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| The river Shuttle shuttling through leafy Bexley Woods. |
Most of this walk is along the Shuttle Riverway, tracking the course of the river Shuttle from its source at Avery Hill, Eltham to its confluence with the Cray near Hall Place, Bexley. Both ends are in former grand country estates that still preserve some of their heritage buildings set among gardens and parkland, particularly Hall Place, a spectacular site which deserves to be better known. Connecting them is a green strip through largely interwar suburbia, not the most exciting of surroundings but easy, pleasant walking, with plenty of reminders of its more rural past if you know where to look.
The riverside sections are flat and easy-going, mainly on
surfaced paths, though the trail is occasionally forced away from the river
over rather rougher, hillier country. Aside from the stations at both ends,
there’s a station link about halfway along at Albany Park, as well as numerous
bus stops.
The route from Falconwood uses part of a Capital Ring link
to join and follow a short section of Green Chain Walk Section 6 and the
Capital Ring, duplicating part of D4.1. Reaching the west of Avery Hill Park, it
leaves Section 6, following the short linking Section 6a to reach the main
Avery Hill Park junction. It then uses the entire route of the Shuttle Riverway
to Hall Place, Bexley, then part of the Cray Riverway north branch to Bexley
High Street, where it meets with the London Loop for the last few metres to
Bexley station. As explained below, the Shuttle Riverway was planned as part of
the Green Chain network but was implemented as a separate trail.
As most of this walk isn’t covered by the official Green
Chain guides, you’ll find a full route description in my information sheet:
to make things easier, this includes the Green Chain sections too. You can also
download the Section 6 guide from Inner London Ramblers. As explained
below, the most recent official Shuttle Riverway guide was a 2009 leaflet that’s
since been removed from Bexley council’s website, but you can download a copy here.
Eltham Park and Pippenhall
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| Joining the Green Chain and Capital Ring in Shepherdleas Wood near Falconwood station. |
The official station link to the west end of the Shuttle Riverway follows Green Chain Walk Section 7 (D1.1) from Falconwood, along Riefeld Road and the secluded green lane known as Gravel Pit Lane to reach Avery Hill Park. But I’m taking the opportunity to include one of the shorter and more obscure links in the chain: the Avery Hill Park branch of Section 6. So, to get started, head west from the station on a Capital Ring link which parallels the Bexleyheath Line railway and the A2 Rochester Way Relief Road dual carriageway, in a cutting below, along the southern edge of Shepherdleas Wood. The wood is part of the Oxleas Woods complex, a Local Nature Reserve and Site of Special Scientific Interest, and I’ve said more about woods, road, railway, station and suburb at the end of the last section and on Capital Ring 1.
The link meets the Ring and Green Chain section 6 at the Falconwood Footbridge over both railway and road, connecting Eltham Parks North and South. For the next 1.5 km, we’ll be duplicating Ring 2 (and my Green Chain D4.1) so I won’t go into too much detail here. The two parks were of course once a continuous green space before the transport corridor so rudely divided them.
They, along with vast tracts of adjoining land hereabouts, from
Oxleas Woods south to Chislehurst and including Avery Hill Park further along
today’s route, were once part of the massive royal estate attached to Eltham
Palace, as consolidated by Edward of Caernarfon (1284-1327), who was given the manor of Eltham by the Bishop of
Durham in 1305, two years before he became king as Edward II in 1307. As
explained elsewhere, Edward’s controversial reign ended violently, but his
Eltham estates remained popular with his successors, up until the Commonwealth
period in 1651. They were then gradually broken up, though significant areas of
open space remain, some of which were explored on D1.2.
The trail follows the edge of Eltham Park South, opened as
a formal park and recreation ground in 1902 to serve nearby housing
developments, with Eltham Warren golf course on the left and a park café a
short detour right before you leave the park. You then walk along a residential street,
Glenesk Road, passing a stink pole near the bottom outside no 3, to reach
Bexley Road, an old highway and former turnpike which I’ve said a little more
about on D1.1. On the other side is what remains of Pippenhall Farm, a
rare and delightful patch of surviving London farmland.
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| Pippenhall Stables on Bexley Road, Eltham: a landmark farmhouse once stood here. |
The main farm buildings, including a 17th century farmhouse, stood on the south side of the road about 30 m left of where you cross it, opposite the bus stop and behind the gate into what’s now Pippenhall Stables. The last tenants, the Grace family, farmed here until around 1915: the land then passed to the council and the buildings were demolished. The western part was developed as the Pippenhall housing estate, visible right, but some of the fields are still in semi-agricultural use, rented out as rough pasture for horses. Other patches are now used as sports grounds, allotments or public open space attached to Avery Hill Park. But enough survives to give a flavour of its former use, with dense and biologically rich hedgerows preserving the field pattern.
According to the Greenwich Industrial History website, the
oldest dateable hedges are from 1370 and there’s a relic of ‘ridge and furrow’
in the southeast likely from before the Black Death in the mid-14th
century, though it’s badly overgrown. The Green Chain and Capital Ring follow
the picturesquely named Butterfly Lane, an old farm track that threads between
the housing estate and the meadows and horse paddocks. A couple of drains to the left of the path run through rough meadows to the infant river Shuttle.
Section 6’s Avery Hill branch begins at a triangular junction amid trees and hedgerows in the surprisingly rural Conduit Meadow. The Ring and Section 6 head off west here towards Eltham, shortly passing a 16th century red brick conduit head which once formed part of the water supply to Eltham Palace. But our way is ahead on the branch, which runs for only around 300 m, bridging the narrow gap between two north-south sections of the Green Chain network.
At first it threads between Charlton Park Rugby
Football Club’s pitches on the left and a public field on the right, then bends
east along the northern edge of Henley’s Field, named after its 13th
century tenant. This was sown in winter 2023-24 with meadow grass and
wildflower seeds to create a flower meadow as a partnership between the Friends Group, the council and the charity Butterfly Conservation. You soon cross
the infant river Shuttle to reach the fingerpost marking the junction with
Green Chain Section 7 and the start of the Shuttle Riverway.
The Shuttle Riverway
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| Source of the river Shuttle in its 'unnavigable thicket' in Avery Hill Park. |
The best candidate for the source of the river Shuttle is about 250 m north-northwest of the Green Chain fingerpost, where a spring rises from the geological interface between the permeable Blackheath Beds and denser Woolwich Beds. According to London blogger Diamond Geezer, the spring is in ‘an unnavigable thicket’, but you can find it if you’re prepared to brave some roughly trodden paths and to hack through encroaching overgrowth in summer. Just before crossing the stream and reaching the fingerpost, a squeeze stile on the left leads to a rough meadow. Following the edge of this, you’ll find yourself walking alongside the stream, which can be notably vigorous or even dry depending on the weather. The path leads into woods, where two linked ponds in a little glade regularly fill with water that splashes into the channel.
