is just to the right along the Wild Walkabout route, one of several by Will Lee which have dotted the wood since 2010. If you followed the Wild Walkabout, which soon rejoins the Green Chain without much additional walking, you’d walk the entire 100 m length of the Marvels Wood Mural, created with the help of schoolchildren in the early 2000s and depicting local people and wildlife.

Marvels Wood Mural: plenty of bees.

Back on the main trial is a minor natural curiosity: a tree branch has grown in curious directions to form an almost perfect letter D. The particularly broad crossing path at the next junction runs along the old parish boundary between Eltham, later Mottingham, and Bromley. It also divided two Kentish hundreds: Eltham was in Blackheath hundred, while Bromley was in Bromley and Beckenham hundred. The woodland to the south is Elmstead Wood, a place name first recorded in 1320, which suggests there were more elm trees in those days than the oaks we see today. You meet the second, longer, circular walk here, the 1.9 km Mottingham Butterfly Trail, its points of interest highlighted on the onsite maps. Turning left at the junction on the Butterfly Trail connects with the Green Chain link to Elmstead Woods station, though we’ll deal with that on a later walk.

Twisted tree, Lower Marvels Wood.

There’s another tree sculpture, this one partly painted, at the next junction, approaching the cemetery fence, but the best one is just beyond it: a spectacular depiction of the face of the Green Man, with an owl nesting in his hair and a falcon taking flight from his head. You can also sample the mural here, running along the fence a little further right. Grove Park Cemetery was opened by the former Metropolitan Borough of Lewisham in 1935. It’s since been listed as a landscape of historic interest by Historic England and includes 56 Commonwealth War Graves. Although much of the cemetery was originally in Bromley, the boundary was reconfigured in 1994 and it’s now entirely within Lewisham, with the boundary running along the fence.

Will Lee's vision of the Green Man in Marvels Wood.

Our trail turns decisively south into Elmstead Wood, soon meeting another Green Chain branch which heads off left at a fingerpost: this is Section 9a to Chislehurst, and we’ll cover it as part of D5. Then, approaching the edge of the woodland with a fence ahead, the Butterfly Trail reconnects from the left: there’s a patch of sweet chestnuts here and more tree carvings. Beyond the fence is the South Eastern Main Line, built by the South Eastern Railway (SER) in 1865. The SER had connected London to Ashford, Folkestone and Dover since 1844 but originally via a roundabout route that first followed the London and Brighton Railway south from London Bridge to Redhill then turned east via Tonbridge to Ashford. The new line was opened as a much more direct route to Tonbridge, branching off at New Cross to run via Lewisham, Hither Green, Orpington and Sevenoaks.

The Green Chain continues to track the Lewisham boundary in something of a green tunnel between the railway and the cemetery to reach another path junction by a footbridge with a derelict but still unmistakably Lewisham-style sign just to the right. Yet another Green Chain branch, Section 8a, starts here, continuing ahead through Chinbrook Meadows to Grove Park where it connects with Section 8 and the Capital Ring. I’ll cover this as Green Chain D5, but for the moment our route is across the railway, leaving Mottingham Woods for the old Bromley manor of Sundridge.

Sundridge Park

Halls Farm, Sundridge Park.

Though Bromley, as previously mentioned, was associated with the Bishops of Rochester, this part of it was long a separately recognised manor known as Sundridge. A form of the name, which likely means ‘detached arable field’, was first recorded in 987, and there’s another village with the same name elsewhere in Kent, near Ide Hill. In the mid-13^th century, it was held by Peter de Blund, a member of an old Norman family and Constable of the Tower of London. Its transformation into a grand country estate began in 1679 when the manor house and its surroundings became Sundridge Park, the country seat of Thomas Washers of Lincoln’s Inn Fields in central London. Its old local name, Washers in the Woods, suggests how heavily wooded the area once was.

