DianneW

WOW.....feel like these places are something from another world..except the Netherlands of course.that is very typical European to me..having previously been viewing the Explore America Official small towns and cities Thread that is what made me start this one I guess...

Croydon just a stones throw from Beddington but very different as an Established Town it was already very built up....
Remember the Elephants Marching almost, though the town...
One-off circus events may well have been held in Croydon but, as far as I am aware, there was never a regular event.
Here is the
Elephants walking around the Lombard Roundabout in the 1960's



..Grants...One of Three large department stores within a stones throw from each other that were full of' in the main' goods we could not afford...but we visited all three..Allders and Kennards where the other two stores, Kennards with their Arcade was like a Magical place to be...
My late Dad talked of the zoo next to Kennards way back but in my child years we had pony rides in the Arcade and all kinds of stalls selling cheap wares..Xmas Grotto was our of this world..as a child...
When Cheetahs Dined in Croydon
Croydon was a good place in the 60's but to me it is the pits now...they are still to this day feeding the town with new Millions of £..



There is a link that shows how it went over the years..down and down even David Bowie's comments...
David Bowie wanted to summarise all he found dreary, drab and stifling, there was only one place he could turn. “It represented everything I didn’t want in my life, everything I wanted to get away from,” he told Q magazine in 1999. “I think it’s the most derogatory thing I can say about something: ‘God, it’s so *ucking Croydon.’

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2...the-last-laugh

I had moved away to the South Coast.. Bexhill on Sea in 2000...pleased to get away from the area by then...the riots of 2011 just viewed that on the TV
...not just in Croydon either as the real cause was the Police had shot dead Mark Dugan in North London a mixed race young male his parents where mixed Irish and African Caribbean descendants... 2019 the final conclusion the Police were innocent.....of course, it was always going to end in tears for the families and friends..


Trying to think of anything good about Croydon now...can't...but certainly some unforgettable memories....

The Batlord

Now tell the history of all those places.

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jwb

Maybe later

Lisnaholic

London has several small rivers that feed into the Thames, but like a lot of London's geographical features, they are difficult to spot because of the wall-to-wall urbanisation. Here's one river, treated very ignominiously in a huge pipe that has been excavated all around so that everyone can see its ugly underbelly. If you were a river, how would that make you feel?


So the Wandle, that Dianne mentions is lucky: it's visible and even accessible in parts with bits of parkland, or "common" as they are called in London (=common ownership= public land) for some bits of its short journey to the Thames. Here’s a map of the river, and though it doesn’t have a scale, I’m guessing the river is about 7 miles long. Dianne mentions Beddington, near the source, to the south, while I spent my early life to the north, in Wandsworth (named of course after the mighty torrent that is The Wandle!)


Alas, the blue of the map is deceptive; by the time it got to Wandsworth, the stream looked more like a cup of black coffee left over from last night.

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"Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it and perhaps that is enough." - Sybille Bedford, 1953

The Batlord

The first time I heard how Thames was supposed to be pronounced I was like no that is wrong. The English are just snooty rednecks who don't know how to talk. I still stand by that.

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Lisnaholic

Yeah, we are particularly good at baffling outsiders with the way we pronounce place names.
But you are completely off-base with your "redneck" comment: we don't have the climate for that. In London though, it's quite easy to become a greyneck.

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"Am I enjoying this moment? I know of it and perhaps that is enough." - Sybille Bedford, 1953

Guybrush

Nice Lisnaholic I now work in wastewater management, including surface water like rainwater runoff and culverted rivers like you posted above. I would love a trip into some of London's bigger culverts, appropriately dressed and with a gas detector, of course!

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Something Completely Different

DianneW

Small world we live.. @tore so this would likely only be of interest to just yourself....

Our next home was a place called Pebbles in Bexhill on Sea. East Sussex. The Lane we lived on was unmade then and All 3 directions around our Property was higher than ours, no more than approx 1 metre ...enough we soon discovered to be living in a basin. Two Wells one in full use and one filled in...so pleased so have our own water source for the garden plants...like this garden was ever doing without water....
On side of a hill from the top of the back garden to a drop to the driveway of a guessimate of 3/4 metres..at least it flowed away from us. The Pebsham Farm next door was our only way to change the flow on that side. I dug out a trench within the farmland near to our border fence and created a small stream and the exit of the rainwater would flow within the farmland now instead of into our garden.....it created a waterfall just next to the Lane. I added rocks so made a feature there..then the rain water crossed the Lane and opposite was a natural pond, initially...before the woods that were there became 5 properties and a water course was constructed where the natural pond was. It was done and dusted before they built the 5 properties, all built on stilts because the area was classed as a flood plain.
They built a tarmac surface as part of the deal that the builder/owner of the land opposite our place made with the local Planning Department=Rother County Council.
Installed street lighting, upsetting the few local residence's and the wildlife went through a hell of a change. Badgers Sets were within that land and protected...not by what went on within this council though...fact.
We had at times rain still flowing off from our property via the driveway as although the side with the Farm had been a success the other two sides there was nothing more we could do about those. All the properties had Wells at one time but having filled them in over the years we got there water instead. When the Lane's surface was built they also lowered the base of our driveway, installed drainage pipes under it to take the waste rain water, allegedly,but within months though the under pipes were blocked so the flow just built up on the driveway until it flowed off onto the new road and then flowed down the new cul de sac causing a minor flood outside peoples front gardens...no big deal but they were suppose to put in some cattle grids where our driveway hit the tarmac Lane...eventually via the Council they actually created some low rocks lined in a row in the cul de sac close, so when the rain flowed from our driveway it hit a series of strategically placed rocks which slowed down the flow before hitting a drain...well almost hitting it as mostly it still went where it did before! Just looked on Google Earth and you can actually see the lines of rocks....also if you look at the 20mph sign across the Lane you can view some of the water course ....

Guybrush

Oh no, your house in a basin! That's rough. We see variations on that theme here too, although your situation sounds pretty bad.

The street our previous house was in was a slope because this is a hilly country. If you looked down the street, there was a dead end at the end of it and then straight into the front porch of a house that itself was at least a meter or two lower than street level. Of course, whenever there was significant rain, a small river would flow down the street, right into that house. Yay for them! They tried putting like a tarmac ledge there, but it couldn't really have helped that much.

We also have a lot of areas that get flooded now and then and will likely become more so in the future with climate change. The weirdest thing, to me, is that some of the houses built in these areas have basements. So every time there's the inkling of a flood, there's water coming into those basements, both surface water and sewage coming up the pipes as surface water gets into the sewer and steals away all the capacity.

In my opinion, the best thing is to do a better job at regulating this at the (local) government level, like prohibiting people to build in certain areas or in certain ways (like building a basement). Expertise or even just competence on surface water is really lacking, at least here and in many layers of society.

The two houses we've bought so far, I did think about this so both our houses have been raised / above street level and well above public sewage lines so that there's little risk of it ever backing up all the way to our basement. At least unless we jam up our private pipes with something (but as the mantra goes, toilets are only for pee, poo, TP and maybe puke if you're sick).

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Something Completely Different

DianneW

Just pleased to have left it behind. Go back to the late 1800's and the farm existed and not much else . Plenty of Wells everywhere must have made a difference to any heavy rain that felled. The property we loved for quite a while even with the water...never ever could see any risk of flooding though . When plans were flying about..the Pebsham Farm next door becoming industrial.
Around 1200 new properties to be built nearby..and all the roads and services that go with those kind of plans....we felt now is the time to move, so we did and been here in France now for over 6 years and now very settled...in the rural...