Penge

Penge
Surrey
The Watermen's Almshouses
Location
Grid reference:	TQ355701
Location:	51°24’50"N, 0°3’6"W
Data
Post town:	London
Postcode:	SE20
Dialling code:	020
Local Government
Council:	Bromley
Parliamentary constituency:	Lewisham West and Penge

Penge is a town on the border of Surrey and Kent, now buried within the metropolitan conurbation. The centre of the old town is within Surrey but close by the boundary, and the town has long since spread out to all sides and across the border. The major sight of Penge is Crystal Palace Park, so named as the location of the Crystal Palace for 82 years, having been moved here after the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Name of the town

The first appearance of the name of Penge is as Penceat in a charter of 957. The name is of uncertain origin but historians believe it to be derived from the ancient British language words for "edge of wood", as the surrounding area was once dense woodland. The same name is found in Modern Welsh in the name of the town of Pencoed in Glamorgan.

History

Penge was once a small town, first recorded as Penceat in an Anglo-Saxon charter dating of 957.

Penge originated as a hamlet within the parish of Battersea, the parish's eastern boundary formed by that with Kent. Today's High Street was only so named in 1900, with the creation of a new bureaucratic entity, the Urban District of Penge; formerly it was New Road and Beckenham Road.

In 1854, the Crystal Palace, which had housed the Great Exhibition of 1851, was re-erected in a new park at Penge; Penge Place, carved out of Penge Common. At once, Penge began to develop into a fashionable suburb. A fashionable day out amongst Londoners was to visit the Crystal Palace during the day and to take the tram down the hill to one of the 'twenty-five pubs to the square mile' or two Music Halls - The King's Hall and the Empire Theatre (later the Essoldo cinema).

By 1862 Stanford's map of London shows large homes had been constructed along Penge New Road (now Crystal Palace Park Road, Sydenham and Penge High Street), Thick Wood (now Thicket) Road and Anerley Road. This all came to an end with the notorious Penge Murders of 1877.

In 1936, the Crystal Palace burnt down, in a fire seen from eight counties.

Historical buildings and structures

Waterman`s Almhouses in 1890

• There are many Victorian almshouses in Penge, the oldest being the Royal Watermen's Almshouses, built around 1840 by the Company of Watermen and Lightermen of the City of London for retired company Freemen and their widows. It is also known as the Free Watermen and Lightermen’s Almshouses on Beckenham Road, built 1840-1841 to designs by George Porter. It is the most prominent building in Penge, Kent. In 1973, the almspeople were moved to a new site in Hastings, and the original buildings were converted into private homes.
• The Queen Adelaide Almshouses, also known as the King William Naval Asylum, St. John’s Road, founded 1847 and built in 1848 to designs by Philip Hardwick at the request and expense of Queen Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, the widow of King William IV, to provide shelter for twelve widows or orphan daughters of naval officers. Again, the almshouses are now in private residences.
• St. John the Evangelist's Church, Penge, Beckenham Road, built 1850 to designs by Edwin Nash & J. N. Round
• Penge Congregational Church, built 1912 to designs by P. Morley Horder with passage aisles and clerestory. Shafts on large, excellently carved corbels. and has a stained glass window by William Morris.
• St Johns C.E. Primary School, was originally part of the Old Penge Chapel which opened in 1837. Early in the 1850s following the completion of St John the Evangelist, the chapel building became used entirely as a school. In 1977 the school’s site was extended and a new school building was opened in September 1978.
• St. John's Cottages on Maple Road were built as almshouses in 1863, designed by the architect Edwin Nash. As with their predecessors, the cottages are now privately owned homes. On New Years Day 1959 No.8 was destroyed by a gas explosion killing one person. The cottage was rebuilt to closely resemble the original.
• The Police Station at the corner of the High Street and Green Lane is believed to be London's oldest working police station but has been scheduled for closure since January 21, 2010. Now closed and sold for use by a private company. (June 2010).
• When completed in 1956 the Crystal Palace Transmitter was the tallest structure in the UK, a record it lost to the Anglia Television transmitter in 1959. It remained the tallest structure in the London area until 1991.
• The London and Croydon Canal was built across Penge Common along what is now the line of the railway through Penge West railway station, deviating to the south before Anerley railway station. There is a remnant at the northern corner of Betts Park, Anerley.
• Following the closure of the London and Croydon Canal, the London and Croydon Railway was built largely along the same course, opening in 1839. Isambard Kingdom Brunel built an "atmospheric railway" along this course.

Pensgreene (Penge Green) and the Crooked Billet

Penge was an inconspicuous area with few residents before the arrival of the railways. A traveller passing through Penge would have noticed the large green with a small inn on its boundary. Penge appears as Pensgreene on Kip's 1607 map. The green was bounded to the north by Penge Lane, the west by Beckenham Road and the southeast by the Crooked Billet. On a modern map that area is very small but the modern day Penge Lane and Crooked Billet are not in their original locations and Beckenham Road would have been little more than a cart track following the property line on the west side of Penge High Street. Penge Lane as the road from Penge to Sydenham is now named St John's Road and Newlands Park Road. There was also an old footpath crossing the Green leading to Sydenham that was known as Old Penge Lane. After the London, Chatham and Dover Railway was built, Penge Lane crossed the line by level crossing. When this crossing was closed Penge Lane was renamed and Old Penge Lane became the present day Penge Lane.

The 1868 Ordnance Survey map shows the Old Crooked Billet located to the southeast of the current location. This earlier location was on the eastward side of Penge Green, which disappeared as a result of The Penge Enclosure Act, 1827 which enclosed the whole Green. This left the Crooked Billet with no frontage to Beckenham Road, so new premises were constructed on the present site in 1827 and subsequently replaced in 1840 with a three-storey building. This was severely damaged by enemy action in Second World War and subsequently rebuilt.

