In The Park:The Folklore Of South London Parks.

"The law locks up the man who steals the goose from off the common but leaves the greater villain loose who steals the common from off the goose" - The Goose And The Common, 17c protest song

National Trust co-founder Octavia Hill got it right when she claimed parks are "a place to play, a place to stay, a place to spend a day". I love parks and living in South London (the UK's second biggest city) I'm spoiled for choice. I regularly visit Peckham Rye Park, the Horniman Gardens, Burgess Park, Dulwich Park, Brockwell Park, and Crystal Palace Park but there are plenty of others on my radar too.

It's a wonder I haven't bumped into tour guide and author Chris Roberts in any of these parks because he is, like me, a fan of the South London park. His local park is Myatt's Fields Park between Brixton and Camberwell and his favourite (not just in London but in the world) is Brockwell Park which he calls King Brockwell and has made up a story about mermaids living in that park's ponds. Apparently they've been there for centuries, often hanging out at the lido and once buying a nearby house over the course of the subterranean river Effra.

Hmm! Chris was at The Bell in Whitechapel (for the London Fortean Society) to talk about The Folklore of South London Parks and he began, as he did back in 2019 when he delivered a talk on the strange things you can encounter on a 63 bus journey from Honor Oak Park to King's Cross, with a version of the Lord's Prayer with the words changed to include as many South London parks as possible. Plus the sound of some of Brockwell Park's ducks and other assorted waterfowl.

Chris Roberts is a great speaker. Friendly, engaging, knowledgeable, and funny although he did, to my mind, indulge in a little bit too much of his own invented folklore alongside actual folklore. I suppose he did have a book to promote. That small caveat aside the talk was, of course, right up my street. Right in my park if you like.

Most of his focus was on the parks that fell into the boundaries of the former Great North Wood (an area still commemorated in the names of places like Norwood and Norbury) and that would mean the boroughs of Lewisham, Southwark, Lambeth, Croydon, and Bromley. Not just parks - which often close at night - but commons too which tend not to. When in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were plans for enclosure of the commons huge protests broke out.

Some commons were lost (Penge and Stockwell) but others remain in the form of Clapham, Streatham, and Tooting. Some of the greatest defenders of our parks and commons have been the aforementioned Octavia Hill who helped save Hampstead Heath, Epping Forest, and Parliament Hill Fields and Ada Salter, a Quaker who combined being President of the Women's Labour League and President of the National Gardens Guild. There's a garden dedicated to Ada in Southwark Park and a curious set of statues dedicated to her and her husband near the Thames in Bermondsey.

Parks became, and remain, places for relaxation, socialising, leisure, and sport. Some of the larger ones have wonderful lidos and BMX tracks (I was at Burgess Park on Sunday to see my cousin compete, and win, several BMX races) but parks are not givens. They are something we, our ancestors at least, fought long and hard for. Burgess Park (which I'd passed through, enjoyably, on the way to the talk and has at least one resident turtle) only came about after World War II as part of the 1944 Abercrombie Plan.

In a talk that somehow managed to include Simon Bolivar, Indian burial grounds, druid stones, ketamine, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Queen Rat, singing armadillos in Bolivia, adders, Polari, Scooby Doo, vegetarian bears with drug habits in Streatham Common, Wombles (of course - we even got the song), the sale of old London Bridge to Lake Havasu City in Arizona, the Peckham Rye cruising scene, and the 70s American gay sex handkerchief code and one that travelled down various waterways (Hogsmill, Effra, and Thames) and multiple snickets, ginnels, snakeways, and bunnyways it was inevitable that some of the stories would be taller than others but that didn't really matter. Folklore isn't necessarily true but it can tell us things about ourselves.

Why do we choose to pass on these stories? Why do these stories become so important to us? So ingrained in our culture and collective memory? London is, of course, a melting pot of peoples from all around the country and all over the world so it's folklore is made up stories that have arrived from Kent, Norfolk, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland as well as Korean, Arabic, Caribbean, South American, Latin American, and Baltic stories. It's the least you'd expect. In West Norwood where there is a large Greek/Cypriot community (as evidenced by a visit to West Norwood Cemetery) many of the stories are of Greek/Cypriot heritage.

