A glimmer of hope on a street corner: Tritton Vale Pocket Garden

How a once-derelict patch of ground, is helping to galvanise a community in one corner of South London.

A futile list of sounds (with an explanation of sorts)

It doesn’t take much to make a familiar place unfamiliar. A change in the weather – rain, bright sunshine, or more dramatically, snowfall or fog can all do it. Smells too – who hasn’t found themselves aware of sniffing more consciously than normal when drains are blocked, or there’s a whiff of barbecue, bonfire or worse in the air?

And then of course there are a place’s distinctive sounds.

Under Norwood: West Norwood Cemetery’s catacombs

Norwood is yawning but awake: shopping, grabbing coffee, heading for breakfast, haircuts, workouts, dates. Watching Saturday unfold beyond the cemetery gates, it’s a little difficult to picture a time when almost none of this was there.

In 1837 London was growing rapidly and expanding at the edges. The city had an urgent need for space and not just for its living. Traditional city centre churchyards and dissenters’ burial grounds were full to bursting – the metropolitan dead also needed somewhere to go.

A Stray Field in South London

An ordinary looking grassy field, at the foot of Gipsy Hill in South London, turns out to be anything but…

Shopping for identity: a trip down Norwood Road

You can tell a lot about a place from the local shops.
Especially on Norwood Road.

The Road to One Tree Hill: Part 2

Often its an image, or sense, of the physical presence of a place that draws me to it, but in the case of One Tree Hill, it was the name that attracted me.

A name that seemed so impossibly resonant that I had to see for myself whether the actual hill could ever live up to it.

In between Norwood

The pervading spirit of some places hangs quite obviously in the air. Even if you’re only passing through and not looking very hard, the distinctive atmosphere will soon make itself apparent.

West Norwood isn’t one of those places.