There are obvious signs of deliberate engineering: the
ponds and surrounding channels are connected by plastic pipes and fed by other
outlets. An alternative source shown on older maps is about 350 m west-northwest
of the fingerpost, just east of Holy Trinity Church on Southend Crescent (and
on Ring 2 and D4.1), where similar geological conditions prevail, and I’m
guessing some of the water is collected from that area. Alternatively, you can
track the other side of the stream a little way left from the fingerpost
through a clearing: if you’re very steady on your feet, there’s even a set of
rough stepping stones which will take you to the ponds.
I’ve not been able to find any explanation of the
picturesque name, but the word ‘shuttle’ originally applied to the device used
to thread yarns around each other when weaving cloth, so perhaps the meandering
stream reminded people of a constant in-out motion. Other than its upper
reaches here, which are in Greenwich, the river runs entirely through Bexley
borough. It flows for around 8 km roughly east and northeast through Blackfen
and the old estates of Lamorbey, Blendon and Bridgen to join the river Cray
just southwest of Hall Place, Bexley. The Cray in turn joins the river Darent
in Crayford Marshes, which joins the Thames at Crayford Ness. Notably, all
these rivers can be traced on foot: besides the Shuttle Riverway there’s the Cray Riverway, which shares the northern part of its route with London Loop 1,
the Darent Valley Path and of course the Thames Path and England Coast Path.
As often noted in London Underfoot, urban rivers usually
have green margins to reduce flood risk, and the Shuttle is no exception. Much
of its course is through public green spaces, from relatively substantial parks
and woodlands to narrow grassy strips buffering housing estates. It was an
obvious basis for a walking trail, and when the Green Chain Walk was in
development in the mid-1970s, the plans included a branch following its course.
Wikipedia has an unreferenced claim that a local resident, Donald Stringer,
also pushed strongly for a trail. Ultimately, Bexley council opted to promote
it as a separate trail in the early 1980s, a companion to the already
established Cray Riverway and using similar branding, though retaining its
connection to the Green Chain in Greenwich. I therefore feel justified in including
it in my broader exploration of the Green Chain.
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| Start of the Shuttle Riverway at Avery Hill, though the river runs in the ditch at right angles to the trail. |
The Riverway runs for around 9 km from the Green Chain junction in Avery Hill Park, close to the source, to the Cray Riverway at Hall Place, close to the confluence. It’s signed with a logo depicting a stylised tree and watery waves, displayed, as on the Green Chain and the Ring, on fingerposts, wayposts and metal signs attached to lampposts. Signs are relatively well maintained though some are a little faded, and some are missing or vandalised. While the route of the riverside sections is usually obvious, there are a few awkward and unexpected turns, so you should find my detailed description helpful. Initially the trail was promoted with free leaflets, though there are long out of print, and no longer even available electronically from Bexley’s website, though I’ve saved a copy of the last edition from 2009.
According to the leaflet, both the Shuttle and its parent
the Cray are particularly noted for their surviving waterside woodlands, which
are mainly alder (Alnus glutinosa), a relative rarity in London. The
tree prefers damp environments, extending its roots well below water level,
which helps to prevent erosion by holding the banks together. Water figwort (Scrophularia
auriculata), pendulous sedge (Carex pendula) and yellow-flowered marsh
marigold (Caltha palustris) grow at the water’s edge, while reed canary
grass (Phalaris arundinacea) and rushes sprout from the shallows. The
rich bankside vegetation provides a haven for small mammals and insects,
including peacock (Aglais io), red admiral (Vanessa atalanta) and
small tortoiseshell (Aglais urticae) butterflies which can be spotted in
season.
Though most of the immediate river margins are undeveloped, public access isn’t quite continuous, necessitating diversions away from the waterside in places. Unfortunately, one of these places is right at the start. The Shuttle initially flows south through the playing fields of Avery Hill, tracked for a while by the Green Chain, then sweeps east and northeast, initially through the private fields of the University of Greenwich at Sparrows Farm. It then runs in an open but fenced culvert between the houses of the Restons Estate, before crossing the borough boundary with Bexley into Parish Wood Park, where a satisfactory stretch of public access commences.
To
negotiate this, the Riverway begins somewhat ironically by leaving the Shuttle
on a more direct path east through Avery Hill Park and Restons, rejoining the
river on the other side of Parish Wood. One advantage of walking this way is a
close-up view of the heritage highlights of Avery Hill.
Avery Hill
 |
| The spectacular but currently neglected Avery Hill Winter Garden. |
In 1892, at the personal invitation of King Leopold of
Belgium, North invested in rubber plantations in the Congo, at the time the
personal property of the king and the most vicious colonial regime in Africa.
But North’s business empire had practically collapsed when he died in 1896,
reputedly from eating dodgy oysters but more likely from a heart attack. The
estate was sold to a psychiatrist who never lived on it and the London County
Council bought it for a public park in 1902, paying the entire cost when no
contributions were forthcoming from the neighbouring boroughs. The LCC
converted the house into a teacher training college, Avery Hill College of
Education, which opened in 1906.
In 1985, the college became part of Thames Polytechnic, which
had been founded as Woolwich Polytechnic in central Woolwich in 1906, initially
with a focus on higher technical education to help meet the needs of the nearby
Royal Arsenal and Dockyard. Like other polytechnics, Thames took university
status in 1992, renaming itself the University of Greenwich the following year.
It shortly increased its footprint at Avery Hill, completing a new campus to
the southeast of the park, known as Southwood, in 1983. It vacated its historic
Woolwich site in 2001 and its main campus is now at the former Royal Naval
College in Greenwich itself. Though Southwood is still very much active, Avery
Hill House is no longer part of the University: it was sold to the Department
for Education in 2020 and reopened as a Harris Academy boys’ secondary school
in September 2023.
The park has an active Friends Group which has been
involved in projects like the wildflower meadow, new woodlands to the south and
a tree trail. Our walk passes several stations on this last, beginning with no
7, Caucasian wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia), followed by 6, red
buckeye (Aesculus pavia), exotics from the Caucasus and North America
respectively. Just past this, a path on the right leads to the café, and if you
detour this way you’ll find a group of three even more familiar London planes (Platanus
× hispanica) as no 4.
Next along on the left is the rose garden, the only
survivor of three terraced gardens attached to the house. From here you can see
the clock and cupola rising from the house itself. Close by is Tree Trail no 3,
black walnut (Juglans nigra), then we rapidly pass no 2, liquidambar or
sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) and 1, bald cypress (Taxodium
distichum): all three are North American imports. To the right, some tree
trunks have been intriguingly carved into mushroom shapes.
Unmissable on the left, in front of the Grade II-listed main house, is the park’s most noteworthy, and currently most endangered, architectural feature, the Winter Garden built for North in 1889. With its three red brick and glass bays covered by glass domes including a substantial central dome surmounted by the figure of Eros, it’s the second largest surviving Victorian greenhouse in Britain after the Temperate House in Kew Gardens and is Grade II listed.
