Swedenborg Churches in South London (Deptford, Camberwell, Norwood)

 The visionary Christianity of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) had a big impact on the more mystically inclined believers in the 18th and 19th centuries, famously including William Blake (though never somebody to bow to another's doctrine he had his criticisms of the Swedish thinker). To this day the Swedenborg Society still maintain a centre in Covent Garden where they put on some interesting events.

In the late 19th century there were at least three 'New Jerusalem Church' congregations in South London:  in Flodden Road, Camberwell; in Warwick Street, Deptford; and off Anerley Hill in Upper Norwood.

According to Lewisham archives, The Deptford New Jerusalem Church on Warwick Street (now Warwickshire path) was built in 1871and closed in 1949 though it was later used by the Deptford Branch of British Legion.

The Camberwell church is pictured below in 1908 (it closed in 1970):

The Deptford and Camberwell buildings are long gone, but another New Church off Anerley Hill remained open until 1987 and has been converted to housing (New Church Court in Waldegrave Road, near to Crystal Palace station):

Yeats in London

We are coming up to the 150th anniversary of the birth of the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats - he was born in Sandymount, County Dublin on 13 June 1865.

Yeats spents some very formative years in London, and next month at South East London Folklore Societu. Yeats authority Niall McDevitt will be giving a talk on 'Yeats in London'.

As mentioned at Transpontine before, there's an interesting connection between W.B. Yeats and the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill. He also visited Madame Blavatsky in Norwood, and spoke at Southwark Irish Literary Club. Hopefully there will be some more South London connections

Wednesday, May 13th 8:00pm, The Old King's Head, The Kings Yard, 45 Borough High Street, SE1 1NA

Talk starts at 8pm. £3/1.50 concession

To be sure of a place you can email nigelofbermondsey@gmail.com to book

(facebook event details)

London Bus Strike- South London Picket Scenes

Thousands of bus workers went on strike for 24 hours last Tuesday (13 January) as part of a campaign to end pay inequality across the company's bus network. 18 bus operators across London pay different rates for the same jobs, with a disparity of over £3 an hour.

There were pickets at all 70 bus garages, including across South London.

Pickets at Norwood garage

Pickets on New Cross Road (photo from @Joe_Dromey)

But the liveliest picket seems to have been in Camberwell, where the presence of a mobile sound system helped create a party atmosphere:

Shadows from Norwood

Author David Hambling has transplanted HP Lovecraft's horror mythos from New England to SE19 in his collection  'Shadows from Norwood'. The seven stories features local landmarks including the Crystal Palace ('The Monsters in the Park') and the underground River Effra ('Two Fingers'). Inevitably there's a story called the Dulwich Horror of 1927 ('The Dunwich Horror' is one of Lovecraft's most famous stories)

You can download the e-book for free this weekend (normal price £2.49) from Amazon. A paperback version will be out soon. Shadows from Norwood also has a Facebook page with has a Google map of the locations mentioned in the stories and a few bonus extra features.

Music Monday: Mercury Prize 2012

Last year's Mercury music prize included several South East London connections, with Peckham's Katy B and James Blake both out of Goldsmiths in New Cross, Plumstead's finest Tinie Tempah, sometime New Cross pub denizen Anna Calvi, not to mention ex-West Norwood resident Adele.

The 2012 shortlist has a few local links, though less South East than South West London. Folk singer Sam Lee is a visiting tutor at Goldsmiths:



Jessie Ware is from Brixton (born in Clapham):



Lianne La Havas grew up in Tooting and Streatham - she went to Norbury Manor sixth form:



Guess we could claim the Maccabees too even though they are from way out South West. They formed at the famous Elliott School, Putney where The XX, Hot Chip, Four Tet and Burial all went. Guitarist Felix White went to posh Dulwich private school Alleyn's, as did Jessie Ware incidentally.

Blavatsky and Blondie

Coming up next month at South East London Folklore Society:

'Gary Lachman will be giving a talk on the celebrated occultist, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s time as a resident of London. Author of “Isis Unveiled“ & co-founder of the Theosophical Society, Madame Blavatsky is a hugely influential figure in modern esoteric history. Gary Lachman is an author of books on the meeting ground between consciousness, culture, & the western inner tradition. His new book “Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality” is published by Tarcher/Penguin'.

