Two sculptures of dinoaurs. The one further back is slightly higher; it is light green, standing on all-fours, and facing the camera. Below it is a brown dinosaur, facing right but with its head turned towards the camera, raising its right foreleg. They sit in the bright sunlight among trees and shrubs typical of a park.

Welcome to the London Borough of…, part II

Last time: I decided to go get a selfie with as many London borough signs as I could in a day. Some hours later, I was in the middle of south-east London, having only got two.

I have hated buses at least since I first used them to get home from school when I was 11. There were three different routes, run by two different companies, and (depending on the driver’s interpretation of fare stages) three different possible fares.1 Combine that with wanting to get home quickly, which didn’t always mean getting the first bus that came, and I’d created an optimisation minigame for myself that I’d frequently lose.

I don’t know whether I was mulling over this as I sat on the bus from suburban Bexley to Woolwich. I suspect I was rather more preoccupied with my inefficiency: per the directions from Citymapper2 I was getting off outside a station I’d travelled through on Crossrail minutes earlier. (Too many minutes earlier.) I did, at least, notice that this meant the first six legs of today’s journey would all be on different TfL modes, and decided that I should try and get all of those in a day as well. It seems creating doomed optimisation minigames is a hard habit to break.

I had decided not to head straight for Crystal Palace, because I knew it would be lunchtime by the time I got there. Instead, I went to the Horniman Museum, home of the infamous overstuffed walrus. This was because I knew it had two things: a café that did an excellent fish finger sandwich,3 and a (crucially) signed London borough boundary nearby. So, from Woolwich, it was the DLR from Woolwich Arsenal to Canning Town,4 then the Jubilee line to Canada Water, then the Windrush line5 to Forest Hill. I had my lunch, saw the walrus, and looked around the aquarium. And then I headed to the borough boundary to get boroughs number 3 and 4.

You should know by now how this goes.

My memory wasn’t completely faulty. I got Lewisham, the borough I was leaving.

The blog's author scowling at the camera, hair a mess, in a selfie next to a sign reading "Lewisham. Welcome to Forest Hill. Twinned with: Antony, France; Matagal[pa], Nicaragua; Berlin–Charlottenbu[rg]." The word Lewisham has the borough logo above it, a yellow crown where the spikes are formed by people with outstretched arms, while the twin towns show their respective coats of arms to the left of their names. The sign is made up of three panels, the top two blue with white writing, and the third reversed. The sign has a pole off-camera to the right, which arches over the sign and down the other side, finishing hovering above the ground, with the signs shaped to match the curved pole. The background shows the top of a lampost, green foliage, and a relentlessly blue sky.
This sign has clearly been there for a while; Charlottenburg hasn’t been an independent borough of Berlin since 2001.

For the borough I was entering, I can still picture, very clearly, the “Welcome to Southwark” sign that I expected to be there.6 It’s a big, white rectangle, with “Welcome to” written in some sans-serif at the top, and then “Southwark” in the signature-like handwriting font that’s used in the council’s logo. Then there’s a horizontal line, and it has the name of the neighbourhood you’re entering at the bottom. It’s incredibly detailed.

It’s also incredibly made-up. I’ve checked Street View, and there has never been a sign like that there. And even if there had been, it wouldn’t have looked like that, as we’ll see when I do eventually “bag” Southwark (spoilers, sorry).

Still, Crystal Palace, with its five-borough convergence, wasn’t far away. And, unlike suburban Bexley, it was a place with things to look at in and around Crystal Palace park. Here are some of the things I found:

