Tim
Apologies in advance for the length of the post. I don't know if any of this will help/ be of interest but here goes.
I grew up in FH/ Sydenham and moved back in 2003 with my partner having lived, studied and worked abroad and elsewhere in the UK. We were both young professionals and worked within driving/ train commuting distance of Sydenham.
Having been away for years the intention was to settle down and stay there for the long haul. However it soon became clear that the place had changed a LOT in a very very short space of time. Landmark buildings and small local businesses/ pubs, even churches were disappearing, and vast quantities of overpriced 1-2 bed flats were springing up all over the place. The area generally started to feel very very tense, overcrowded and overburdened.
Driving was unpleasant, public transport a trial and we were both stressed, becoming iller and iller by the day and very unhappy because all we were doing every day was work-eat (badly)-come home-sleep. Everything took so long – even getting packet of tea at the local shop became a battle. I don’t have rose-tinted spectacles – Sydenham has always had its own particular problems as an inner London suburb. But we began to feel dehumanised.
I had a perpetual cold and felt abysmal throughout my second pregnancy. London has some decent hospitals but getting an appointment at the local doctor’s surgery was nigh on impossible. There was no continuity of care and I could not get seen by a midwife until after 20 weeks of pregnancy so overloaded were the Lewisham midwives. It was pretty a patchy service to put it politely but I did finally manage to opt out of care by Lewisham although even doing that was a nightmare. The services in all surrounding areas were near breaking point. It was scary. This never bothered us before we had kids but after we did it became a huge issue. As did schools. We felt the infrastructure just wasn’t keeping up with the pace of expansion in London. And to add insult to injury as first time buyers we could not even afford a decent house with a scrap of garden when we had kids. Not too much to ask I don’t think – especially when you are earning a more than decent wage - and something my parents and grandparents now, I think, took for granted in a way today’s young people cannot.
Having said all that I do think most of this is a London-wide and to some extent countrywide issue, not Sydenham alone, hence why we moved out of London altogether.
When you are child free the problems London faces right now are oppressive but not urgent. And there are the pubs, clubs and other entertainment facilities of London to take the edge off the bad points. But all that frilly stuff is partly shut off to you or loses its appeal when you have children. You don’t want your kids to be subject to dangerously overstretched health services (I could go into some of the shocking and scarily inadequate treatment we got at the local surgery but won’t) or to have their education jeopardised in overcrowded and overburdened schools. Particularly when you are paying through the nose to live in the area. Particularly when you and relatives before you grew up there and weren’t subject to those sorts of problems yourselves. And particularly when you can avoid it by simply moving somewhere else. Having a nice Waitrose or somewhere to drink lattes isn’t really an issue when you can’t get your kid into a decent school or an appointment at the docs when they are sick I’m afraid.
You can get a lovely Victorian five/ six bed house where we are now for the same price as the two bed flat (shared garden) we were in in Sydders so to be honest it would have been silly not to move, something we weren’t actually truly motivated to do until after having kids. I now wish we’d moved out even sooner. The sort of properties I like in Sydenham and grew up in have mainly been converted into flats now anyway so they are not even available to buy, even if we wanted to. And if they are they will often set you back double or more what you will pay for the same thing here in Kent.
My partner and I are both able to work from home. Or perhaps I should say we have rejigged things so as to work from home/ be able to live here. If need be we can get into London in 1.5 hours. This seemed a problem at first - but to be honest some nights traffic was getting so bad when we lived in Sydenham that it was taking me 1.5-2 hours to get from Streatham to Sydenham by car on my way home from work. That fact alone made it seem not too much of a pain if we had to commute back in by train for work if necessary. My partner goes back to London for meetings every so often - it's fine. If we want to take the kids up to London for museums, theatre etc the journey time is not too painfully different from getting a bus/ train from Sydenham up into town so we don’t really notice a change to be honest.
Traffic congestion in Sydenham was a real problem - we couldn't seem to get anywhere by car in under an hour no matter how short the journey. Buses and trains were overcrowded, expensive, parking was hellish, the roads full of potholes and unpleasant to drive on. Roadworks were ubiquitous and never ending. Shopping was a burden - Sydenham Road - well I wanted to shop there and use the cafes but it was just like one long tunnel of pollution. Walking a pram up there the kids would start spluttering or be covered in black gunk when they got back home. The youngest started to wheeze and splutter – a problem which cleared up when we moved and never resurfaced. Crossing the roads with two kids was horrible. Crossings were not nice to use, drivers careless and desensitized by the horribleness and stress of it all. So we ended up driving elsewhere to shop - ridiculous. There always seemed to be some sort of argument in the offing too – either in the Post Office or the road – a tension which was non-existent when I was growing up. There were some car jackings and other crimes very close to us too that made us want to move too. Again a London wide problem I guess, not just Sydenham, but not something we did not want to keep living with. We were not alone. Of our wide circle of friends, relatives and old school mates only one couple still live in Sydenham. Their house, which they bought as a long term home only two years ago for them and their two kids, is currently on the market and they are looking at properties in Beckenham.