The talk takes place on Thursday, October 11, 2012, 8:00pm at The Old King's Head, Kings Head Yard, 45-49, Borough High St., London SE1 1NA, all for less than the price of a pint ( £2.50/£1.50 concs).

The Norwood Connection

There should be some good South London content in this. When Blavatsky moved to London in 1885 she lived at Maycot cottage in Upper Norwood (Crown Hill), where she spent her final six years writing The Secret Doctrine. WB Yeats describes a visit there: "I found Madame Blavatsky in a little house at Norwood, with, but, as she said, three followers left" (having been exposed for some fraudulent practices). Yeats was surprised that a cuckoo hooted him from a clock that had apparently stopped: "I wondered if there was some hidden mechanism and I should have been put out, I suppose, had I found any, though Henley had said to me, 'Of course she gets up fraudulent miracles, but a person of genus has to do something' (Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil, 1922).

Another visitor recalled: 'I first met dear old “H. P. B.,” as she made all her friends call her, in the spring of 1887. Some of her disciples had taken a pretty house in Norwood, where the huge glass nave and twin towers of the Crystal Palace glint above a labyrinth of streets and terraces. London was at its grimy best. The squares and gardens were scented with grape-clusters of lilac, and yellow rain of laburnums under soft green leaves. The eternal smoke-pall was thinned to a gray veil shining in the afternoon sun, with the great Westminster Towers and a thousand spires and chimneys piercing through. Every house had its smoke-wreath, trailing away to the east' (Charles Johnston, Theosophical Forum. 1900)

One of Blavatsky's best-known followers was Annie Besant, the well known feminist, birth-control advocate, and political radical. Annie Besant had also lived also lived not far away in the 1870s, at 39 Colby Road SE19. Another leading Theosophist was the American Colonel Olcott. On September. 29 1889 he gave a lecture at the Hatcham Liberal Club, New Cross described as his 'largest audience of the season'.

Touched by your presence dear

Oh so what's the Blondie connection? Well the first time I heard the word 'theosophy' was in their 1977 hit 'I am always touched by your presence, dear' which includes the line 'Coming into contact with outer entities, We could entertain each one with our theosophies'. The song was written by early Blondie bassist Gary Valentine, who also wrote another Blondie favourite, X-Offender, and played on their debut album. Valentine left the band in 1977 when they were on the verge of internaional fame, and went on to be a writer under the name Gary Lachman... the very same, all the way from CBGBs to the Old Kings Head in Borough High Street.

Blondie in 1977, Gary Valentine Lachman on the right.

London Wildlife Folklore Events

A couple of interesting folklore-inspired events especially for kids/families coming up soon courtesy of London Wildlife Trust's Wildlife Gardening Centre, a green oasis in Marsden Road, Peckham.

On Sunday October the 17th, Vanessa Woolf-Hoyle will be telling stories about harvest, growing, field boggles, London wildlife etc., all this plus a nature trail at the centre itself.

Then on the afternoon of Halloween (31st Oct) between 2 and 4pm, there will be a trip to Norwood for an afternoon of storytelling in a yurt (a spooky tale about the gypsy queen of Norwood Hill) and a chance to make your own tree spirit!

Both events are free, but booking is advised. For more information or to book your place please contact Celia Hammond on chammond@wildlondon.org.uk

קריסטל פעלעס - Jewish Norwood

Bob from Brockley wonders about coming across a flyer with the Hebrew letters for 'Crystal Palace' on it - קריסטל פעלעס. Can't throw any light on that, but there's certainly an interesting Jewish aspect to the history of the wider Norwood area. Most notably, the area was home from 1866 for around 100 years to the Jews' Hospital and Orphan Asylum (renamed The Jewish Orphanage in 1928 and in 1956 the Norwood Home for Jewish Children). Former residents remembered "We enjoyed swings, skipping-ropes, hoops, walks to the Crystal Palace, rambles among the lovely hills, dales and woods of Norwood, Dulwich and Sydenham" and "Pictures twice a week at the old Norwood Palace, and later at the Regal. Then there were the concerts at Brockwell Park, and the mad scramble back afterwards - to be rewarded with sweets when we arrived."


