Early Childhood of Eternal Summer: A Pilgrimage to Sydenham Hill

Ancient woodland, modernist houses, and a ruined folly

Jun 24, 2025

After he’d left, people often asked him what London was like. And his childhood self would answer: mostly woodland.

We’ve come together to this South East London suburb, to revisit Simon’s childhood home. He lived here between the ages of two and five, then left for Warwickshire during the hot summer of ’76. Today the skies are clear blue, and the sun is searing. Which is exactly as it ought to be: for Simon, eternal summer reigns in Sydenham Hill.

The station, a fifteen-minute train-ride from the freneticism of Victoria, is flanked by trees on either side, and verdant banks of brambles in bloom. A simple footbridge of latticed ironwork spans the twin railway lines, and a ramp with a corrugated roof zigzags upwards through the greenery, like the walkway of a giant tree house. We emerge onto a leafy street with white picket fencing and a church with a pointed spire. Mouse barley is growing on the verges, and the air is pungent with the smell of privet flowers.

Was this the church, he wonders, where they sometimes came? The name, St Stephen’s, means nothing to him. He doesn’t recognise the rose garden, nor the clipped box hedges, nor the gothic windows. But, inside, the ceiling of the sanctuary is unmistakable: a firmament of midnight blue, spangled with stars. He gazes up at it, transfixed.

Opposite the church, we pass through a metal gate, and climb a steep path lined predominantly with oaks. The sun streams through the canopy of leaves above: the light is liquid, glassy, absinthe green. Our footsteps are accompanied by the sound of water trickling downhill. At the top of the ridge, the Wood House pub presides, an enticing prospect on a sultry day.

We turn left onto Crescent Wood Road, passing Six Pillars, a white-rendered early modernist house of elegant simplicity. Amongst the red brick Victorian villas on this street, it stands out with a cool self-possession, seeming to rebuke its neighbours for their excesses. And then we come to the entrance to Peckarmans Wood, an estate of housing from the 1960s, the place that Simon once called home.

It's the trees that strike you, above all: redwood, black locust, oak. Their height is imposing, non-negotiable. Everything else seems small in comparison. The houses, in terraces, lie low on the hillside, modestly deferring to the drama of the landscape, which drops away towards the woods beyond. Their simple rectilinear forms mix different hues and textures: timber, brick, white clapboard, and unusual copper rooves that have weathered to a patina of peppermint green.

The grounds are expansive, with patios spilling over onto communal gardens. Surely no developer would be this generous with space today. To a child, this little enclave constituted an entire world, rose- and jasmine-scented, amply supplied with grassy banks for tumbling down, as well as a ready assortment of willing playmates. Today, there is a hopscotch chalked upon the path in pink and blue. A slender fox strolls languidly across the lawn.

How do you tell which is your former house, when anybody who knows has passed away? Simon has brought photographs, taken by his father from the upstairs rear window, of a group of them playing on the lawn with a huge blow-up ball. We contemplate a grainy, faded photo of a summer’s evening long ago. An evening, perhaps, of eating supper outside, and racing giddily around barefoot, and staying up beyond bedtime. Identifying landmarks, analysing angles, we realise that the indeterminate sapling in the photo has grown into the giant hornbeam that now towers over us. From there, we figure out which must have been his former home.

We ring the buzzer hopefully. Sally is welcoming, and draws back the curtains, which she has closed against the baking heat. Some things have changed: the Crittall windows have been replaced with PVC; but much of the room is original, and recognisable from one of Simon’s photos of a pass-the-parcel game. He takes it all in with reverence, and gets excited by peculiar details: the doorbell mechanism high up on the wall, the wavy glass panes of the internal door, the sliding wooden panel at the entrance to the kitchen.

Ascending to the upper floor, he delights to see the built-in wooden stairgate at the top, and touches the brass bolt with deliberation, as if this small object might possess the power to roll back the years. He remembers that his grandmother once locked him upstairs. “Nan was lovely,” he reflects, “so I must have done something extremely naughty.”

Sally shows us Simon’s old bedroom, now home to a teenage girl, a gecko and a snake. He stands at the window, at the exact spot where his father must have stood thirty-two years ago, as he watched his young family playing on the lawn, and lifted his camera to memorialise the moment. The grass has grown and been mown back many times; countless little feet have run that way. From the branches of the vast hornbeam hangs a makeshift swing.

Thanking Sally, we depart, and find the gate that leads from the estate into the trees beyond. You needed a key back then, Simon tells me. Now, though, it is left unlocked, and a sign sets out a classic English contradiction: the land is private and there is absolutely no right of way; however its use by the public is cordially welcomed.

We wander through pools of light and shade, marvelling at the scale of the trees in this remnant of the ancient Great North Wood. The burbling of blackbirds and wrens fills the air. Then we come, improbably, to a romantic folly, a broken stone archway, standing mysteriously in the forest. It was built as a garden ornament for a lavish mansion, one of a number constructed here in the area’s heyday, when the Crystal Palace stood in Sydenham. Post World War II, these grand houses had been abandoned and were eventually demolished. This ruin has outlasted them.

There’s one more thing that Simon wants to see. Concealed in the woods is the portal to a long-abandoned railway tunnel, another relic of the Crystal Palace era. The one place of danger on an idyllic estate, it loomed large in his young imagination. The older kids would dare him to go, but he always refused. There was a reason, he felt, that it was strictly forbidden.

We can tell we’re getting close when we start to see graffiti, bits of rubbish, the ashes of old fires. The brick tunnel, open back in those days, is now barred with metal gates. It has become a hibernaculum for bats. And as we walk towards it, something strange happens. From one footstep to the next, all warmth disappears, and we find ourselves enveloped by the dark, dank chill of this sepulchral place.

The Ambient City

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