Between 1792 and 1800, under two different owners, the estate was remodelled to a master plan drawn up by renowned landscape designer Humphry Repton (1752-1818), and the house demolished and rebuilt in spectacular style to designs partly by John Nash (1752-1835), inspired by Classical temples and incorporating a distinctive dome. The parkland later met the same fate as Eltham Lodge, converted to Sundridge Park Golf Course in 1903, though it’s still on the Register of Historic Park and Gardens. The house, now Grade I listed, became a luxury hotel, before being converted to upmarket flats in 2019. Sadly, it’s not visible from the trail: all you can see to the left from New Street Hill, which the Green Chain now follows for some distance, is a golf course that could be anywhere.

New Street Hill is nonetheless a quiet and pleasant leafy street with substantial interwar houses lining the opposite side, and it’s soon obvious you’re descending into a valley. At the bottom, we finally cross the river Quaggy, which runs under the road in a pipe roughly outside no 39 before emerging on the surface through the golf course. The river rises in Locksbottom to the south as the Kyd Brook and flows roughly northwest 17 km through Petts Wood (Loop 2) and Sundridge Park, through Chinbrook Meadows, the western parts of Mottingham and Eltham and through Kidbrooke to join the river Ravensbourne by Lewisham station. We’ll encounter it on several later walks. Its curiously comical name is likely from an old adjective meaning muddy or marshy, related to the word ‘quagmire’.

Eventually a pleasantly rural path branches off left, between the golf course and allotments, soon crossing quite a vigorous stream, another Quaggy tributary known as Milk Street Ditch. This originates underground just a short distance west on Milk Street, but doesn’t surface until it reaches the allotments, joining the Quaggy in the golf course. Milk Street is so named as it was originally the drive to a dairy farm, Halls Farm, attached to the estate: the allotments were actively used as fields until the mid-20^th century. A big white Victorian house soon looms ahead to the right, the former farmhouse, now used as a children’s nursery: you can take a closer look by dodging a few metres down the path to the right at the end of the allotments. Beyond this is Halls Farm Scrub, all secondary woodland that’s grown up since agricultural use ceased in the 1950s, then a small recreation ground and tennis courts.

Milk Street Ditch flowing towards Sundridge Park.

A footbridge takes you across another railway, the Bromley North branch line. This is one of the more obscure and quirky backwaters of London’s transport network, a legacy of wasteful Victorian competition. As a substantial regional centre just outside London, Bromley was an attractive destination for the railway companies, and its first station, now Bromley South, was opened by the London Chatham and Dover Railway (LC&DR) in 1858. The LC&DR’s arch-rival the South Eastern Railway (SER) was envious, and in 1878 tried to poach some of the LC&DR’s custom with a short 3.2 km branch line from Grove Park, on its main line, to a second station on the other side of the town centre, now Bromley North, with one intermediate stop at Sundridge Park.

Though the line was never extended further, it retained regular direct services to London Bridge, Victoria and other central London terminals until 1976, when these were reduced to peak hours only. Since 1990, to manage congestion on the rest of the network, it’s been run entirely as a shuttle between Grove Park and Bromley North, known to staff as the ‘popper’, though the through connection is still in place and is sometimes used for trains diverted by engineering work. Transport planners have considered revitalising the line by converting it to a branch of the DLR or London Trams but for the moment it remains a minor appendage, with no Sunday service, rare for a London railway.

There’s a short street-based link here from where the path emerges on Minster Road to Sundridge Park station on Plaistow Lane, which is still much as it was in 1878, while the once-rural lane has become a pleasant local high street with some attractive cafés. It’s a convenient place to break the walk – except on a Sunday.

Plaistow

Kings Meadow, Plaistow, with wildflower meadow fenced on right.