 

Elsewhere, you may be unfortunate to run into the Korean toilet goddess Cheuksin or the trickster demon who decided to destroy most of London and kill almost everybody there to celebrate a dyslexic sixteen year old girl's birthday. No, I wasn't sure where that one was going either.

In Greenwich Park there is a well dedicated to the Saxon god of fertility and those that have fallen in have reported huge improvements in their love, and sex, lives. They have even spoken of "erotic leylines" due to the fact that the park is near Royal Hill where there used to be several brothels that would serve members of the Royal Navy stationed in Greenwich. Chris Roberts talked of attending a history talk about this era and how he was a little alarmed when somebody announced the date and venue of the next open evening for their coven before adding that clothing would be optional.

It was a warm night last night but everybody kept their kits on. There was an interesting diversion into South Norwood Country Park which, for some reason, has a small section that is full of abandoned computers and keyboards. While some visiting teachers were using Google Lens to identify the local flora and fauna, the AI inside their phones were freaked out to see their obsolescent technological forebears ungraciously put out to pasture.

 

The AIs feared for their own future and perhaps parks should too. Chris Roberts only briefly touched on the recent furore regarding festivals in Brockwell Park (he saw both sides but was very unhappy that two festivals, Mighty Hoopla and Cross The Tracks, were funded by arms dealers) but he did say that he is worried about the future of our parks in an era where money talks louder and louder and louder.

Parks, already, come and go. The Royal Flora Pleasure Gardens and The Royal Surrey Zoological Gardens (both near Camberwell) are no more and Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens is a shadow of its former self. The Royal Surrey Zoological Gardens sounds an interesting place. It was South London's own London Zoo and it was the first place in the UK to host giraffes. The giraffes arrived at night as the owners of the zoo were worried about how those living along the Walworth Road would respond to these eighteen foot tall long necked horses trudging through the inner city.

Other parks still remain but important parts of them are gone (Mountsfield Park's football pitch, home to the Catford Kittens, is now buried) while some of the new parks arriving like Elephant Park in Elephant & Castle look and feel pleasant but seem to be dedicated more to consumerism and consumption than leisure and relaxation. There's a feeling in Elephant Park that you should only stop to buy coffee. Black Sheep coffee ideally.

There are also a lot of ghost stories and most parks have at least one. Though in the case of Emma Cons Gardens (just off The Cut, opposite the Old Vic, near Waterloo station) the ghost story was made up to try and attract visitors. Although in my experience the main visitors it attracts are street drinkers. A street drinker in a Tinie Tempah hooded top once asked me if I'd like to join him for a couple of cans of industrial strength lager. 

But we must hope that our parks (be they in South London or elsewhere) don't become ghosts to us but remain something that is the heart and soul of our societies. A fun Q&A touched on Brunel's Great Estern and how there is a flag from it still in Anfield football stadium - put there by Everton fans when they played there, before Liverpool, in the late 19th century, Will Self, grime, a talking lion's head in Kennington Park that sometimes breaks into traditional Irish song, the old R Whites Lemonade factory in Burgess Park - a place where you can variously see people dressed as condors rehearsing Ecuadorean dance routines or find partners for chemsex after dark, the time the Richardson family (South London's Krays) employed an actual bear to provide security and hand out Christmas presents to local kids - it later escaped and ran off down Walworth Road (giraffes AND a bear!), Walter Benjamin, and a floating girl that some have reported seeing on One Tree Hill near where I live.

We didn't even get into the angels that William Blake saw on Peckham Rye but when I go down there next (and it won't be long) I'll have a look and see if I can spot them. I'll probably have an ice cream too. Parks are magical places but they're also places that are free, and accessible, to all. We live in an era where there is a threat to all the social infrastructure we grew up taking for granted. As with the NHS, libraries, and a free press, we should fight to save our parks. Life wouldn't be the same without them. Chris Roberts knows that. I know that. You know that. Octavia Hill and Ada Salter knew that. Even, I suspect, the singing armadillo of Bolivia knows that.

Thanks to Jade, Leyla, Tim, Michael, Andy, and Paula for joining me and to David, The Bell, and LFS for hosting (and to myself for doing the door - which was fun and meant I could learn people's surnames) but thanks mostly to Chris Roberts. Every day is a school day with Chris but every day is also a fun day too. A day in the park, you could say.