The Crooked Billet is by far the oldest and arguably the most famous public house in Penge. Peter Abbott states that it was there in 1601 and speculates that it might be much more ancient. In modern times it is particularly well known for lending its name as a bus route terminus. From 1914 General Omnibus routes 109 and 609 both operated between Bromley Market and the Crooked Billet following different routes. The 109 was renumbered 227 by London Transport and continued to terminate at the Crooked Billet. (Route 609 was shortened terminating in Beckenham ). Around 1950 some services were extended past the Crooked Billet to the Crystal Palace. Eventually nearly all buses traveled the extended route. The 354 buses now use the terminus, as do so short running buses on route 194 which carry the destination 'Penge High Street'.

William Hone wrote about a visit to the Crooked Billet in 1827 and included a detailed sketch of the last building on the original site.

Open spaces

• Crystal Palace Park
• Alexandra Recreation Ground
• Cator Park
• Penge Recreation Ground
• Betts Park
• Royston Playing Fields
• South Norwood Country Park

Rail

• Penge West station
• Anerley railway station
• Crystal Palace railway station
• Birkbeck station
• Clock House railway station
• Kent House railway station

The southern extension the East London Line, rebranded as the "London Overground East London Railway" brings services to the Docklands and Shoreditch through Penge West to connect with the North London Line. It opened in summer 2010.

In the 1860s, Penge was also a terminus for the short-lived Crystal Palace pneumatic railway.

Cultural references

After the Crystal Palace was moved to Penge Place, a fashionable day out was to visit the Crystal Palace during the day and to take the tram down the hill to one of the 'twenty-five pubs to the square mile' or two Music Halls:The King's Hall and the Empire Theatre. [1] [2] Music Hall comedians were in the habit of making fun of the locale in which they appeared and consequently Penge became the butt of many jokes.

• Spike Milligan in much of his work including the Goon Show. In Scradje (series 6, episode 26) Professor Hercules Grytpype-Thynne was described as 'the strolling anchorman for the Penge and district tug-of-war team. In Round the world in 80 days (series 7, ep. 20) it was revealed that Count Villion de Jim "Thighs" Moriarty was the gold medallist road sweeper to the Penge district. A dialogue in Insurance - the White Man's Burden (series 7, ep. 21) went:

Seagoon: I didn't know you had a deaf ear. Bloodnok: Yes, I found it on the floor of a barber's shop in Penge

A small Post Office in east Penge was the location for Part 2 of The Stolen Policeman (series 8, ep.11) and Series 8 episode 13 opens:

Greenslade: This is the BBC light programme. We present the all-leather Goon Show. For the benefit of listeners who are listening we present 'The Plasticine Man'. The curtain rises on a window revealing the waiting room of the East Penge labour exchange. On a crude wooden bench sit two crude wooden men.

• Horace Rumpole, a barrister known as "Rumpole of the Bailey", frequently tells others of his greatest triumph, winning an acquittal in the Penge Bungalow Murders "alone and without a leader." Author John Mortimer's original chronology was incorrect, as the Penge bungalows were prefabricated houses which replaced homes destroyed during Second World War, long after the date of Rumpole's claimed triumph. When the details of the trial were later documented by Mortimer in the novel Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders in 2002, he moved the events to the early 1950s.
• Terry Wogan as Penge-sur-mer or Penge-les-trois-auberges, pronouncing Penge as the French might
• Brian Wright in his (1986) book Penge Papers: confessions of an unwaged metropolitan househusband
• The Meaning of Liff defines a "Penge" as 'the slotted wooden arm on which a cuckoo emerges from a cuckoo clock'.
• In the 'far-fetched fiction' of Robert Rankin, characters from Brentford refer to Penge as a far-flung outpost of civilisation and often say that they 'hear it's very nice, but I've never been there myself'. On one occasion the anti-heroes Pooley and Omally took so long to walk home from Penge that they grew beards on the way. Their friend Professor Slocombe claims that Penge was the true birthplace of the Virgin Mary (he also claims that Chiswick is the original Babylon).
• Former Beckenham resident David Bowie makes reference to Penge in the song 'Did You Ever Have A Dream', itself the B-side of Bowie's early 1967 single Love You Till Tuesday (song). Bowie juxtaposes the ordinariness of Penge with America by singing "You can walk around in New York while you sleep in Penge".
• The Italian Job had scenes shot including some on the old Crystal Palace race track. The television transmitter is visible in the scene where an armoured truck is destroyed by explosives.
• In the film The Football Factory (2004), main character Tommy Johnson refers disparagingly of Tamara, the girlfriend of his best mate Rod, as a "Penge Minge" and "...wannabe Middle-class scum.".
• Radio 4 series "Old Harry's Game" references Penge several times throughout the first five series, including the replacement of the Archbishop of Canterbury with the Bishop of Penge as the 'supply' Archbishop.
• It is the setting for the BBC (2006) comedy series Pulling.
• English dramatist Christopher Fry, in his play "Venus Observed", includes the phrase, "...every pool's as populous as Penge..." in a long speech.
• In South Africa the largest amosite (Grunerite) mine in the world was named Penge (apparently one of the U.K. directors considered that the two areas were similar in appearance.)
• A scene from The Buddha of Suburbia was filmed around Penge East station, and showed the offices of Tomei & Sons.
• In How Not To Live Your Life Don refers to Penge as "Where the sun doesn't shine"

Outside links

• The history of Penge
• A Penge walk
• Virtual Penge
• Penge forum
• Penge Historical Images