Green Chain walkers now face quite a lengthy section mainly along streets, starting as the trail winds through Plaistow. This is now a residential suburb of Bromley but was once a recognised hamlet and manor within the parish, first mentioned in 1278. It stood on Burnt Ash Lane, a very old north-south road between Lee and Bromley, its name recalling the charcoal industry which once flourished in woodlands nearby. Another road, Plaistow Lane, branched southeast here towards Chislehurst, with a small village green at the junction. This has survived, though it’s a little south of our route and west of Sundridge Park station. The name, likely meaning ‘place to play’ and pronounced locally as ‘plah-stoe’, is a relatively common one: there’s another Plaistow in West Ham, Newham, on Ring 14.

Peter Thellusson (1735-97), a City banker born to a Huguenot family in Geneva who was heavily involved in the slave trade and Caribbean sugar, bought the manor in 1777 and built a luxurious mansion, Plaistow Lodge, which we’ll shortly pass. His descendants began developing some of the land, and in 1864 Plaistow became a separate parish in response to complaints from the growing population that this distinction had already been extended to Bromley Common, on the south side of the town. A new church, St Mary’s, was provided south of the green. The railway stimulated further development.

Modest David Bowie plaque, Sundridge Park.

One of the area’s most famous 20^th century residents was musician, artist and actor David Bowie (1947-2016). Bowie, or David Jones as he was originally known, was born in Brixton, but moved to the area as a child with his family in 1953, initially to Bickley and then Bromley Common. In 1955, the Jones family moved into a modest terraced house at 4 Plaistow Grove, immediately west of Sundridge Park station, which has since been marked with a small blue plaque. Bowie lived here until 1969 with his parents and older half-brother Terry Burns, a major influence, though a troubled figure who also spent much time in psychiatric hospitals (see Coulsdon on Loop 5). So this was Bowie’s base for much of his early recording career, which began in 1964. His first album, David Bowie (1967), was likely written here, as was ‘The Laughing Gnome’.

Just to the right of where the Green Chain emerges on Minster Road is Kings Meadow, originally a private pleasure ground provided by housing developers in the 1920s. It later became a council recreation ground and was rather a bland grassy space until relatively recently when a Friends group got to work, creating among other things a wildflower meadow. A fence separates the meadow from Plaistow Cemetery, opened by the local Burial Board in 1893 and now managed by Bromley council. Besides 34 Commonwealth War Graves in the southeast corner, it's the last resting place of Samuel Cawston, whom we’ll encounter when we reach Bromley Hill.

A council walking and cycling route from Grove Park runs through the meadow, joining the Green Chain link to Sundridge Park station. Our route, though, is ahead along an alley called Nichol Lane, once a country track heading for a curious location known as Hollow Bottom which still has something of a rural flavour.

Hollow Bottom Cottage, Plaistow.

By the junction with Foxbury Road on the left is Hollow Bottom Cottage, a tall, narrow Grade II-listed brick cottage that looks like it’s been sliced from a terrace but was built as a detached house in 1739. By the end of the 19^th century, it was used as a gamekeeper’s cottage for Sundridge Park. Just beyond it on the left is the Prince Frederick, originally a weatherboarded alehouse opened in 1723, though the current pub is an 1890 rebuild with a 1930s makeover. Originally the Prince Fredericks Head, it’s the only pub of this name, commemorating the eldest son of George II, who died young in 1751, allegedly after being hit by a cricket ball.

At the bend on Foxbury Road you can also see the cemetery between the houses on the right. The trail then crosses Burnt Ash Lane, with Plaistow Green a short detour south and the church a little further along, then continues along Park Avenue. Just past no 38 is a gate to the Parish Church of England Primary School, which now occupies Peter Thellusson’s original Plaistow Lodge, converted to a school in 1896 and now Grade II*-listed. It’s a grand neo-Classical mansion with a particularly attractive wing featuring a large arched window, but from the trail the houses completely block it from view, so if you want a good look, you’ll need to detour along London Lane. Continuing past a stinkpole on the corner of Kinnaird Avenue, you reach a triangle of grass on the busy road known as Bromley Hill.

Bromley Hill

The Italian Villa on Elstree Hill, a rare reminder of the Bromley Hill estate.