The orphanage was demolished in 1961 - it was replaced by the Norwood Synagogue, but this too closed during the 1970s I believe. Norwood still exists as a Jewish children's charity, but no longer has any particular link with South London. The old orphanage site in Knights Hill, West Norwood now belongs to Lambeth Council as Norwood Hall - for which there are ambitious plans to build a swimming pool and health centre, albeit dependent on uncertain government funding and planning permission (see update at West Norwood News blog).

Bridget Riley

There's a new Bridget Riley exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. One of the great South London artists, she was born in Norwood in 1931, studied at Goldsmiths in New Cross (1949-52) and later taught at Croydon College of Art. Apparently she also had a revelation at Peckham Rye that she should start her art practice with drawing:

'One evening in the autumn of 1949 I was walking up and down Peckham Rye station. It was dark and wet and I was trying to decide what to do. I was coming to the end of my first term at Goldsmiths School of Art and was feeling upset and frustrated. I had arrived anxious to make a start, to find a firm basis for the work that I hoped lay ahead. It seemed that I was unable to get to grips with some of the real problems of painting, which I felt sure existed but which I could not even begin to identify.

A copy I had made of Van Eyck's Man in a Red Turban had been included in my portfolio submitted for entry to Goldsmiths, and this had probably helped me to get a place. Competition was stiff. People were still returning home after the Second World War and had priority in further education. These were men and women in their thirties who, delayed only by the slow pace of demobilisation, came directly from active service. They were overjoyed to be back in civvy street and to have the chance of making a life as artists. Coming straight from school, I counted myself lucky to be there. But this cultural climate did not diminish the challenge of what to do at Goldsmiths. On the contrary, it intensified it, as it became clear that this problem was felt by many of us in different degrees.

Excerpt published in Evening Standard, 10 May 2010, from 'Bridget Riley: From Life (£15), a catalogue published by the National Portrait Gallery to accompany the exhibition.

Bridget Riley, Blaze 4, 1963

A Banquet at Crystal Palace, 1860

On a market stall in East Dulwich I recently came across a clipping from the Illustrated London News. It is undated, but various stories on it suggest that it was from Summer 1860. It includes an illustration and account of a banquet at Crystal Palace with guests including Gladstone (then Chancellor of the Exchequer) and 'many members of Parliament and eminent scientific literary men':

'On Saturday week Sir Joseph and Lady Paxton gave a charming fete at their beautiful residence, Rockhills, adjoining the Crystal Palace... After enjoying a promenade in the grounds attached to Sir Joseph's villa, the company, at seven o'clock, proceeded to the north wing of the Crystal Palace, where an elegant dinner was served, covers being laid for 350 persons. After the banquet a ball was improvised, and at ten o'clock the whole upper range of fountains in the Crystal Palace gardens were set in motion, and illumined with various coloured lights, the effect of which upon the falling water was singularly beautiful'.

Quite a party evidently.

During this period too, the Crystal Palace became a key theme in Russian literature, as Sarah J Young (a CP based lecturer in Russian) discusses at her blog. Essentially the argument was between the writers Chernyshevsky and Dostoevsky. The former, active in revolutionary politics, used the Palace on Sydenham Hill as an image of utopia in his novel What is to be Done? The latter, who wrote about a visit to the Palace in 1863, saw the Crystal Palace and indeed the whole utopian impulse as a doomed attempt at a rationalisation of human life that could never banish the human taste for doubt, suffering and chaos.

Sarah has also started exploring wider depictions of the Crystal Palace area in literature. Some of them I had heard of, but I had no idea that 'Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book (1938) is set at the Queen’s Hotel (in the novel called the Regina) on Church Road, Crystal Palace'. More to come apparently.

Tinie Tempah - South East of the Thames

When I described Blak Twang as London's best rapper earlier this week I guess I was thinking of the older UK Hip Hop generation. Obviously there's a whole lot of younger rappers coming through working more at the grime/hip hop interface. Which brings us on to Tinie Tempah, currently number one in the UK singles chart with Pass Out.

Tempah lived in Peckham and then moved to Plumstead, but gives the whole of the southlands a shout out in his early (2005) track South East of the Thames - 'Shout out to Brockley... Catford... Sydenham... New Cross... Peckham... Woolwich... Croydon... Deptford... Norwood.... Thamesmead.... yeah it;s all good' (similar vibe to Southside All Stars 'Southside').



