please empty your brain below

Is this "Canals February"?

Because if so, I thoroughly approve.
Remember enduring the traffic jams on the Old Kent Road during the 1990s whilst the road was rebuilt/widened, the Canal Bridge site rebuild dragged on and on, I think the sequence was to build a new road (now the n/b carriageway), divert all the traffic over that, demolish the old bridge, then build the new s/b carriageway, now there is no sign of a canal ever existing at this location.
Whitten Timber - ah, those strange arty all-night performance festivals in their old warehouse, when it was Area 10 about 10 years ago. Super creative, but not a money spinner.
Thanks for a thoroughly good read and some great photos. I did this walk back in 2016, I think after reading something on your blog. Nice to see it again. Not sure I'll go back now as I dont really want to see the new developments (which look depressingly the same as everywhere else in London)
I dont remember the bridge murals - they are wonderful.
Really enjoyable couple of canal posts, thank you - I'll have to go and take a look myself.
Any reason for the rather random steam engine? Tried searching and have found nothing. Looking at the photo I'm not even sure it was ever a working locomotive.
In Addington Square, a joyous video for a joyous song;-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnHlGONToIc
Burgess Park's straight flat tarmac path makes it the best (and fastest) parkrun in London, and i love it...
My first proper introduction to Burgess Park occurred a few years ago by two entirely disparate ways.
1) Thanks to an interest in 'conflict archaeology' I was drawn to the "ghost streets" - Neale St and Waite St - whose tarmac footprints had been deliberately retained as a marker and memorial to the residential community that had once existed, prior to WW2, when much of the area had been destroyed by enemy bombing.
2) Hearing about the 'Carnaval del Pueblo' - a celebration of the local South American community - which included a procession along Walworth Road, ending at the park. It sounded like fun, and - sure enough - in the years I was able to catch it - it was.

I haven't really been back much since the CdP ended, but one thing I have since learned is that an "improvement scheme" for the park included intentions to grass over where the Waite and Neale streets had once stood... which seemed to me a misguided way of airbrushing an unfortunate but significant passage of history.

I'd always assumed that the local councillor, Burgess - who had proposed the park and after whom it was named - had been a man, but - after some Googling today, for some further background - I made the discovery that Jesse Burgess was, in fact, a she.
(I'd already been aware that the councillor had been a keen promoter of an entire *ring* of new parklands around [the whole of] London in the new, post-war London - the "Abercrombie Plan" - (and that it had, sadly, never extended much beyond its optimistic beginnings in Southwark) but I've definitely learned something today in terms of discovering that the progenitor for the plan had been a woman!)
Fascinating posts!
Great post again with great links - topped off by that priceless video mentioned just above.

Looking at the 1900's map, it was more than just a few streets cleared to make the park - the mind boggles at the thought of the relentlessly dense tangle of (no doubt soot-blackened) streets with no major open space east of Kenning Park or north of Herne Hill, all the way to a mostly inaccessible industrial riverside.

I'm also curious about the landscaping-over of the remnants of the abandoned roadways, though they always made for a sort of dystopian/unfinished ambience. It makes that part of the park feel a lot more 'complete' now.










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