Bromley, likely meaning ‘clearing where broom grows’, first appears in the historical record in 862 as a village on an important route from London to Hastings which branched from the Kent Road at what’s now New Cross and from the Folkestone road at Lewisham. As mentioned above, the diocese of Rochester held the manor from the 10^th century, building a palace for use by the bishops when visiting London. Bromley became a market town in 1205 when it was granted a charter by King John and subsequently grew into a significant regional centre. Besides David Bowie it has quite a roll call of famous residents, including authors Richmal Crompton (1890-1669), Hanif Kureishi (b1954) and H G Wells (1866-1946), though the so-called ‘Bromley Contingent’ of the punk era, centred on Siouxsie and the Banshees, mainly lived in other parts of the borough.

From the 17^th century, proximity and direct roads inevitably attracted wealthy Londoners seeking their own country estates. One of these was Bromley Hill, to the northwest of the town, which spilled over the parish boundary with Lewisham. Its northern access was a lodge on the main road that was later rebuilt as a pub called the Garden Gate, so-called as it was close to the boundary with Kent, ‘the garden of England’. Off our route to the north, it’s since been converted to a McDonalds burger restaurant. From here the estate filled the land between the Hastings Road, here also known as Bromley Hill, and the river Ravensbourne south as far as Beckenham Lane.

A farmhouse overlooking the estate was rebuilt as Bromley Hill House in the 1770s. Charles Long, later Baron Farnborough (1760-1838), a lawyer, politician and close associate of sometime prime minister William Pitt the Younger, bought it as a family home after marrying in 1793, and he and his wife Amelia (1772-1837), developed house and grounds to their own designs. Amelia, a watercolour artist of some note, created woodland gardens with water features powered by various springs on the hillside. These were much admired by celebrity visitors including George IV as well as the public, as the gardens were opened weekly in summer.

The Longs’ descendants sold the estate in 1880 to a wealthy local stockbroker, Samuel Cawston, mentioned earlier when we passed Plaistow Cemetery. He soon began parcelling it out for development, initially for upmarket villas aimed at middle class commuters. The big house still stands, much altered and expanded and now used as a hotel, but there are few other remnants of the estate, and Amelia’s gardens have been entirely obliterated. The area retains a distinctive feel, though, and the steep slopes have inhibited the dense suburban development seen elsewhere in the area. You can read a bit more on the Ravensbourne Valley Residents website.

The trail reaches Bromley Hill just north of its junction with the old lane to Plaistow, London Lane. The road forms part of the stretch between New Cross and Farnborough which was turnpiked in 1719 by the New Cross Turnpike Trust. It was designated A21 in the 1920s but is no longer classed as a trunk road until it reaches Locksbottom south of Bromley.

Across the road the Green Chain enters the former Bromley Hill estate. Oaklands Road was one of the roads laid out by Cawston to facilitate development, while Coniston Road, which the trail follows north, was a curvaceous path through open parkland. Note the rough surface: one curiosity about this and several other estate roads is that by a quirk of land ownership they’re ‘unadopted’, meaning that they’re owned jointly by the surrounding properties and not maintainable by the council at public expense, though highway rights still exist over them.

The Bromley Court Hotel, as it’s now called, is a little further up Coniston Road, but the Georgian mansion at its core is almost unrecognisable. Our trail follows Elstree Hill, once an access drive to its stables and outbuildings. On the rightwards bend you cross onto the Lewisham side of the old parish boundary with Bromley, also crossing from Bromley & Beckenham to Blackheath hundred. Lewisham was once part of the London County Council area, while Bromley remained in Kent, so until 1965 you’d once again been entering London here. The boundary was initially retained when Greater London was created but tweaking in 1994 moved Elstree Hill entirely into Bromley.

Former Bromley Hill stables on Elstree Hill, Bromley.