Tinie Tempah is playing at the Coronet at Elephant & Castle this Friday 12th March at Together, and at Rar! underage club at the Albany in Deptford on Friday 19th March.

Also check out his take on the Chris Ofili exhibition at Tate Britain.

South London French Exiles (2): Emile Zola

The great French novelist Emile Zola lived in the Queen's Hotel in Upper Norwood from October 1898 to June 1899 while in voluntary exile during the infamous Dreyfus affair. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French Army, had been falsely accused of spying, largely as a consequence of the widespread anti-semitism in ruling circles. Zola famously came to his defence by writing an open letter to the French President, "J'Accuse" and as a result was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for criminal libel. It was to avoid this that Zola fled to London, where he remained until the death of the President and the withdrawal of the threat of prison.

Zola led a lonely existence in Norwood, his whereabouts concealed from all but trusted friends. His visitors included the French socialist leader Jean Jaures, Yves Guyot (a prominent Dreyfusard), J H Levy of the Personal Rights Association, and the novelist Octave Mirbeau.

Zola spent his time working on his novel Fécondité, cycling and taking photographs of the local area, including the following one of the Crystal Palace.

Interestingly when Zola had visited London five years previously he was deemed sufficiently a literary celebrity to be honoured in one of the regular grand fireworks displays at the Crystal Palace. Along with the 'Ascent of two Large Balloons, bearing torches and Aerial fireworks' and and 'Aquatic Forest of Floating Trees of Fire' the 23 September 1893 display included a 'Fire Portrait of Emile Zola with motto "Welcome"' (Patrick Beaver, The Crystal Palace: a portrait of Victorian enterprise, 1986).

There is a blue plaque for Zola on the hotel in Church Road, Upper Norwood (close to Crystal Palace triangle). A collection of Zola's photographs of the area has been published by the Norwood Society.

Crystal Palace Cinema Campaign

The Picture Palace Campaign is campaigning for the bingo hall at 25 Church Road, SE19 to be reponed as a cinema - apparently Gala have sold the building to a large evangelical church despite an independent cinema operator also putting in an offer. The art deco building in the Crystal Palace triangle was originally built in 1928 as a cinema and the interior was designed by the renowned cinema architect George Coles.

Nunhead to Crystal Palace walk

'On Saturday 31st January 'Walk London' invites you to a leisurely taster of the Green Chain Walks forthcoming extension from Nunhead to Crystal Palace . Generally it follows the disused railway line but diverts to make the most of local landscape, views and, places of interest. The walk is free of charge, starts at 11am outside Nunhead railway station and, is 6.5 miles long. Of course, you may break-off at any time. There are some steep slopes and muddy sections. We'll visit Nunhead Cemetery, One Tree Hill, The Walter Segal houses, Horniman Gardens , Sydenham Hill Woods nature reserve, the site of Upper Sydenham station and, Crystal Palace Park. We conclude at the Café near the Park's Penge Gate. The walk should take 3 or 4 hours and the Walk Leader will give a brief historical commentaries. Experts are welcome to correct him! You can see the route on the web here.'

Waiting for the wall to fall

I've been to a couple of cold places this year - to Berlin in October and to Crystal Palace park this morning. But it's not just the climate they have in common. Both also feature monstrous blocks of concrete decorated by graffiti artists in an attempt to humanise them. The difference is that one was installed by a repressive regime to control people moving from one part of the city to the other - the other seems to have no purpose at all. Can anyone explain the Crystal Palace 'wall'?

The Crystal Palace 'Wall'

The Berlin Wall

Crystal Palace Fiction

The title story of Shena Mackay's new collection, The Atmospheric Railway, takes its name and some of its subject manner from a short-lived Victorian railway line in Crystal Palace (the author grew up in Blackheath and went to Kidbrooke school),

Crystal Palace magazine The Transmitter has identified a couple more novels set in that part of London. A recent one is Karen McLeod's In Search of the Missing Eyelash, set in Penge and Crystal Palace. Of greater vintage is The Young Visiters (sic) by Daisy Ashford, published in 1919 but apparently written by the author when she was 9 in 1890, a comic tale with much of the action set in Crystal Palace, or rather in the Crystal Palace.

BNP in South East London Update

Last night's post about the BNP membership list underestimated the number of members across South East London - the original version of the list was in lots of different sections and I missed some. Various other versions are out there now which are easier to search.

