Sydenham Hill Wood - History

History

The oak-lined formal avenue, known as Cox's Walk, leading from the junction of Dulwich Common and Lordship Lane was cut soon after 1732 by Francis Cox to connect his establishment of the Green Man Tavern and Dulwich Wells with the more popular Sydenham Wells. When the poet Thomas Campbell lived in Sydenham (between 1805 and 1822) he would visit his friend Dr Glennie, in Dulwich Grove who had established a school on the site of the tavern.

After the relocation of the Crystal Palace in 1854, the Dulwich Estate governors, whose responsibility was to use the land in the Manor of Dulwich to raise money to fund the college, made plots along Sydenham Hill available on long leases, and a series of very large houses was built. Between the junction with Crescent Wood Road and Cox's Walk there were seven houses. One of the largest was the Hoo, standing almost opposite the present 36 Sydenham Hill. In some of George William Johnson's horticultural publications from around the 1880s there is mention of a Mr. and Mrs. Richard Thornton of The Hoo, Sydenham Hill and gardeners Mr. Ratty and W. Barrell.

The folly was in the former grounds of the house Fairwood at 53 Sydenham Hill, built in about 1864. First occupied by Alderman David Henry Stone, who in 1874 was Lord Mayor of London. Shortly after moving to Fairwood Alderman Stone commissioned James Pulham & Son to build the folly. Incised lines on the folly's arch simulating stonework are very much like those on the bridge in Buckingham Palace Gardens. The Pulham catalogue indicates that the firm of James Pulham and Son worked extensively in the Sydenham/Dulwich area in the 1870s. In the grounds in front of Kingswood House, less than a mile from here, there are some remains of features that were done in Pulhamite.

In 1862 the London, Chatham and Dover Railway started construction of the Crystal Palace and South London Junction Railway from Nunhead to serve the Crystal Palace at Sydenham following enactment of the London Chatham And Dover Railway (Metropolitan Extensions) Act. It went through Sydenham Hill Wood, the Dulwich College estate and two tunnels, to terminate at the west of the Crystal Palace. It opened on 1 August 1865 with one station, Charles Barry's Gothic Crystal Palace (High Level) terminus, but other stations were soon added at Lordship Lane on 1 September, Honor Oak on 1 December and Nunhead on 18 September 1871. Upper Sydenham station was opened on the 1 August 1884.

In 1871, Camille Pissarro painted the view down the tracks to Lordship Lane from the wood and brick bridge on Cox's Walk. The image, of a train billowing steam, grasps the optimism of the industrial age. In 1908 the footbridge was renewed in teak and iron to the same design as the original.

The fortunes of the railway waned with those of the Crystal Palace, declining after the Crystal Palace burned down in 1936. It closed during the war, and the post-war re-opening was unsuccessful, with the Crystal Palace High Level station in a poor state of repair. The last service ran in 1954. The track was lifted in 1956 and the terminus demolished in 1961.

In the 1950s and early 60s, the folly still showed remnants of stained glass in its window, nearby there was an artificial stream that ran down hill and there were greenhouse and potting sheds in the wood, one of which, covered in ivy, was full of clay flower pots of all sizes, still arranged as they had been left by the gardener. The green houses had boiler houses and heating systems with huge hot water pipes all round.

In early 1952 the King Edwards Hospital Fund for London purchased Beechgrove, 111 Sydenham Hill, and equipped it for use as the "Beechgrove Home for the Aged Sick". It was opened by the Countess of Limerick on June 17th 1952 and run by the County of London Branch of the British Red Cross Society to accommodate elderly people discharged from hospitals in Camberwell. It closed in January 1960 when the Fund surrendered the lease to the Dulwich Estate.

In the 1980s the whole of these ancient woodlands came under attack from housing developers, Professor Gordon MacGregor Reid (President of the Linnean Society of London for 2003–2006), who then worked at the Horniman Museum, organised the Sydenham Hill Wood Committee of the London Wildlife Trust to campaign against it. Around this time there was also a mention of the situation in Private Eye. In 1988 there were still many wild rhododendrons, a lone Monkey Puzzle, the remains of a formal pool near the Cedar of Lebanon, fragments of Pulhamite ornaments and the folly.

The trackbed was built on in some places but in others it has been allowed to revert to nature. Part of the route adjacent to the Horniman Museum and Gardens is now a 'Railway Nature Trail', maintained for the museum by the Trust for Urban Ecology. In Sydenham Hill Wood its path can be followed from the footbridge on Cox's Walk to the entrance of the Crescent Wood tunnel. The tunnel emerges again in the north west corner of Wells Park.

To the west of and parallel with the trackbed, there is a small stream in the woods called the Ambrook, a tributary of the River Effra feeding a pond in the neighbouring Dulwich Wood. From here it flows across the golf course, then alongside Cox's Walk, under Dulwich Common and into the lake in Dulwich Park. In wet weather it rises above the drains and flows along the road around Dulwich Park by Frank Dixon Way.