The lane holds numerous intriguing features, not least of them the delightful strip of community garden tended by residents on the left just past the bend. Opposite this, the terrace of cottages with integral garages at nos 21-23 is a remnant of the Bromley Hill stables, and there’s another surviving structure set back from the street at no 13, the Grade II-listed Italian Villa. This began as a single storey summer house built for Amelia Long sometime after 1801, overlooking her Italian garden. It was rebuilt and much expanded in 1930 by R Alexander Young, the Lewisham district surveyor, an enthusiast for architectural salvage who incorporated various elements from demolished Victorian buildings.

The most obvious of these is the rather incongruous 1874 gateway arch fronting onto the street, rescued from the London School Board offices on Victoria Embankment near Somerset House, which had been pulled down the previous year. The gateway now seems disconnected to the villa thanks to the similarly noteworthy yellow buildings immediately behind it.

Elstree Hill, Bromley: displaced London School Board gateway (left) and Walter Segal self-build house.

These are a pair of self-build houses designed by German-born architect Walter Segal (1907-85), who in the mid-1970s persuaded Lewisham council to support an experimental scheme where he worked with council tenants to build their own homes from his kits on sites unsuitable for large-scale development. The site here, still in Lewisham back then, was an outlier: there are more Segal houses at Walters Way in Honor Oak and Segal Close in Brockley. Segal’s work also inspired Britain’s first black housing coop to build Nubia Way, just off the Downham Woodland Walk on Ring 3. The history of self-build schemes since has been a patchy one: they don’t sit well either with the traditional social housing ethos or with today’s developer-led private-public model, but the largest such scheme yet is currently underway at Church Grove in Ladywell, also in Lewisham.

Madeira Avenue, on the left at the next junction, was another estate drive. It’s worth detouring a few paces along it to note the prominent wall separating the first house on the right from its neighbour: this was the north wall of the Longs’ walled kitchen garden. The wall straddles the Prime Meridian: the unofficial Greenwich Meridian Trail follows Madeira Avenue and joins our walk for a while at the junction. You cross from the eastern to the western hemisphere as you pass the first of the two garages next to 2 Elstree Hill on the left. Another short detour left on Warren Avenue reveals the other end of the wall, even more prominent between nos 66 and 64.

A footpath now takes the trail across the flat floodplain at the bottom of the Ravensbourne valley, with the current boundary between Bromley and Lewisham running just to the right of the path. As often with urban rivers, the margins have been left undeveloped to avoid flood risk, but too many private playing fields block a continuous riverside trail. Until just after World War II, this was a more natural wetland, but was then drained, filled with rubble cleared from the Blitz and levelled to create the current grassy space. On the right (north) is Millwall FC’s training ground, while Warren Avenue Playing Fields on the left, though now in Bromley, is still managed by Lewisham.

River Ravensbourne, Warren Avenue Playing Fields, Bromley.

The Ravensbourne marked the western boundary of the Bromley Hill estate. The river rises at Keston Ponds south of Bromley, beside Loop 3, and I’ve said more about its name and its spurious connection to Julius Caesar on my post about that walk. It flows for 17 km northwards via Bromley, Catford and Lewisham, where it’s joined by the Quaggy, to reach the Thames as tidal Deptford Creek between Greenwich and Deptford. It’s an important Thames tributary, and the closest one to central London that still runs entirely on the surface.

Historically, the west bank here was part of the separate, but equally extensive, country estate of Beckenham Place. The patch of this between the river and the railway was developed for housing in the interwar period, despite the watery surroundings. Today, the buildings are quite a mix: 1930s Moderne-style semis mixed with more conventional houses of the period along Ravensmead Road, plenty of 1960s flats and houses, and a late 2010s block to the right where the path emerges onto the road. A few planters and patches of earth alongside the path and on the corner of the driveway constitute the tiny Ravensmead Community Garden, which when I last passed could have done with some tender loving care.

The trail passes Ravensbourne station on the Catford Loop Line, opened by the London, Chatham and Dover Railway in 1892 as a relief for its Chatham Main Line from London Victoria. This used part of the 1865 Crystal Palace High Level line, which left the main line at Brixton, then branched off at Nunhead to run via Catford, Beckenham Hill and Ravensbourne, rejoining the main line just to the south of our route at Shortlands.