It now seems that there are 102 BNP members in the SE postcodes areas, a worrying number but my earlier point about their lack of significant presence in London remains. Yes Deptford is a BNP free zone, and there is only 1 each in New Cross and Walworth. Further out there are larger clusters though - particularly in Eltham. Complete breakdown is as folows:

SE1 (Bermondsey) - 5
SE2 (Abbey Wood) – 1
SE3 (Blackheath) - 6
SE4 (Brockley) -4
SE5 (Camberwell) – 6
SE6 (Catford) - 3
SE7 (Charlton) -2
SE8 (Deptford) – 0
SE9 (Eltham) – 17
SE10 (Greenwich) - 2
SE11 (Kennington) – 0
SE12 (Lee) – 1
SE13 (Lewisham) – 2
SE14 (New Cross) -1
SE15 (Peckham) – 5
SE16 (Rotherhithe) - 5
SE17 (Walworth) -1
SE18 (Woolwich/Plumstead) - 7
SE19 (Upper Norwood/Crystal Palace) - 4
SE20 (Anerley/Penge) - 6
SE21 (Dulwich) – 1
SE22 (East Dulwich) -2
SE23 (Forest Hill) – 6

SE24 (Herne Hill) – 3

SE25 (South Norwood) -5

SE26 (Sydenham) – 3

SE27 (West Norwood) -1

SE28 (Thamesmead) - 4

Not a lot of interesting detail in the list of local members, other than the fact that one SE18 member is Sean Pearson, who stood for the Conservatives in a 2006 local election in Greenwich Glyndon Ward and was until last year chair of the Swinton Circle - a group on the far right of the Tory Party (Malcolm Redfellow has more on this as well as some hilarious extracts from the list).

Some interesting as well as dubious comments to earlier post and also over at Brockley Central. One suggestion is that after the initial turmoil, the BNP might benefit from the fuss if they can present themselves as victims - there was a member on the news complaining about living in a 'fascist state' (oh my aching sides - read some history) - never mind the fact that it seems likely that the list was originally published by one of their own in a faction fight between wannabe fuhrers. The BNP are also getting lots of publicity, and will try and use the stories about teachers, police officers etc. to show that they are full of upright members of the community (actually there are only a handful of members named for any particular job).

There is some risk of this, and we certainly can't rely on the BNP continually shooting themselves in the foot. Still at least their opponents now know where to look out for them.

South London Film Locations

The London Film Location Guide by Simon R.H. James (London: Batsford, 2007) features hundreds of locations in exhaustive detail – he has obviously spent years tracking down not just particular streets but exact house numbers.

In terms of our core area of New Cross, Deptford and Brockley there’s not much to report, with the films included mostly mentioned on Transpontine before, including Shaun of the Dead, Spider, Once a Jolly Swagman and Intimacy. In relation to the latter though, James has identified no.2 Alpha Road as the house used for a great deal of sex. The only film he mentions that I wasn’t aware of is Five Seconds to Spare (1999), where Ray Winstone has a recording studio in APT arts on Deptford Creekside – and ends up dead in the Creek.

Unsurprizingly there are numerous film locations listed for Greenwich, the area around the South Bank, Bankside and Borough Market (including all those Bridget Jones scenes).

I watched Mona Lisa (1986) recently so knew some of it was filmed in East Dulwich , but the author has done the legwork and notes that Bob Hoskins buys flowers at 286 Crystal Palace Road (on the corner of Goodrich Road) and then tries to visit his daughter at 16 Darrell Road. I wasn’t aware that in Last Orders (2001), the exterior of the pub is The Wishing Well Inn in Bellenden Road (the interior is the Larkhall Tavern in Clapham – now converted to flats), while Michael Caine’s butcher shop is 194 Bellenden Road – now Lucius and Richards.

I must rewatch the Children of the Damned (1964) now that I know it features the Bermondsey Street tunnel. And I was delighted to discover that in the original Italian Job (1966), Michael Caine delivers the famous line 'You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off' in Crystal Palace park (you can see the TV transmitter behind him).



But things are never as they seem in the movies. A car chase in ‘Lewisham’ in I Believe in You (1952) was actually filmed in Latchmere Road in Battersea, while in Janice Beard 45 wpm (1998) a ‘Rotherhithe’ scene is actually Pensbury Place in Vauxhall.