In addition it was really depressing seeing Sydenham becoming like that having loved it as a place growing up - and not being able to do anything about it. The character of the area seemed to be fast disappearing - old Victorian facades/ buildings disappearing along Kirkdale, FH pools etc. Best to make a clean break, remember it fondly as it was as I now do again. As I say where we are now is actually more like home than home - the people are friendly, chatty, the surroundings pleasant. And so many come from Sydenham/ Forest Hill or Crystal Palace that it is actually quite scary. My daughter goes to an excellent school and we have met lots and lots of people – which we didn’t really in Sydenham. Too busy. Turnover too fast. There is constant change where we are of course – but on nothing like the scale we saw in Sydenham. New flats receive open consultation and some of the new buildings recently built to blend in with the old Victorian shop facades, for example, have been so well done they look more convincingly authentic than the originals, which gives a sense of cohesion and civic pride/ attention to detail to the area.
My 65 year old mum who lived in FH/ Syd her whole life sold up and moved close to us recently and hasn't looked back either. At first she was sad to be leaving. But about 10 weeks before she moved someone set fire to her garden in the middle of the night and the fire brigade had to be called. It was a pretty serious fire and could so easily have been devestating if the neighbour hadn't spotted it. A couple of weeks after that my mum was burgled and the house ransacked while she was at work (they got hardly anything – she has nothing.) The same thing happened to the 80-year-old neighbour opposite her days before my mum moved. He was in the house at the time and thankfully managed to scare them away. Visiting my mum one weekend shortly before she moved I was looking absent mindedly out of her front window when I saw a lone, barely teenage girl drop her trousers, bend forward and wee like a dog on another elderly neighbours’ front wall in the middle of a street overlooked by hundreds of flats in broad daylight. I could not believe it, it was getting insane. I felt so awful for those people who had been in the houses since the 1930s, still living there and so sad at what I saw happening. It’s not too bad you may think if you have your health and are still young and able to overcome the seedier aspects of London life. But for vulnerable old people to be stuck scared and alone in the middle of all the madness, isolated and without help I felt awful. It was getting worse, no question. It annoyed me that many people on local forums deny this or put blinkers on to it. Because if you are in denial it means you are not ready to tackle the problem – because you don’t see one. So nothing will ever change or get better. I wanted to get my mum out asap. She has never been happier (or saner!) since moving.
I suppose the difference is some people have to live in London for work. We did but changed things around so we didn't have to. Some people (mainly those without kids I guess) don't mind living with London's crime/ overcrowding or square it better than we did with some of the facilities that are on offer there. Some people are also, I guess, not too bothered about seeing swathes of the area's heritage disappear because they are not too close to it - I actually found it quite upsetting that FH pools would be bulldozed, for example, because my nan and great nan and mum and I had all used it and learnt to swim there when young. A lot of the buildings in FH/ Sydenham are not just bricks and mortar but are bound up with people and memories for locals and to see it all eroded or shattered and brought to the ground in such a short space of time can be very unsettling. I didn't want to bring my children up living in what I felt had become basically a transient factory floor for commuters and property developers. I wanted to give them a more static and permanent 'home.' I think (or hope) that is what they now have.
As regards Waitrose – well we have everything here. Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Asda, local shops plus an out of town shopping centre with things like Debenhams, Next, M&S etc which people drive to. Waitrose is well serviced by people in town – quick to use, handy car park, and it’s within easy driving distance for people in neighbouring areas so it gets a steady stream of customers from a wide catchment. There are a lot of retired people here with spare cash who frequent it. They obviously make sure business is brisk all day every day, not just on evenings/ weekends after people get home from work. Also because property is so much cheaper here even people who are not on massive incomes (young people with kids/ one income only households or people with earners working solely in retail – ie people who’d you’d maybe think of in London as not having much cash) have more spare money for things like shopping – I guess because they are not spending all their weekly wad on housing. Families tend to stick around for generations here too which means there is a good support network in place - houses are passed down the generations or families live together in big houses together which means that their day-to-day outgoings are shared or less than those of professional singletons/ couples living in (but not originally from) London essentially paying through the nose for accom, utiilties and nursery fees because they have no support network in place. So there is more spare cash around to spend in Waitrose. That is what we have found at least. I don’t think ‘young professional’ in London necessarily equates to being cash rich – and a lot of people/ businesses realise this. Especially in the current climate.
Anyway, that’s more than enough waffling. I hope all is well there in Sydenham. We come back every so often, it’s still nice to visit if not to stay. Very upset to see The Woodman closing though, that’s one that goes back to the days of my Great Grandfather down the pan. But there you go, that’s London in 2011 folks.
I'll just not be in my usual seat in the Golden Lion as much.