Pope Street - how a village acquired houses, a factory and a station, and changed its name

Every week I think of a subject for these articles and I always try and think of something new and different to the others I’ve been doing recently. So I thought this week I’d better find something far-flung and far away from Greenwich and Woolwich and the areas in the borough that I usually write about. The most far-flung thing I could think of is Pope Street Station.  How many of you know where that was? On the 1870s OS map I can find the site of the station – but there is no sign of it there although the Dartford Loop line is there, running past the future site.

The Dartford Loop line was built by the South Eastern Railway and opened in 1866. It leaves the North Kent Line at Hither Green and goes on its own route down to Dartford, basically going via Sidcup.  In 1870 as it neared Sidcup it ran past the site of Pope Street but there was no station there  and the area is marked on the map as ‘Lower Bedmont’.  Lower Bedmont has entirely resisted research –  not a single reference can I find using the Google search system or the British Library newspaper database. There are a few mentions of ‘Bedmont’ itself, without the ‘Lower’ prefix. This includes  names and references in nearby buildings and streets and I’ve even found an article which discusses it.  ‘Bedmont’ seems to have been part of the Kemnel Manor area – somewhere near where the new Muslim cemetery is now.

The site of the future station as shown on the 1870 map is at a point at which Footscray Road, from Eltham meets Cross Lane going South – now Southwood Road and in 1870 a brickworks is marked there. Going north from the crossroads to the Avery Hill area is Pope Street which looks a bit more promising - there are buildings just down the road and eventually Pope Street Woods.  Further north and also close to the road was ‘Black Boy Wood’.  ‘Black Boy’ usually means there is a connection with King Charles II, who was given that as a nickname. Nearby is an area which Charles II granted to Sir john Shaw – now the  grounds of the Royal Blackheath Golf Club,  west of where this woodland once stood.

In 1870 not only was this still; countryside but the local crime was also rural. In 1870 poachers William Pratt, and George Loversuch, of Lee,  were summoned by John Joiner, gamekeeper.  He said that on a Sunday afternoon he had seen them in Pope Street Wood, kneeling down at some rabbit holes.   They had four rabbit nets and a ferret. Pratt had a dead rabbit in his pocket. He knew they were poachers who had previously been several times in prison.

In the early 19^thcentury  these woods were also used by the fox-hunting fraternity. On one occasion in 1893 the Sanderstead Harriers hounds met at Eltham  ‘and turned out a vixen fox’ and chased her to Blendon. Then ‘an old favourite fox was turned out in Avery Hill Park ......he went off to Black Boy Wood ... he was saved alive after a hard run of two hours’. (poor creature)  As late as 1896 the areas was known for ‘first rate shooting’...... ‘its close proximity to London ... renders it especially desirable for gentlemen engaged in business in the City’. In Black Boy and Pope Street Woods ‘the coverts are well stocked .... with a large stock of wild birds left from last season ... the bag should comprise a fair amount of hares, rabbits, partridges, and woodcock, as well as pheasants’.

In the 1870s there are many newspapers advertisements for sale of ’valuable growing underwood  .... in Pope Street Woods, near Eltham’.  However there are more ‘Properties for Sale’ advertisements  and they are quite clear that they are looking for purchasers with development in mind.   For example “Sixteen plots of prettily-timbered building land, with frontages to the road from Pope Street to Chislehurst, overlooking a well-wooded and highly picturesque country.  ... choice sites for the erection of detached villas with great accessibility to town”.  But this is not an area which will keep its countryside very much longer.  

For the sake of the local wildlife it’s just as well that housing development proceeded quite quickly and eventually a railway station was opened at the crossroads where Pope Street met Footscray Road.

Pope Street Station opened on 1st April 1878 on the Dartford Loop Line between Mottingham and Sidcup Stations-and said to have originally opened for the convenience of first class ticket holders who lived in the growing suburb of up-market houses.  It is located within a cutting and its original design was to the South Eastern Railway’s standard but  ‘economical’’ model.  It had two platforms with – as in most other places -  the ’up side’ where the main buildings were sited. These were single-storey and were like those at Crayford, Bexley and Sidcup Stations. There were the usual offices in wooden buildings and the station was lit with gas lamps –the wrought iron posts which held them were kept even when the lamps themselves had been converted to electricity. The ’down side’ platform had  a canopy but no buildings.

