When was Telegraph Hill invented?

In a previous post about Waller Road, I noted that the designation by some of the area South of New Cross Road and north of Brockley as the distinct area of 'Telegraph Hill' (rather than as part of New Cross) seems to be quite recent. It is not mentioned, other than as the name for the parks, in the memoirs of Eileen Elias, ‘On Sundays we wore white’ (London: WH Allen, 1978) which describe her childhood in the area from 1910 to 1920.

I was delighted to hear this week from Tony Robins, who grew up in the area in the 1930s and 1940s (his war time memoirs are available online here). Tony recalls: 'From 1930, the year I was born, to 1948 (National Service),we lived at 77 Kitto Road, on the corner of Erlanger Road. Nobody could live closer to both parks, and my sisters & I considered they were ours - I think nobody could possibly have spent more time playing in them than we did! We knew our address was 77 Kitto Road, New Cross, S.E.14., and always said we lived at New Cross, or New Cross Gate (or even just the Gate) - not at Telegraph Hill, even though the parks had that name. After the war, coming home by bus or tram either along the Old Kent Road or Queens Road, or the other way from Lewisham or Greenwich, when paying my fare I learned to tell the conductor simply "The Gate, please".

So when was Telegraph Hill invented? I believe that the Telegraph Hill Centre opened in 1968, and there was a community body called the Telegraph Hill Social Council around this time and into the 1970s. But I think these were conceived as serving the Telegraph Hill Ward, part of the Lewisham Council area that extends almost to Honor Oak. I think it was probably the designation of the Telegraph Hill conservation area in 1990 that created a sense of a more narrow boundary, defined by the housing built by the Haberdashers Company in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. This is the area focused on by the Telegraph Hill Society, rather than the more architecturally and socially mixed Telegraph Hill Ward.

None of this matters too much, names do shift and after all 'New Cross Gate' was a new name compared with Hatcham, the area's older moniker. But I do think when people make a point of saying they live in 'Telegraph Hill not New Cross' as opposed to 'Telegraph Hill in New Cross' they are kidding nobody but themselves. What worries me more is that the imagined geographic distancing easily slips into a social distancing, with some people perhaps believing that they are somehow superior because they live several metres higher above sea level than the folks down below.

This is what Tim Butler and Garry Robson found in their academic study 'London Calling: The Middle Classes and the Re-Making of Inner London' (Oxford: Berg, 2003), in which they describe ‘Telegraph Hill’ as a middle class ‘enclave’ marked by ‘an element of smugness that is somewhat off-putting’ and a ‘denial of the wider area (New Cross) in which Telegraph Hill is located’. This is something of a stereotype, but a recognisable one nevertheless.