BBC show 'Homes Under the Hammer' this week featured a house up for auction in Catford, to be precise on the Corbett Estate. They mentioned that the Estate was developed by a Quaker, as indeed once explained at Walking Hither Green:
'The eastern half of SE6 is all about the Corbett Estate. The street plan leaps out from the A-Z for its rigid grid pattern, a rare feature in south-east London...The estate was the dream scheme of Scottish MP Archibald Corbett, who had the notion of providing "a modern Hygeia" for hard-working and respectable families. The area would be littered with places of worship but not a single inn or tavern, and the 300 acres he purchased for the plan in 1896 are now full of north-of-the-border place names'.
More surprizing to me was the statement on the programme that Catford had been the home to Ben Elton, Spike Milligan and Cat Stevens. I knew about the first two but hadn't heard about the latter. A quick Google search suggests that the programme was relying on wikipedia, with the Catford entry stating that Cat Stevens 'lived in a flat above a Catford furniture shop in the early sixties'. I can't find any other sources for that, but for now we'll take it. Stevens was born in 1948, and grew up in Soho (his family ran a restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue), so if he did live in Catford it was presumably for a brief period in his early career. But if true it would mean that he once lived in the same borough as Lewisham-born reggae singer Maxi Priest, who had a big hit in 1989 with a cover of Stevens' Wild World. Priest went to the now closed Roger Manwood School in Brockley Rise, as did footballer David Rocastle.
Baker Street's posters from the past
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Baker Street Station is one of the oldest on London's Underground. It was
one of the seven stations on the first line, the Metropolitan, which opened
in ...
17 hours ago
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