 The station had a goods yard on the ‘up side’ with two sidings and a dock platform.  There was also a two storey timber signal box at the end of the ‘down ’ platform – which was eventually demolished in 1955

Now if you are all wondering what happened to Pope Street Station .. the next thing to happen is that on 1st January 1886, the station’s name was changed to ‘New Eltham’-  said to be done to please a developer.  For a while it was  known as ‘New Eltham and Pope Street Halt’.   At around this time a  lattice over bridge was installed so passengers no longer had to walk across the lines to change platforms. This was removed in 2013 and replaced with a more accessible footbridge and lifts.  By 1926 electric trains were .using the station. 

In 1955 platforms were lengthened and the goods yard partly closed. One siding remained,  controlled from Sidcup.  until goods traffic was totally withdrawn in 1963 and the old yard became a car park.  Later in the 1960s the station buildings were upgraded and replaced. In 1988 a new single storey brick ‘up side’ building was installed.

So the hamlet of Lower Bedmont also known as Pope Street -lasted until the end of the 19^th century. By the 1920s it was a railway suburb and a small centre had grown up close to the new station.– It was built along with the houses for the middle class commuter, who ‘went to his business in a frock coat, top hat and spats’.   Today the pattern of the country side remains and the old fields and their boundaries survive in the numerous local sports fields – but in the 2020s they too are disappearing under the ever encroaching new housing. 

Pope Street became Southwood Road and then later Avery Hill Road. There were 'farms and hop gardens all the way down... Tudor cottages were there, very old’. Tthe road was narrow and there were lots of trees 'right down to Polecat Corner ' - that was, I think , the point at which Avery Hill Road meets Halfway Street. Rural activities continued at the  Beehive  pub in Footscray Road . it was rebuilt in 1897 but still hosted trotting races and travelling circuses in an adjacent field

Most importantly to the development of a centre was a library , built almost adjacent to the station in October 1931.  It was opened  by H.M. Tomlinson – an east end based writer and journalist,  known for  travel writing, novels and short stories often about London River and life at sea.  It had been built and equipped by Woolwich Borough Council at a cost of £12,500. The earliest references to it say it was a ‘public library and convenience’.  This convenience is long gone but there does seem to be one of those automatic things outside now.  I also seem to remember there was a little museum in the library in the 1970s and I don’t know if it’s still there.  There also was, or is, a cafe in the library.  I remember some 20 years ago my husband coming home and with some excitement telling me about the profligate beans on toast which you could buy in the library for 50p!

Industry also began to root itself in the area.  . I have already mentioned the brickworks at the South end of Southwood Rd but there is also one on the site of All Saints Church in Berota Road

Most important was the Stanley works built just off the west side  of Avery Hill Road. I think I’ve written about them before, when I first started writing for Weekender.  They were precision instrument makers. The factory was built in 1916 by George Heath, a Crayford based, maker of navigational instruments. In the 1920s Heath was taken over by Stanley’s – the South Norwood based instrument making company. In the Second World War production was intensified and more buildings were added. In 1945 V2 damaged a whole wing. During the 1940s and 1950s the company flourished and expanded developing and making a very wide range of instrumentation. A wide range of precision instruments but they made their money out of sextants and compasses, because every Naval officer had to have one. The factory eventually closed in the 1990s.  it is now the site of housing around Stanley Close

There is a red painted building behind the library- a rectangular windowless blockhouse built in 1954. This was a crucial part of London's Cold War civil defences. It was the Woolwich Borough Control and, later, Greenwich Control Centre.  Members of Subterranea Britannica visited it in 2003 going through an air lock and two steel plate blast doors. they saw a ventilation plant with a diesel generator; a ‘Signals Room’ with a  manual switchboard and a large 1:50,000 map of South East London and North Kent on one wall. The emergency escape hatch was bolted over it to prevent access. There was a kitchen with a 1950’s electric cooker, a toilet with  two cubicles and three hand basins, a gent’s toilet has a urinal. The whole place was damp with mould

Lower Bedmont had changed a lot in a century.

Information on the station from the excellent Kent Rail web site