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| Galatea reclines among the carp at Avery Hill. |
Each bay was originally a separate temperature-controlled zone, between them accommodating tropical, warm temperate and cool temperate plants. The east bay houses a mildly decadent sculpture by Leopoldo Ansiglioni (1832-94) of Galatea reclining on a dolphin, surrounded by a carp pond. There’s another version of this piece at William Hearst’s castle in San Simeon, California, an even more grandiose example of a rich man’s private folly.
Unfortunately, this splendid building and its contents are currently in a rather neglected state, with some areas closed to the public and the climate control not currently working, as you will see for yourself if you look around: it’s open daily from 10.00-16.00, apart from an hour for lunch. As part of the house rather than the park, it was the responsibility of the college and, later, the university, and didn’t sit neatly alongside the primary mission of training teachers.
In the early 2010s, following discussions with
the council and the Friends group, the university agreed to seek Heritage
Lottery funding for a thorough restoration, but this fell through when it
decided instead to vacate the house in 2015. The Winter Garden was excluded
from this deal and passed to the council, but two bids to the government’s
‘levelling up’ fund both failed. Following pressure from the Friends, the
council now plans a lottery bid, but progress on this has been slow.
Outside the glasshouse is tree trail no 16, a cedar of
Lebanon (Cedrus lebani), a favourite exotic on estates like this, then
the trail starts to bend south along the eastern perimeter of the park, passing
no 15, a copper beech (Fagus sylvatica purpurea), and 13, a Scots pine (Pinus
sylvestris), before leaving the park onto Avery Hill Road just north of the
University of Greenwich campus. The estate originally extended to the other
side of the road where there was a woodland, Restons Wood, and farm fields, but
these have disappeared beneath the streets and houses of the Restons estate.
The street pattern here was laid out in the 1930s, though building wasn’t
completed until the 1950s.
Pleasingly the designers left a green strip known as
Anstridge Path, which the trail now follows. Halfway along is Anstridge Hall, a
postwar community centre with attractive wooden cladding. This was once managed
by Greenwich council but since divested to a local charity, St Mary’s Eltham
Community Centres Association, which also manages four other centres. I’ve so
far not tracked down an explanation for the name, but Restons Crescent, which wraps
around the houses to the east, commemorates the former wood.
Blackfen
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| Parish Wood pond, Blackfen. |
Across Restons Crescent, along a short footpath and
through a kissing gate, you cross the borough boundary between Greenwich and
Bexley, and we’ll stay in the latter borough for the rest of the walk. When the London County Council (LCC) was created in 1889, the area now covered by Greenwich borough was included in its territory while Bexley was left in Kent, so between then and the creation of Greater London in 1965, you'd have been leaving London here. This was
also the former parish boundary between Eltham, in Blackheath hundred, and
Bexley, in Ruxley hundred, giving a name to another extensive tranche of
woodland on the Bexley side, Parish Wood. A reasonable clump of this still
exists as part of the otherwise more open green space you now enter, Parish
Wood Park.
Bexley first appears in the historical record around 780
as ‘Bixle’, the name meaning a clearing surrounded by box trees. Sometime after
807, when Coenwulf, Anglo-Saxon king of Mercia (reigned 706-821)
reasserted Mercian control over the separate kingdom of Kent, he gave the manor,
which then covered the whole of an extensive parish, to Christ Church
Canterbury. It stayed in ecclesiastical hands until 1537 when then-archbishop
Thomas Cranmer handed it to Henry VIII. James I sold it off around 1607, and topographer
and historian William Camden (1551-1623) became lord of the manor, which
he bequeathed on his death to the University of Oxford, his alma mater. By
the 18th century, the manor had been broken up, with several large
country estates, some of which we’ll pass on this walk.
This western part of the borough is known as Blackfen,
once a very rural hamlet with two farms centred on the junction of two old
lanes, Days Lane and Burnt Oak Lane, northeast of our walk. In 1845, the
Woodman pub opened a little further north, on the coaching route of Bexley Road
(crossed earlier at Pippenhall) where it meets Days Lane, and the local focus
began to shift as more houses appeared on and near the main road. The pub still
stands, though rebuilt in the 1930s and now known as the George Staples, in
what is regarded as the centre of Blackfen today. The Blackfen Past and Present website has much more about the neighbourhood.
The name is undoubtedly a reference to the soil hereabouts
which, though not a peaty fen in the modern sense, is certainly dark and moist.
This dampness is evident in the park and the wood, where an attractive pond
occupies a corner of the woodland patch and crack willows (Salix × fragilis)
join the elders at the water’s edge. Past this, the Shuttle runs through a
green strip left by developer Wates when it built the houses of Berwick
Crescent in the 1930s: the leaflet suggests looking out for hawthorn here.
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| Homes beside the overgrown river Shuttle at Berwick Crescent, Blackfen. |
The river once descended a waterfall on the other side of Days Lane, which you soon reach and cross. Beyond this is Holly Oak Wood Park, another green space reserved when the area was developed in the 1930s. This was also once woodland, but most of the remaining trees were dug out during World War II to create allotments, some of which remain, over to the left when the trail first enters. Further along is a preserved patch of ancient woodland, reaching down to the riverside path. Here, behind green railings, the Shuttle’s most significant tributary the Wyncham Stream joins on the opposite bank. This rises from several springs on Chislehurst Common (which we’ll pass on D5.2) and flows roughly north-northeast through Flamingo Park, under the A20 at Kemnal and through Sidcup to Blackfen. The confluence itself is heavily culverted though the stream each side has more natural banks.
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| The harshly culverted Wyncham Stream joins the Shuttle (foreground) in Holly Oak Wood, Blackfen. |
Lamorbey
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| The Oval, Marlborough Park, one of New Ideal Homesteads' better moments. |
Like many rural areas relatively close to London, by the 18th century Bexley had its fair share of grand country estates. One of these was Lamorbey, immediately to the south (right) of the Shuttle between Holly Oak Wood and Penhill, with the hamlet of Halfway Street on its south side. It was variously known as Lamienby, Lamaby or Lamb Abbey, though the last is a corruption as there was never a religious institution there. The name is likely derived from an owning family, though the earliest recorded owner is Thomas Sparrow, a reeve, in 1495.
The next owners, the Goldwells,
built the first big house sometime in the mid-16th century. It was briefly
owned by Charles FitzRoy (1662-1730), an illegitimate son of Charles II,
and converted into a country seat after 1744 by William Steele, a wealthy
director of the East India Company, who rebuilt the mansion and laid out a
park. By 1812 it was the property of the Malcolm family. Their wealth was founded
on slavery and Caribbean sugar, but locally they were known as benefactors,
building various schools and, in 1840, a chapel at Halfway Street so that
worshippers no longer had to schlep to Bexley.
