please empty your brain below

Excellent post - this is what I read this blog for! Thanks DG.
When I saw Beckenham mentioned, I got a little excited but thats only because I work there
Three places mentioned. Only one covered.

Poor Beckenham and Bromley. So easily forgotten.
My apologies that this three hour, eight mile walk wasn't able to cover all 50km² of Beckenham and Bromley.
I didn't even manage all 3km² of Penge.
Exciting for me too as I was born in Beckenham :-) Parents lived in Anerley at the time but moved to Thornton Heath when I was one. Parents were adament that we lived in Surrey and it was only as an adult I realised I could technically claim to have been born in London.
Seriously @eonleader?
Did you not read how much content there was in this blogpost/
Way more interesting than expected. Though I guess that's because a lot of it isn't what people consider to be "Penge" these days.
Enjoyed this post, so was Crystal Palace Park Road built as a replacement for through traffic between London and Bromley?

Looking at the markers and going back to the street signs, I do wonder if there should be a ban on updating stuff unless there is some sort of safety issue, one of the access covers in the pavement outside Southgate tube station on the zebra crossing side had a black and white design on the cover (in other words it looked like it was part of the Holden design), it was still there in 2011 after the station was refurbished.
A good friend of mine swears blind that where she lived and still owns a flat is in Anerley but I've always told her it's actually Penge. I'll share this article with her - it'll help change her mind, I'm sure! Thanks DG. :-)
How did Penge get its name? I used to work with a colleague who lived there and he would ostentatiously refer to it in a mock French accent, sounding like 'Ponj'.
Detached parishes are fun aren't they?

By the way, in Italy, Toto is a nickname for Salvatore.
"penge" is Danish for money, and is mentioned in the warning on the flap of many Danish post boxes that letters should not contain cash.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Denmark_postbox.JPG
Fascinating post. Such a shame the Crystal Palace Subway isn't included in the Open Days weekend. What a gem!

I thought Penge was Anglo-Saxon. According to the all-knowing oracle that is Wikipedia, it means "edge of wood", which makes sense.
"The Rim of Penge."

Fnarr.
Also the site of a double murder in the early 1950s. Horace Rumpole's defense of the accused, alone and without a leader, established his reputation.
THC: Anerley, so far as I can tell, was never a local government area, just an informal district, so it is quite possible that one lives at the same time in Anerley and in Penge.
A fascinating post.

I’m intrigued to know how you alighted on the idea of dealing with Beckenham/Bromley/Penge by walking the Penge boundary. Did you have the idea and then discover the Pengepast blog? Or did you discover the Pengepast blog when you were researching Penge and did that give you the idea?
As a survivor, I would ask it to be recorded that Penge received the greatest number of doodle-bugs (V1) per sq. mile in WW2.

When you say that Penge was in London at one point, are you referring to the LCC when formed taking ownership of the Crystal Palace and its Park? The Kent/Surrey border came right through it on a NW/SE axis until Surrey was pushed back west to Fox Hill.
Until then, the Pool River was the boundary between Surrey and Kent, not London.
I understood, perhaps mistakenly, that the involvement of London - or one of them - was when Penge was an exclave of Battersea. But it's all rather confusing.

I too have relatives who used to live in Anerley / Penge, with similar doubts being expressed. But, setting aside formal borders, very many areas of London (or indeed of any other big built up area) are subject to similar doubts and controversies.
Thanks for this. It explains a part of my family history I'd been curious about. My Battersea born Great-grandfather and his brother were both residents of the Penge workhouse as children and I wondered why this might be.
During my nomadic period in the late 70s that encompassed much of south London, I was one of the people that lived in Penge who pronounced the place with a French accent -- as a micky-take of course.

I am wondering if I was a workmate of Petras409?!
Mine was the late 1960s, working in a railway office in Croydon.
So perhaps not, Chris.
My mum and dad lived for years in Waterman's Square. One day a television researcher came to visit, and it led to Lucinda Lambton interviewing Dad on TV during a programme about the Square. After a while the residents - all council tenants originally - managed to get the name changed to Royal Watermans Square.










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