IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Auckland Road, LONDON, SE19 2ED

Typical late 19th century villas of the sort that predominate around the Crystal Palace / Upper Norwood heights: between them is a drive to some lock-up garages and in the gap one can just make out the large Sylvan Road estate on the hill behind.

Looking down Cypress Road from its junction with the main road (South Norwood Hill). Beyond the trees, the large buildings of the Sylvan Road Estate.

Leading from Auckland Road. Leads towards a sports pavilion and large playing fields. Also a path leads through the woodland on the hills above the fields towards the Lake.

This image was taken on a late September afternoon. The shadows were already quite long.

This pavilion is part of several sports fields near South Norwood Lake.

The houses on South Norwood Hill often enjoy huge views eastwards over the broad valley that marks the headwaters of the River Ravensbourne and its tributaries such as the Chaffinch Brook. In the distance here, through the haze, can be seen churches and other prominent buildings in the Penge area.

New construction work at Cypress Infants School.

In the middle distance, an area of playing fields lying to the north of South Norwood Lake.

Unusually for a suburban road, the house-numbering on Howden Road goes not from one side to the other, but all the way up one side and down the other. The Victorian villas on the right, northern side are numbered consecutively uphill from 1 to 13; the numbering then returns down the other side, covering houses that are exclusively interwar semis. It seems clear that when the road was first laid out in the nineteenth century there were only houses on one side and for a couple of generations their inhabitants would have enjoyed a view onto fields, a view taken away when the land was broken into building plots between the wars.