The rest of the Crystal Palace line south from Nunhead has since closed and much of its trackbed is now a footpath which we’ll follow on Green Chain D6. But the Catford Loop remains open, now largely used by Thameslink trains linking London Blackfriars and Elephant & Castle with Orpington and Sevenoaks. The original booking hall at Ravensbourne burnt down in 1988 so the current one is modern, but the rest of the station retains something of the rural Victorian feel it had when it first served the commuters of Bromley Hill.

Beckenham Place Park

Beckenham Place Park's recently restored lake.

There may be more famous parks in London and the competition is tough, but Beckenham Place Park surely deserves a high ranking in any list of the capital’s most attractive large green spaces. Encompassing a generous 96 ha, it includes everything from ancient woodland and acid grassland to formal parkland, sports fields, an 18^th century mansion and 21^st century gardens. You’ll have already visited it if you’ve walked the Capital Ring, and I’ve said much more about the park and its history on Ring 3, but we’ll see a bit more of it today.

Like Bromley Hill, it originated as a Georgian estate. Unlike Bromley Hill, significant parts of it have survived as a coherent green space, though parts of it were developed just as rapaciously. It was patched together between 1757 and the 1780s from land in both Lewisham and Beckenham parishes by John Cator (1728-1806), an immensely wealthy merchant and property investor from a Quaker family. A keen amateur botanist, Cator introduced numerous exotic species and supervised the landscaping himself. Cator’s successors developed the southern and western tranches from the 1820s, but retained the mansion and its immediate grounds, renting these out to tenants.

In 1905 most of the remaining park was remodelled as a golf course. In 1927 the London County Council bought the estate to protect it as green space for residents of the large social housing estate of Downham nearby (Ring 3), then under construction. The golf course was retained, becoming the first such facility in England under municipal management.  When the LCC’s successor the Greater London Council was dissolved in 1986 the estate narrowly avoided privatisation and was eventually passed to the London Borough of Lewisham, who decided in 2016 that the golf course was no longer financially viable.

Since then, with the help of lottery funding and a Friends group (sadly dissolved in 2023 but retaining a web presence), the entire park has been remodelled for conservation and informal recreation in a gold standard example of how to regenerate a neglected green space. Except in one respect: besides the Green Chain and the Capital Ring, various shorter trails have been created, but no-one seems to have devised a consistent signing plan. There are waymarkers in a confusing variety of designs around every corner, but not always a Green Chain one when you need it.

Just after the railway and before the park gate, the Green Chain crosses the former boundary between Lewisham and Beckenham parishes, the latter also in Blackheath and Beckenham hundred. Prior to 1965 you’d once again be leaving London for Kent here, and until 1994 this was still the boundary between Lewisham and Bromley. The realignment that year sensibly placed all the park into Lewisham, a borough I introduced under Ring 2.

Inside the park, the path first runs through a strip of woodland between two fields. Crab Hill Field on the left (southeast), now the largest area of grassland in the park, was the site of an Italian prisoner of war camp during World War II. It was once known as Thistle Down but appears to have been renamed after the road we just followed, Crab Hill. This in turn was named after Crab Tree Field on Foxgrove Farm, one of the components of the estate to the southwest. On the other side is the former Lewisham Hills Field, so-called as it was always on the Lewisham side of the parish boundary, though after the Catford Loop was built through the park it became known as Railway Field.

Puddingstone, Beckenham Place Park.

A few metres beyond the entrance on the right is a geological curiosity, a deposit of ‘puddingstone’ consisting of flint pebbles bonded in what appears to be cement. Although reminiscent of modern construction materials, it was formed 55 million years ago when the area was under a shallow sea and the calcareous remains of marine creatures glued the pebbles together, creating a geological layer known as the Blackheath Beds. There aren’t many places in London where the beds are so clearly exposed, but we’ll pass an even better example on Plumstead Common on walks D2.1 and D3.

