More From Brockley: Pictures from my walk on 18th March 1990 in Brockley. The previous post on this walk was Nunhead and Brockley. The pictures in this post are all from a small area of Brockley.
Two men walk around a street corner into the sun, their shadows clean on the pavement behind them. Like many who lived# in the area the two men are black.
This Brockley Cross at the north end of Mantle Road and it slopes down under a railway bridge to Brockley Station. Two railway lines cross here and I think the 4 aspect signal was on the line from London Bridge to Brockley. The other line, according to Edith’s Streets, was a goods line and the area behind the hoardings was Martin’s sidings with room for 36 coal waggons. This was on land belonging to Martins Dairy at 4 Endwell Road, leased to leased to the London North West Railway and sub let to coal merchant Charrington Warren Ltd.
The steps at right lead to the side entrance to Endwell Court, a block features in my previous post.
Josies Cafe was next to the railway bridge on Mantle Road which is at the right of the picture. There was still a café here (no longer Josie’s) until around 2010, but since then this has been a small empty plot.
Josies Cafe seen from the opposite side of Mantle Road with the grassy bank leading up to the goods line which crosses Mantle Road here.
I think this building housing the Brockley Paper Co was next to Josies Cafe, and has been demolished and replaced by a block of flats with shops on the ground floor. One of these at 1a Mantle Road is now the London Print Shop.
This small row was just south of Foxwell Road and you can see the railway bridge in the distance at right and the sign for Josies Cafe.
This block which included The Maypole Inn whose sign can be seen was demolished before 2008 – the pub closed in 2006. A block of flats was built on the northern part of the site around 2012, but I don’t know where the ‘low cost flats’ advertised here were located.
I walked to the other side of Brockley Station over the station footbridge and along Coulgate Street to Brockley Road and into Harefield Road. The building in the centre background is the back of a house on the corner of Foxberry Street and Coulgate Street,.
This post began with two men, so I’ll end it with two women who walked in front of me to cross the road as I was looking at the graffiti on the wall at the read of the corner shop.
This had the message ‘FREE WINSTON SILCOTT’ above a lot of less legible scrawls. Silcott was one of the ‘Tottenham 3‘ convicted in 1987 for the murder of PC Keith Blakelock on the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham in October 1985, but had been nowhere near the scened. All three convictions were quashed in 1991 after it was found the police had fabricated their confessions. He remained in jail as he was convicted for an unrelated murder of a boxer and nightclub bouncer and was only released in 2003.
More from this walk in a later post.
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