By now the western part of the
estate had become a separate property, in the early 18th century
owned by the Lamen or Lamming family who had a house known as Marrowbone or
Bone Hall. Given their name it’s tempting to assume they once had some
connection to the broader Lamorbey estate but I’ve not read anything confirming
this. Bone Hall later fell derelict, replaced by 1807 by a new house called The
Hollies, rebuilt in 1854 and leased to a succession of tenants.
The railway arrived in 1866 when
the South Eastern Railway opened the Dartford loop line. We encountered this
line at the start of D1.2 at New Eltham: it was mainly built as a relief
line connecting the SER’s main line at Hither Green with the North Kent line at
Slade Green (Loop 1). It ran just to the south of Halfway Street,
calling at a station named Sidcup, after a village even further south and in the
separate parish of Foots Cray. This obscure place rapidly grew into a local
centre and many locals now apply its name to the much wider area (see also Loop 2).
Development inevitably spread
north to Lamorbey, which in 1880 became a separate ecclesiastical parish, with
the Malcolms’ chapel upgraded to Holy Trinity Church (some way off our route to
the south). In the early 20th century, the big landowners began
selling off land in earnest for housing development and other uses. Both
Lamorbey House and the Hollies became institutions of different kinds, while
interwar builders like New Ideal Homesteads, whom we’ve encountered several
times on our southeast London wanderings, acquired large tranches. A
significant amount of parkland and other green space survived, and some of it
can be glimpsed from our route.
The land immediately north of the
Shuttle, on the opposite bank from Lamborbey, remained as farmland and woodland
until 1931 when New Ideal Homesteads launched its Marlborough Park Estate
scheme, boasting of ‘super homes designed by a woman for the woman’. Uncharacteristically,
they provided it with the generous amenity of a fine shopping area known as the
Oval, an extensive crescent of handsome mock-Tudor retail units overlooking an
oval of grass. If you need refreshments or to break at a bus stop, this is only
a short walk left along Willersley Avenue, which the Riverway meets on the
other side of Holly Oak Wood. Now part of a conservation area, it’s well worth
a look. Just opposite its northeast end, in the wedge between Burnt Oak Lane
and Sherwood Park Avenue, is a squat NHS building, built by Kent County Council
as a first aid post at the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
Otherwise, you cross Willersley
Avenue, which was laid out as part of another early 1930s development to the
south, the Hollies estate, on land once attached to the house of the same name.
This was a slightly more upmarket development than Marlborough Park, with
chalet-style houses on leafier streets, the work of H Smith, a builder based in
Avery Hill. On the other side of the avenue, you follow the river into
Willersley Park, a field reserved as a recreational area for both estates. It’s
mainly open grass rimmed with ornamental trees.
Just before you leave the park,
across the river to the south (right), you can just about glimpse the landmark
tower that rises to mark the site of the Hollies. It’s now known as the Clock
Tower but was originally a water tower built to serve an institution better
remembered today than the original country estate. In 1899, the Greenwich Poor
Law Union bought the house and 25 ha of the surrounding land as a ‘model home
for orphans’. The Greenwich and Deptford Children’s Home opened in 1902, initially
housing over 500 children, not just orphans but those whose parents were in
workhouses, prisons or other institutions.
The old house became an
administration block, surrounded by numerous new buildings arranged around
winding drives on a symmetrical plan and surrounded by much open parkland, a
novel and progressive innovation at a time when most orphanages were in grim
urban sites. There were four large blocks each housing 50 boys; 15 twinned
cottages for girls and infant boys, each named after a tree and with a suitable
specimen planted outside; a swimming pool and gymnasium; a workshop for
training boys in boot making; various service buildings like a laundry, bakery
and stores; a school; an infirmary; and the water tower.
Despite the efforts made with
the setting, life in the home was far from rosy. A 2005 book recounting the institution’s
history and including personal accounts from former residents (The Hollies:
A Home for Children by Jad Adams and Gerry Coll) tells of ‘beatings,
cruelty, deprivation, loneliness and the joy at the simplest of kindnesses and
pleasures’. The children were considered to have limited prospects: initially, some
boys were trained in a trade like boot making, but others were sent on to
Canada as farm labourers. Girls were mainly expected to enter domestic service.
‘With hindsight, it is amazing how a project set up with the best of motives
made so many young lives unnecessarily harsh, lonely and, in some cases,
unbearable,’ comments a reviewer.
Things didn’t change for the
better when the London County Council (LCC) took over in 1930, renaming the institution
Sidcup Residential School. In 1950 it reverted to the Hollies name, and in
1965, when the LCC was superseded by the Greater London Council, was
transferred to Southwark council despite its distance from the borough. Residents
of the by now well-heeled surrounding area campaigned for its removal in the
1970s, claiming its inmates were responsible for crime and bullying. It finally
closed in an ugly scene in 1989, when a bitter dispute between the council and
trade union NALGO culminated in police raiding the premises and forcibly
removing the children.
Since then, rather ironically, the
site has become an upmarket development. Nearly all the original buildings
still stand in what’s now a conservation area. But they’re now largely desirable
dwellings, including the water tower, with additional infill houses built in
similar style, while the gymnasium and swimming pool are an exclusive country
club. More pleasingly, much of the green space remains as a public park. The
area is worth a wander but is a step away from our route.
Marlborough School, visible
across the river a little further along, was built on part of the site to the
east of the infirmary. The little café on the right as you leave the park is
operated by students at the school as work experience, thus its name, Café
L’école. It’s open to the public but only on schooldays from mid-morning to
early afternoon.
 |
| Green lung: Marlborough Park. |
Marlborough Park Avenue was once an old track connecting Blackfen and Halfway Street through open fields. On the other side, still within the former extent of Lamorbey Park, is Marlborough Park, another section of field kept as a green lung when the area was developed. It really does look like a lung if you see it on a map surrounded by the densely packed streets of Marlborough Park Estate. Again, it’s mainly open grass with some ornamental shrubs and trees, and what the London Parks and Gardens inventory describes as ‘attractive mid-20th century iron railings’ at both entrances.
The official Riverway route
uses the surfaced path along the northern perimeter, though there’s an option to follow the river more closely on a grass path along the southern perimeter. The
Riverway leaflet draws attention to primitive plants growing on the bank, such
as the liverwort (Marchantia polymorpha), one the simplest forms of
plant, and horsetail (Equisetum), which reproduces using spores.
The trail crosses one of the
ancient lanes through the area, Burnt Oak Lane, and runs along the northern edge of Sidcup Golf Club, one of the current occupiers
of the old Lamorbey estate. The big house, some way to the south, ceased to be
a home in 1910 when it was sold for conversion to a hotel, with the parkland to
the north leased to the golf club. In 1926 new owners refashioned the hotel
surroundings as a pleasure garden with new woodlands, while New Ideal
Homesteads acquired the northeast section for part of another big estate, Penhill,
in 1933.