Our trail follows the edge of Crab Hill Field then turns into the main wooded area, Summerhouse Hill Wood, a remnant of semi-natural woodland with oak, ash and beech that predates the estate’s creation. The Greenwich Meridian Trail, meanwhile, continues around the edge of the wood on an alternative route. Just inside the trees, close to a small pond, are two slim late 19^th century bollards marking the parish boundaries of Beckenham and Lewisham indicating that you once would have been leaving the former and re-entering the latter here, returning to London as it was prior to 1965.

Parish boundary markers, Beckenham Place Park.

Further on, a Green Chain fingerpost and information board marks the end of Section 9, with Section 8 and the Capital Ring approaching along the right-hand fork. To complete the walk satisfactorily at a station, we’ll need to duplicate Section 8 and the Ring here by forking left, but I’ve suggested a couple of diversions exploring some features not officially on either trail. The next 400 m or so are covered on Ring 3, but since I wrote that post, the lake, a decorative feature of the old park which was progressively drained during golfing days, has been magnificently restored as a swimming lake. The Meridian Trail rejoins where the Green Chain passes the southern tip of the lake, and just past this there’s a fine view of the mansion dominating the left-hand slope.

Just after the squirrel sculpture described on Ring 3 and a fine black mulberry tree likely dating from the early 19^th century and once part of an orchard, I recommend a detour. First thread uphill through the Sensory Garden, created in 2010 with the help of a lottery grant and using plants that stimulate the various senses. It’s laid out in four sections around a central circle: scent on the left, with hearing behind it, and touch on the right with sight behind it, though as the online description points out, ‘some plants have attributes for more than one sense’.

This was once a rose garden which formed part of a larger complex of walled gardens stretching out to the right. The rest was restored and replanted as the Pleasure Gardens in 2019 and is worth an off-piste wander. Though today’s gardens are doubtless very different from anything John Cator would have created, they do at least nod to his botanical interests in incorporating a wide range of plants.

The Homestead, Beckenham Place Park, complete with mirrorball.

Above the gardens is the Homestead, a Grade II-listed cluster of 1780s former stables and other utility buildings around a courtyard. The site was badly damaged in a fire in 2011 then restored and repurposed recently as an excellent café, bar and events venue, with an education centre, retail outlets and toilets. The main stable block, now housing the café and classrooms, has an attractive canopy and a cupola with clock. On the right (north) is the Garden Cottage with its projecting gable end and bay window, while the more modest buildings opposite once housed a brewhouse and ‘horse hospital’.

Following my suggested route, you won’t pass the mansion itself, but you can detour a short distance left for a closer look once you’ve left the Homestead. Now Grade II*-listed, it’s an imposing sight with its massive portico. It’s still privately leased and isn’t in the best state of repair, so is still regarded as ‘at risk’ by Historic England. On Sundays, a street food and farmers’ market trades on the drive leading to the house.

New Beckenham

My alternative route and the Green Chain, Ring and Meridian trails rejoin just before leaving the park as you pass another patch of woodland, Scrumpshill Wood, on the right to emerge on Southend Road. Green Chain Section 8 ends, and Section 10 begins, at the junction with Stumps Hill Lane. Once again, I’ll refer you to Ring 3 for more information about New Beckenham and its connection to the Cators, but if you didn’t detour to the Edward VIII pillar box on the corner of Brackley Road while following the Ring, here’s your opportunity. With this option, you’ll also bid an early farewell to the Greenwich Meridian Trail, which follows Section 10 for a short distance along Stump Hill Lane before heading north on Worsley Bridge Road.

From the pillar box, you can either stay on the main road to finish at Beckenham Junction station, or as I’ve suggested follow Brackley Road to rejoin the main route of the Ring and Section 10 at the junction with Worsley Bridge Road, continuing past St Paul’s Church and through the Copers Cope Road Conservation Area to New Beckenham station on the Hayes branch line.