Equally South London locations can double up for other places. The back streets of ‘Soho’ in an An American Werewolf in London (1981) are actually around Clink Street, SE1 (the scene where Jenny Agutter pushes through the police cordon is on the corner of Clink Street and Stoney Street). Passport to Pimlico was not filmed in Pimlico, but in a street built for the purpose on a bombsite in north Lambeth –where Copeland House and Ferrybridge House estates now stand. Most far fetched, at least in terms of geographical distance, Reese Witherspoon’s ‘Harvard’ speech in Legally Blonde was actually filmed in the Great Hall of Dulwich College! Oh and the door to The Leaky Cauldron in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is under the railway bridge at 7 Stoney Street, SE1.

Then there are the continuity distortions, where areas several miles apart are made to look adjacent. The book gives many examples, including The Sandwich Man (1966) with Michael Bentine, where Dulwich Park SE21 is apparently sandwiched between SW1 and Green Park, W1.

No book of this kind can ever be really comprehensive. In terms of New Cross and Deptford for instance, he hasn’t picked up on some locations featured previously at Transpontine, such as Interview with a Vampire and the Quatermass Xperiment. He documents the Thamesmead locations for A Clockwork Orange and the concrete subway at Wandsworth gyratory, SW18, where a tramp gets beaten up in the same film. But he doesn’t include Nettlefold Hall in West Norwood, also used in the film.

Still there’s more than enough here to fuel a thousand conversations in the pub or round the water cooler.

Bookshops

South East London is not well-served for bookshops. My New Cross/Brockley/Deptford homeland is pretty much a desert. Likewise Camberwell, which just a few years ago had at least three, and Elephant & Castle since the now permanent closure of Tlon - though 56a Infoshop is still keeping the flag flying for radical literature.

Still, all is not lost. There's the newish and arty Review bookshop in Bellenden Road, Peckham. A bit further afield (for me) there are two really good independent bookshops. The Bookseller Crow is in Westow Street, Crystal Palace (and it has a blog too). When I bought my copy of The Day The Country Died : A History Of Anarcho Punk 1980 To 1984 a while ago, they told me that Joy de Vivre from Crass used to work there. Being in Crystal Palace there are also lots of places to grab a coffee and eat nearby, my favourite being Domali with its famous vegetarian fry-ups. If you're driving you can park for free behind Sainsburys, check out the garden centre and the quirky Haynes Lane indoor market - the latter with some good second-hand bookstalls itself.

Kirkdale Bookshop in Sydenham has been going for forty-odd years. Upstairs it has a good selection of new books, downstairs a second hand section including lots of interesting London books. It's also just down the road from Blue Mountain cafe and near to Sydenham British Rail.

Both worth making the journey if you don't live immediately nearby.

South London Ghost Trains

South London is not so well served by the London Underground as the other side of the river, so unsurprisingly it doesn't figure so strongly in the new book Haunted London Underground by David Brandon and Alan Brooke (History Press, 2008). Still there are a few spooky stories from the transpontine zone.

- The Crystal Palace tunnel runs between Gipsy Hill and Crystal Palace stations: 'This tunnel is reputed to be haunted. Many years ago a track-maintenance worker was run down and killed by a train in the tunnel. He was decapitated in the process. His ghost has been seen on many occasions wandering disconsolately around the tunnel'.

- Another tunnel on the short lived Victorian 'pneumatic railway' between Sydenham and Penge became the subject of an urban myth when the railway closed and the tunnel was bricked up - the legend was that an abandoned carriage had been bricked up inside with 'a grisly cargo of skeletal passengers'. The tunnel is thought to have been subsequently destroyed.

- Elephant and Castle Underground Station: staff 'have experienced the sounds of someone running towards them mainly when the station is closed but no one can be seen'. People travelling northbound on the Bakerloo Line from the Elephant have seen 'the sudden reflection of a ghost-like face staring back even though no one is sitting nearby'.

- The London Road depot of the Bakerloo Line, beneath street level by St Georges Circus/Lambeth North: staff have reported strange 'metallic-sounding tapping noises as if an old-fashioned wheeltapper was a work' and seen 'shadowy figures' with blurred edges 'passing hither and thither in the sidings'. 'Another apparition in the area is that of a nun, She is thought to have been connected with a nearby convent school'.