The hotel closed during World
War II and much of the land passed into council ownership. In 1946 the house
became a Kent County Council adult education college. In 1950, the council
offered to rent part of it to drama teacher Rose Bruford (1904-83), who planned
to set up a drama school with the backing of such luminaries as Peggy Ashcroft
and Laurence Olivier. The project prospered and eventually the whole complex
became Rose Bruford College, as it remains today, with its own theatre
in a converted barn. Former students include Tom Baker, Anthony Daniels, Nerys
Hughes, Gary Oldman, Pam St Clement and many more you’ve likely seen on stage
or screen.
Today, the former pleasure
gardens are a public park, an attractive location but off our route beyond the
golf course. The whole former estate is on the Register of Historic Parks and
Gardens, but some of the structures have been neglected and the variety of uses
and ownership obscures the coherence of the landscape, exacerbated by the
intrusion of three more schools with their own playing fields. Lamorbey and Sidcup Local History Society’s Lamorbey town trail explores the public
areas in some detail.
 |
| A fragment of the old Lamorbey Park on Burnt Oak Lane, Sidcup, Shuttle running to right. |
Past Burnt Oak Lane, the river bends south through the golf course, where there is no public access, so the Riverway is once again forced into a diversion. The first part of this turns out to be one of the walk’s most pleasant sections, first through a green patch with handsome specimen trees that once formed part of the park, then a strip of notably rich and verdant secondary woodland.
The diversion continues through the suburban
streets of the Oakley Park Estate. At the junction of Rowley and Harcourt
Avenues, you’re not far from the biggest of the great Bexley estates, Danson
Park, some of which has been preserved as a magnificent public park. But that’s
a topic for another day as our route heads in the opposite direction, passing under
power lines supported by a pylon isolated on its own island in the middle of the street: you might imagine some conceptual artist put it there. High tension overhead lines are rarely seen in dense residential areas, which makes me wonder if this one predates the houses. This area is Penhill, once a
tiny hamlet on an old lane, Penhill Road, between Blendon and Sidcup. Our trail
follows this now quite busy road for a short distance to regain the Shuttle at
Penhill Bridge.
 |
| No pylon is an island. |
Blendon and Hurst
 |
| Hurst Place, Hurst. The last oast house in London was once adjacent. |
Another country estate, Blendon, once occupied the land north of the Shuttle and east of Penhill Lane. Prior to the 1370s, the manor was held by Jordan de Bladindon. He was named after the location, which was subsequently corrupted to the current Blendon: in Old English, it meant something like ‘the farm of people who live by dark water’, likely referring to the Shuttle.
A later owner was banker and MP Jacob Sawbridge
(c1665-1748), one of the original directors of the company behind the South Sea
Bubble scandal of 1720, after which he was banned from parliament. In the 1770s
Blendon was owned by Mary Scott, who inherited it from her late husband Arthur,
the commissioner of Chatham naval dockyard. According to Edward Hasted in The
History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent (1797), Mary ‘erected
on the old site a neat mansion, and much improved the park and grounds about it’.
The estate was sold in 1929 to yet another developer, D C Bowyer, and has
almost entirely vanished under streets and houses. Even Blendon Hall, Scott’s ‘neat
mansion’, which stood about 500 m north of our route along what’s now The
Avenue, was demolished in 1934.
A waterside strip was once again left between the houses, Riverside
Walk West, where we follow a grassy path close to the water’s edge. The leaflet
highlights the presence here of non-native trees such as sycamore (Acer
pseudoplatanus), introduced to Britain from mainland Europe around 1500 and
now considered an invasive species, with American red oak (Quercus ruba) and walnut (Juglans
regia) at the eastern end. There are also numerous mature willows, and
another towering pylon.
Reaching Blendon Bridge on Crofton Avenue, there’s an
opportunity to break at Albany Park station by following a 1 km station link. The
avenue itself follows the line of an old track south to the hamlet of Hurst.
This was centred on Hurst Place, never a grand country estate but a big house
and a very large farm growing cereals, hops, soft fruit and vegetables. The
first recorded tenant is one Elizabeth Cooper, widow, who in 1681 held ‘a
messuage or tenement with barn, stable and orchard’.
Politician Nicholas Vansittart (1766-1851), one of
the longest-serving Chancellors of the Exchequer in British history and later
the first and only Baron Bexley, bought it around 1839 and it remained in his
family for the next century. This was still a rural area in the early 20th
century: in 1912, a corner of farmland to the south became Sidcup Cemetery, and
in the 1930s our old friends New Ideal Homesteads built the Albany Park estate on
a much larger tranche of the southern part of the farm. Then in 1945 the Municipal
Borough of Bexley, as it then was, compulsorily purchased the rest of the land for
a social housing estate.
Hurst Place, thankfully, was left standing and repurposed
as a community centre, a role it still fulfils today, with the immediate
surroundings becoming a park. You pass this on the right if you follow the link
to cross Hurst Road, which was rerouted a little north of its original course
when the streets were built up, and continue along another old lane, Penfold
Lane. The current building dates from at least 1790, though was partly adapted
into a school in the second half of the 19th century by a Mr Newman,
who rented the property and planted numerous exotic trees around it, including
a gingko (Gingko biloba) on the southwest terrace which is still much
admired.
The buildings of Hurst Farm stood on the opposite side of
the lane and may have predated the house. The farm was equipped with a
traditional conical Kentish oast house for drying hops (see London Countryway 2). When the council planned to demolish it along with the other
buildings in 1950, the Hurst Horticultural Society, which
used it as a store, protested, pointing out it was the nearest surviving such
structure to central London and the only one in the Metropolitan Police
District. The demolition went ahead nonetheless and nothing of the farm
remains, though the Horticultural Society is still active and based at Hurst
Place.