  • The Crystal Palace itself, or at least where it once stood before it burnt down. It’s easy to tell where it once was from the stonework that remains in the formal gardens, including the ceremonial steps that still rise optimistically from the surrounding park. The structure was originally built in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851, then moved to the park (and indeed suburb) that now bears its name, opening there in 1854. It burnt down in 1936.
  • The Crystal Palace transmitter. The main Freeview mast for London, it was built in the 1950s for the BBC. But the televisual history of Crystal Palace stretches back further: the television pioneer John Logie Baird had a research laboratory there, and much of his equipment was destroyed in the aforementioned fire.
  • The Crystal Palace dinosaurs. Now these are fun. Possibly the only Grade I listed dinosaurs in the country, they were built as an educational display when the palace was moved to south London. They were the world’s first dinosaur statues, and represented the latest scientific knowledge of the day. Sadly, that means that they do not represent the latest scientific knowledge of the present day, and their value is now for their history rather than their accuracy.
  • The Crystal Palace National Sports Centre. I’d heard of this only because it’s where the London Grand Prix athletics used to take place. I don’t know why that meant I’d heard of it, but I do know that from 2013 it moved elsewhere. The reason, of course, was that the Olympic Stadium had opened in Stratford the previous year, which gives me chance to remind you about Wenlock and Mandeville.7
  • Crystal Palace station. Right next to the park, and built to serve the erstwhile Palace, I mention it because it houses a branch of Brown & Green, a business I remember as runners-up in the first series of The Restaurant. If you don’t remember it, it was like The Apprentice, but with Raymond Blanc instead of Alan Sugar, vaguely serious contestants instead of self-promoters, and “You’re fired” replaced with, er, “I’m closing your restaurant”. Maybe with a snappier catchphrase it would have lasted more than three series.8
An overstuffed taxidermy walrus inside a Victorian gallery with an arched roof. In old, wooden display cases, other taxidermy specimens are displayed against bright block-colour backgrounds.
A lattice transmitter mast, viewed from near the bottom looking up to the top, as it tapers to a point. It seems to rise up from above leafy trees, with others overhanging on the left. The sky is bright blue.
A sculpture in a park in the shape of two ironwork arches, set at right-angles, each topped with a rectangle above with a circle of iron inside. It sits in rough grass in a park. In the background, against a solid blue sky, a latticework tower rises up from some leafy green trees.
Two sculptures of dinoaurs. The one further back is slightly higher; it is light green, standing on all-fours, and facing the camera. Below it is a brown dinosaur, facing right but with its head turned towards the camera, raising its right foreleg. They sit in the bright sunlight among trees and shrubs typical of a park.
Four Canada geese (one adult, three juvenile) walking from left to right. The adult goose is at the back; the frontmost goose has one of its legs raised mid-step. They walk along a gravel path, in front of of a railing that arcs in on the left, then sharply turns so it is parallel to the camera on the right. Behind the railing is wild-looking greenery.
Two poppies, the larger one on the left, with bright red petals surrounding a black centre. The sit against muted green foliage.

What there wasn’t, however, was a glut of London borough signs. I combed the area, and there were almost none to be found. I might have given up entirely on the project, but I was spurred on by at least being able to tick off one more.

A selfie of the blog's author, peering in from the bottom-right of the photo with sweat shining on his forehead. To the left is a lamppost with two signs, the first reading "WELCOME TO Bromley, THE LONDON BOROUGH"; it is rectangular, with green text on a white background with a green border (except for the name of the borough, which is written in cursive writing in white on a rough green patch). The second sign, smaller and lower down, is circular and pink, with white text around the edge reading "Anerley Hill – Penge & Palace Trail" surrounding a minimalist line drawing of a large house, a transmitter, and two trees. A tree pokes in behind the sign, and the sky, which forms most of the background, is blue from top to bottom.
I promise I don’t scowl this much in real life.

Thank you, Bromley, for caring. Truly you are the London borough.

To be continued…

Borough count: 4/33.

  1. I don’t know why this mattered to me: I was given money for my bus fare, and even back then the difference between 50p, 60p and 80p was not meaningful to our household income. ↩︎
  2. Or TfL Go—I don’t know which one I was using back then. ↩︎
  3. It would appear that, since I last went, the catering concession has been taken over, and the humble fish finger sandwich is off the menu. ↩︎
  4. If you want to know whether I pretended to drive the train, the answer is (a) I am an adult, thank you very much, and (b) Of course I did. ↩︎
  5. This was 2023, so back then it was known as the “London Overground Highbury & Islington to New Cross, Clapham Junction, Crystal Palace and West Croydon line”. It is honestly astounding that that name lasted for over a decade. ↩︎
  6. It haunts my nightmares. ↩︎
  7. They also haunt my nightmares. ↩︎
  8. My suggestion is “You’re fried”. It’s right there. ↩︎

One response to “Welcome to the London Borough of…, part II”

  1. Welcome to the London Borough of…, part III – Escaping Oxford

    […] Last time: there was a lot to see in Crystal Palace Park, but what there wasn’t was an abundance of borough signs. Four down, 29 to go. Why did I think for a moment this would be possible in a day? […]

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