Sydenham Town Forum

I started at St Bart’s in 1969 and it was already located at Peak Hill. The single storey building next to the top playground wasn’t yet built/finished. And the turf alongside the lower playground hadn’t been laid. What was great when I started was that everything was or seemed to be new. The woodwo...

Miss Redmain, was my first teacher at St Barts, and remember her as being very friendly. One thing I can recall about her was keeping the class up to date with the Fischer v Spassky chess match which was going on at the time. It seemed everyone caught the chess bug, this lead to a chess competition ...

I do! I think it was outside the electricity showroom.

What a remarkable picture. Mr Scrobie looks just as I remember him and if I think of Mrs Scrobie, it's standing behind the meat slicer at the end of the shop. Did they have a daughter? She might have lived near the corner of Taylors Lane and Longton Grove. Sometimes you'd walk past the yard at the b...

This is a great picture. I don’t know how many times I was sent to Scrobie’s by my mum for bread (stacked on the shelf on the left hand side as you went in, ‘Mother’s Pride’ and unwrapped / unsliced ‘Hovis’ loaves) or for cigarettes (“Ask Mr Scrobie for two tens of Gold Leaf”). In the summertime the...

I don't remember a country dance called 'Brighton Camp' but distinctly remember one called 'Black Nag'. On the subject of music, the first movements of Beethoven’s 5th symphony and the Moonlight Sonata and Mozart’s 40th symphony are very much tied in with my memories of St Barts (1969/73) as they we...

Just on the subject of ‘seconds’ again. Anyone attending St Barts Primary School during the Mr Timms era must remember him standing up towards the end of lunch and calling out, “Anymore for anymore?” which often resulted in a rush for seconds (not of course, if the only option was a choice of parsni...

I’ve recently seen the movie, ‘Sparrow’s Can’t Sing’ at the Sydney Film Festival as part of a retrospective of women film makers. It was made in the East End, around Stepney (sorry, not Sydenham) and though not a great film it does include some great shots of the old terraced houses being knocked do...

I used to go shopping at Sydenham Sainsbury’s with my Nan. I seem to remember the queue moving up one side of the shop and down the other. Two things stand out in my mind. Watching the cheese being cut with a wire and wrapped in white paper. Also the delicious square-shaped fruit pies they used to s...

I think Mrs Cheetah was headmistress at St Philips when I was there. She also ran a after school drama group there in the evenings in the early 70’s with a few ex-pupils involved. We put on a play and only two people turned up one of them was my mother! Some of the pupils I can remember are Paul Rus...

There was a church hall a little way up Taylors Lane just past ‘Scrobies’ (corner of Coombe Road). When I attended St Philips School it was where you went for lunch if you didn't have 'home dinners.' It was also used for P.E.

My family moved from Sussex to the house with the big white gate in about 1963/4. My bedroom was the one at the top. It was already divided into flats and there were garages at the back. We later moved to 70 Longton Grove (still standing). I sat on the steps here watching another enormous house next...