Penfold Lane now runs as a path through the council estate
and then through Ideal Homes’ estate: the link leaves it at Carisbrooke Avenue towards
Albany Park station but if you kept ahead, you’d soon pass the cemetery,
mentioned above. The station is on the Dartford Loop Line, noted above as
having spurred the development of Sidcup after it opened in 1866. But there was
no station here until 1935, when Ideal Homes prevailed on the Southern Railway to
provide one. Its setting is something of an interwar time capsule: a low-rise
red brick station building at the end of a cul-de-sac, surrounded by parades of
shops and an imposing Brewer’s Tudor pub, the Albany Hotel.
 |
| The Albany Hotel by Albany Park station: 1930s suburbia epitomised. |
Back on the main trail, another walkway, Riverside Walk Central, opens out into a more substantial recreation area. The parkland surrounding Blendon Hall swept down to the north bank of the Shuttle here, and a bathhouse for ‘taking the waters’ stood on the waterside, roughly opposite where the play area on the south bank is today. The farm buildings of Tanyard Farm once stood immediately south of the river where the Riverside Walk ends at Elmwood Drive.
 |
| Riverside Walk Central, Bexley, another welcome riverside margin. |
Bridgen and Bexley Woods
 |
| The Shuttle Riverway's secluded path through Bexley Woods. |
East of Elmwood Drive, the Shuttle ran through another country estate, Bridgen Place, centred on a house of the same name which stood on the high ground to the north. It was built around 1780 by one William Cope but demolished in 1930 to make room for yet more cheap houses. The hamlet of Bridgen was at the northern end of Elmwood Drive where it meets Bridgen Road. If you wander that way, you’ll find the Anchor pub on the corner of Arbuthnot Road, which once led to the big house and is named after a 19th century owner. The pub is attested in the late 17th century when it was known as the Anchor and Cable, though the current building is from 1928.
The Riverway, meanwhile, continues alongside the river into
Bexley Woods, formerly known as Bexley Park Woods as it was attached to the
main manor of Bexley, centred on Bexley Village where our walk will end. At 12.8
ha of mainly ancient woodland dominated by hornbeam (Carpinus betulus)
and dotted with tall oak standards grown for timber, this is the largest wooded
area on the Riverway. As was customary, the wood was formerly managed by
coppicing, with the hornbeams cut back to a stump every 10-15 years to yield
sticks for building, fencing and firewood. The process is known to promote
biodiversity and there have been some moves to revive it now that this is a s
Site of Borough Importance for Nature Conservation.
This is arguably the most attractive stretch of riverside
walking on the Riverway, through a sombre woodland with a generous canopy and gnarled
mature trees standing like silent guardians while the Shuttle lives up to its
name by weaving between deeply cut banks alongside a well-defined path. Out of
the woods and on the other side of Parkhill and Bridgen Road is another green
strip stretching south from the houses of Riverdale Road, where the river once
marked the southern boundary of the parkland around Bridgen Place. Midway along
this stretch, as the leaflet explains, there are ‘relatively shallow, rapidly flowing sections
of the river called riffles and deeper, more tranquil sections called pools’.
Further along, the river has cut into the banks to expose sediments that probably
date from the end of the Pleistocene epoch around 12,000 years ago.
 |
| Characteristic Shuttle Riverway scene on Riverdale Road, Bexley, with green strip buffering housing. |
The continuous riverside route is broken at Upton Road, where the Shuttle once ran over a weir, as allotments and private fields now block progress. Upton, further north along the road, was one of Bexley’s medieval hamlets, though has since been overrun with houses, its old name largely forgotten. It's noted for the Red House, built for and co-designed by writer, textile designer and socialist activist William Morris (1834-96) in 1859 and now owned by the National Trust, though it’s only open intermittently and visiting it from the trail requires a major diversion. At Lesnes Abbey on D1.1, we passed close to a memorial commemorating Morris, who regularly walked that way from Upton to catch the train at Abbey Wood.
 |
| The welcoming entrance to Love Lane Allotments. |
While a further, and quite attractive, small and semi-wild public green, Finsbury Way Open Space, occupies the north bank, there’s no through route this way, so the Riverway diverts along the attractively named Love Lane on the south bank. This still faintly reflects its origins as a winding country lane, with houses only on one side. On the other, behind a thick hedge, the space between street and river is occupied by Love Lane Allotments, surely the best-kept such facility on the Green Chain. Have a look through the main gates to admire the carved welcome signs, the colourfully painted planters and the admirable display of national flags with the caption ‘We grow together’. Management has been devolved by the council to an independent association, who seem very busy not just with growing things but organising work parties, trips and charity events.
The lane continues as a narrow footpath giving another glimpse of the
allotment before crossing the playing fields of BETHS boys’ grammar school. This
was founded in Erith in 1945 but moved here in 1961 to take up more previously
undeveloped land: the acronym stands for ‘Bexley/Erith Technical High School’. You
emerge at the junction with what was once another old lane, Blind Lane, by the
school drive, and immediately turn north along another section of Love Lane
which runs as a footpath between the fields. Soon you reach the picturesque
setting of a footbridge over the Shuttle, which at this point is thickly lined
with trees, including black poplar (Populis nigra) as well as
willow and alder. The path follows the Shuttle a little further, passing a
lovely old oak tree with an unusual branch pattern, to the busy dual
carriageway of the A2 Rochester Way, the roar of which has been apparent for
some time.
 |
| Oak tree beside the Shuttle just before it reaches the busy A2 East Rochester Way in Bexley. |
At this point you have a choice. Turning right, you can follow the
Shuttle all the way to the confluence, which is now only around 800 m east, but
this requires walking alongside the road. There’s a broad footpath and cycleway
safely separated from the traffic by fences and crash barriers, but the noise
and fumes are uncomfortable. This is undoubtedly why the official Riverway
leaves the river completely here to follow a northerly dogleg through Warren
Wood and Hall Place, about 1.7 km longer and rather hillier than the direct riverside
route. The surroundings are much more pleasant and interesting, particularly
Hall Place, though you could visit this on a short detour from the direct
route. My information sheet describes both options, so the choice is yours.
 |
| Shuttle in culvert beside the A2 near Black Prince Interchange on the alternative direct route. |
The official route crosses East Rochester Way on a footbridge. The busy road is a continuation of the one we crossed at Falconwood at the start of the walk, the current incarnation of the Kent Road, which originally ran along Roman Watling Street to the north. This section between Falconwood and Dartford was a 1927 extension of plain Rochester Way which had opened from Sun in the Sands at Kidbrooke to Falconwood a few years earlier. Like its predecessor it was originally a much more modest interwar bypass, a wide single carriageway road with an at-grade pedestrian crossing here rather than a footbridge. It was expanded to its current proportions in 1972. Across it, and under a slightly incongruous gateway arch, you’re in the area known as Bexleyheath.
Bexleyheath Warren
 |
| Bexleyheath Warren, near the site of the Pest House. |
Bexleyheath was originally Bexley Heath, an extensive area of heath and ‘waste’ managed as a common attached to Bexley manor, with the ancient highway of Watling Street crossing it from east to west. Until the early 19th century, there were very few buildings aside from the occasional coaching inn along the road, which was notorious as a haunt of highway robbers preying on travellers (as were sections of the road further west, as explained at Shooters Hill on Ring 1). The heath was inclosed in 1819 and over the next century much of the land was parcelled off and developed.
By the 1870s there was already quite a settlement around
the junction of Watling Street and Mill Road (now Mayplace Road) to the north
of our route, at first known as Bexley New Town, though it was later better
known as Bexleyheath, the name that the station took when the Bexleyheath
Railway opened in 1895. By then it was the biggest and most important
settlement in the area, outstripping Bexley, and is still the major shopping
and business centre in the borough. It’s since been ill-served by ugly late 20th
century development and the loss of nearly all its older buildings.
Our route doesn’t go that far, though, instead turning
east through a patch of remnant countryside at Warren Woods. The buildings of
Warren Farm were just to the left as you turn into a grassy open space. The
site likely got its name when it was used for raising rabbits commercially in
the 16th century, and the farmhouse was once known locally as the
‘pest house’, recalling the case of a traveller returning from London along
Watling Street who was taken ill with plague and died there in 1665.
In 1845 it became the hospital wing of the school at Hall
Place. It was demolished in 1937, by which time most of its land was under
development, though the houses we’ve passed weren’t completed until after World
War II. Thankfully a patch was retained as public space, including part of the
woodland and an adjacent field to the north which is now largely open grass and
known as Gravel Hill Green.
The wood is partly ancient oak and elm woodland and is
recognised as a Site of Borough Importance for Nature Conservation thanks to
its rich birdlife, butterflies and flora, which according to Bexley council’s
records include bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta), wood anemone (Anemone
nemorosa) and the delightfully named stinking iris (Iris foetidissima).
The Riverway crosses one of the patches of acid grassland within the wood,
another important and relatively rare habitat in London, though the example here
is threatened by heavy use and dog waste, and typical grassland species survive
only around its edges where the sward is slightly taller.
 |
| The surprise view down Broomfield Rise, Bexleyheath. |
The trail follows Broomfield Road, with the houses on the right built on the rest of the woodland in the 1930, except no 25, a distinctive older building that once must have been in the middle of the Warren. It’s on the corner of Broomfield Rise, which provides a surprise view downhill to the Cray Valley. The street ends at Gravel Hill, an old road that connected Watling Street and Bexley. The woodland once continued on the other side where some of the land remains undeveloped as Gravel Hill Open Space.
This
is a curious site: we enter on a grassy plateau that has something of an airy
and wild feel, but below this is a steep grassy hillside descending into the
Cray valley, planted like formal parkland with parallel lines of decorative trees,
including various exotics, that emphasise the sweep of the slope. The Riverway
chooses a line of handsome red beeches for the final descent to its official
end point by the entrance to Hall Place on Bourne Road.
Hall Place
 |
| The Tudor western half of Hall Place, Bexley, on a day when its colour matched ths sky. |
I wrote extensively about Hall Place when I visited it on Loop 1. It’s one of London Underfoot’s absolute highlights, a lovely Grade I-listed house partly dating from Tudor times, surrounded by beautiful and unusual formal gardens and a wider area of parkland alongside the river Cray. Today’s walk goes past rather than through it, so I’ll refer you to my earlier post for a fuller description, but to summarise: it was built as a country retreat on the site of an earlier house in 1537 by John Champneys (1495-1556), a former Lord Mayor of London, likely recycling materials from the recently closed Lesnes Abbey (D1.1).
It was later owned by Francis Dashwood (1708-81) of
Hellfire Club notoriety (see also West Wycombe on Countryway 12). As
touched on above, it was later a boarding school, then a World War II US Army
communications centre and council offices. Its surroundings, occupying an
expansive 65 ha, became a public park and sports fields when it was bought by
Bexley borough, then still in Kent, in 1935.
Since 2000 the house, gardens and their immediate
surroundings have been managed by an independent charity, the Bexley Heritage
Trust, which also manages Danson House and Park to the west, with numerous
improvements funded by a £2 million Heritage Lottery grant. Besides the house
itself, highlights include the distinctive heritage topiary known as the
Queen’s Beasts on the west lawn, a stable block that’s now an art gallery, a curious
clapboard granary propped on mushroom-shaped concrete posts, a barn that’s now
a pub and steak house and a 21st century visitor centre and café
beside the Cray. To the east are recently created model gardens, more
traditional herb gardens and orchards and a historic glasshouse now used as an
independently managed butterfly house and owl sanctuary.
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| Hall Place's peculiar topiary, the Queen's Beasts. |
Bexley
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| Styleman's Almshouses, one of many listed buildings on Bexley High Street. |
I cover the Cray Riverway northern branch in detail on my Cray Riverway page, and Bexley itself on Loop 1. The route takes you past the gates and red brick garden wall of Hall Place, also Grade I listed, dating from the 18th century and incorporating some earlier work. The gates are now kept locked but provide an excellent view of the house’s oldest and most attractive frontage, in its classic 16th century H-shaped layout with tall windows and decorative checkerboards of stone and flint. The patch of grass and trees rising to the right was once part of the surrounding parkland, carved up by the large and complex Black Prince interchange on the A2. It now provides a welcome buffer to the road, with a secluded path providing views of the park through the railings.
Climbing onto the Black Prince Flyover which carries
Bourne Road, you once again cross the A2 and then the Shuttle, just 200 m from
its confluence with Cray. From the flyover the view is obscured by vegetation,
but you have the option of descending again to follow the footway between the noisy
road and the Shuttle. Metal railings mark the bridge where the A2 crosses the Cray,
with the Shuttle joining just to the right. The water level here is normally
healthy even in high summer, a contrast to the often dry ditch back at Avery
Hill.
 |
| The Shuttle, on the right, joins the Cray beside the A2 close to Hall Place. |
The Shuttle may have finished its journey, but you have a short distance further. Back on Bourne Road, you pass the Black Prince hotel itself over on the right: there’s a closer view from the direct alternative route along the A2. Now a Holiday Inn, the core of it is a rather attractive 1920s mock-Edwardian roadhouse ‘improved’ pub and hotel with a name referring to Edward of Woodstock (1330-76), the first Duke of Cornwall. There are various local legends connecting him with Hall Place: one says he stayed here while on his way to war in France, while another has him courting his fiancée Joan of Kent (c1328-85), the ‘fair maid of Kent’, on the banks of the Cray.
 |
| The Black Prince, Bexley: the prince himself never called. |
The Black Prince occupies the site of Bourne Place, built in the early 18th century as a mansion for local worthy Laurence Holker and added to the Hall Place complex in Francis Dashwood’s time. It passed through several subsequent hands, and by the late 19th century was the centre of a smallholding growing strawberries and other soft fruit which was sent to Covent Garden market by train. But the house was derelict when sold to east London brewery Charrington’s in 1928. They saw the potential of its location right next to the newly built East Rochester Way, which back then ran right past.
On the left past the flyover is the ground of Dartfordians Rugby Football Club. This was founded in 1924 by old boys of Dartford
Grammar School, and moved to Bourne Road in 1952, though the pitches were
shifted around in 1968 to make way for the interchange. Next is St Mary’s
Recreation Ground, on what was once farmland known as Building Fields. It’s now
home to Bexley Football Club, founded in 1886 and now playing in the
Kent County League. The road then narrows as it approaches the centre of Bexley
itself.
On the right is the Grade II-listed Old School House, a
neo-Jacobean yellow brick building from 1824 now used as offices, its stucco
highlights brightening a façade apparently designed to intimidate as many
schoolchildren as possible. It was originally known as the Bexley National
Schools, though the panel above the main entrance bearing this legend is
probably a later addition covering a window. It was surrounded by fields when
newly built.
The surroundings take on a more villagey character as you
enter Old Bexley Conservation Area by Bexley Library on the right. The village
centre stood on the old west-east highway between Eltham and Dartford, much
later turnpiked as a coaching route: we crossed another part of this soon after
the start of the walk at Pippenhall, where you may remember it’s known as
Bexley Road. Bourne Road, which we’ve been following, ran north to meet Watling
Street before continuing to Erith.
The High Street turned south at the junction, as it still
does, to cross the river Cray at a ford and, later, a bridge. Immediately south
of this was a crossing with another important route tracking the Cray from
Crayford on Watling Street, continuing southwest to Foots Cray and south to
Orpington. Some of this has been superseded by the modern A223 but can still be
traced as footpaths and minor roads, including many of those on the Cray Riverway.
As mentioned above, the manor passed through royal hands to Oxford University and the big estates were progressively broken up as housing development and industrial sites, particularly in the 19th century and especially after the Dartford Loop Line opened in 1866. The village’s population increased from 1,441 inhabitants in 1801 to 10,605 by 1891. But miraculously its character has been substantially preserved, perhaps because it was already a select and well-heeled neighbourhood in pre-railway days, its inhabitants confident and powerful enough to keep it that way, as with other more famous London ‘villages’ like Barnes, Hampstead and Highgate. Today it’s often known as Old Bexley or Bexley Village to distinguish it from the wider borough and the surrounding suburban development.
Bexley itself was once something of an industrial centre, thanks
initially to the availability of both water and power from the Cray. It’s
recorded as having three mills in the Domesday survey of 1086, and by the 15th
century there were brickyards and tanyards. Old Bexley Industrial Estate,
opposite the library, was formerly Reffell’s Bexley Brewery, founded in 1874.
This was once one of three breweries in the village, and was the last to close,
in 1956 when it was taken over by Courage. Some of the buildings still stand,
repurposed as light industrial units. Brewing only returned to the borough when
the current Bexley Brewery opened in Erith in 2014.
The library is a small but handsome Edwardian public building
with an imposing gable end, dating from 1912. It’s now managed by a community
group and open limited hours. Past this on the left, set back a little from
Bourne Road, is a Victorian post office building, now occupied by a dentist but
still with a pillar box and two Grade II-listed but rather dilapidated 1930s
red K6 phone boxes outside it. Then you’re at the original junction with Bexley
High Street that the village grew around, now a mini roundabout surrounded
mainly by older buildings.
 |
| Now permanently out of order: listed K6 phone boxes outside Bexley's former Post Office. |
Our route turns right here towards the station, but if you have time, it’s worth wandering a little further in the other direction, under the railway bridge to the former ford and present bridge over the Cray. Bexley Mill, straddling the river on the right, occupies one of the mill sites mentioned in the Domesday survey, though the present building is a reconstruction of the weatherboarded flour mill that stood here from around 1779 and 1966, when it burned down in suspicious circumstances. It was rebuilt by the Grand Metropolitan group as a theme pub-restaurant, the Old Mill, in 1971, but was converted to flats in 2008. To its left (south) is a Grade II-listed late 18th century building, Cray House.
Opposite the mill are Grade II-listed houses at 101-105.
Though parts of them date from as early as the 15th century, their
appearances have been much changed: in the case of 101, a mid-18th
century Queen Anne façade has literally been bolted onto the front of an
earlier building, with the bolts clearly visible. The houses towards the end of
the row retained thatched roofs into the 1960s. Round the bend at no 123 is High
Street House, built in 1761 for antiquarian John Thorpe (1715-92), who
is commemorated by a blue plaque.
St Mary the Virgin church, a little further on the left,
is the village’s oldest building, particularly notable for its attractive and
unusual shingled spire. Now Grade II*-listed, it mainly dates from the 13th
century but is on the site of the original Anglo-Saxon church and incorporates some
earlier work. Manor Road beside the church leads to the manor house, on the
likely site of the original pre-Norman manor house though much rebuilt and
altered. Today’s building is partly Victorian, though some of the structure
likely dates from soon after it was acquired by Oxford University in 1536, and
perhaps even earlier.
Back on our route along the western portion of the High
Street are several more Grade II buildings. The Kings Head (no 65) right is a
timber-framed late 16th or early 17th century inn,
possibly converted from a hall house: if you look up you can see its wonky
lines behind a modern frontage. The Village Hotel (57-59), right, occupies a
handsome early 18th century red brick house. Opposite the hotel, we rejoin
the London Loop again: it’s skipped from the southern branch of the Cray
Riverway (which approaches close to the church before heading off towards Joydens
Wood) to the northern branch by following the High Street across the river.
On the left is the Railway Tavern (38), an 18th
century building behind a 19th century pub front. Just past this is Tanyard
Lane, another reminder of Bexley’s historic industries: the Loop and Cray
Riverway northern branch leave here towards Foots Cray Meadows while we continue
just a few paces more on the High Street to Station Approach. The building on
the corner (34-36), now a shop and café, is the parish workhouse of 1787, though
its original use ceased in 1837 when the parish joined the Greenwich Poor Law
Union.
Our route turns here past another K6 phone box, but a
little ahead across the road, you can see the distinctive terrace of Styleman’s
Almshouses, a bequest of John Styleman (1652-1734), former governor of
Madras (today Chennai in India), built in 1755 for the local old and needy. If
you wandered further on, you’d pass two pairs of 18th-century houses at
numbers 5-7 and 1-3 and a war memorial on the corner of Hurst Road.
Bexley station, as mentioned, is on the Dartford Loop
Line, like New Eltham (D1.1) and Albany Park (above). Unlike these
stations, which were late additions, it opened with the line in 1866, partly as
there was already a significant settlement with potential passengers, but also
to satisfy demands for goods traffic, primarily agricultural produce headed for
central London. It originally had five goods sidings, plus station buildings in
the local clapboard style which largely survive today. It’s interesting that
the railway ultimately wrought so much change on so much of the country we crossed
on today’s walk, obliterating the old rural environment under vast swathes of
suburban housing to the extent that you must look very hard to piece together
an idea of what used to be there. Yet the one place you don’t have to look so
hard is Bexley itself.
For an extended exploration, try the self-guided circular walk described by the Royal Geographical Society as part of its Discovering Britain project. Designed to give an idea of the area’s historic development, it entirely follows parts of the Cray Riverway and London Loop, running from Bexley station along Bourne Road to Hall Place and then through Churchfield Wood back to Bexley again.
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