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Tag: Virtual-Audio-Tour-With-Memories

Transcript of Stop 3 on Virtual & Audio Tour Featuring Memories & Local History

Posted on January 30, 2021 by Kerry Hood

Down Raglan Avenue, just before the bend.

Stop 3 – Of brick-workers houses, and the brick-pit of J.J. Peill. 

Previous Stop – Next Stop

Peills Pit in 1924 when it was being worked. Note geologist J. Rhodes, and wheelbarrow.  At the top is the chalk pile along where Bourne Road is now.

 

Narrator:  You might have noticed the long grass on the left as you came down the path.  This is our meadow area, where the grass is only cut once a year, to encourage weeds – no I mean wild flowers – to grow.  Even in the first summer, we noticed butterflies that had never been there before.

Little skipper butterfly with attenae dipped in ink

Essex skipper in the meadow area of the park

little white butterfly on a yellow dandelion

Small white butterfly on a dandelion in the park’s meadow

little brown butterfly

Meadow Brown Butterfly in the meadow area

butterfly

Male Gatekeeper butterfly on bindweed

 

Phil:  Now look back the way you came, and you can see the rear of the Victorian terrace houses of Havelock Road. When you get to stop 9 you can look back and see how similar they all are.   The houses on Havelock road are older than the surrounding streets, and they were built for the brick workers. You can see the supervisor’s house, with the extra storey at the top (on the right-hand side of the Havelock Road entrance). 

 

frosty field n terraced houses

View of the terraced houses of Havelock Road

 

Jo: It is unlikely that these houses were built with the pit’s more expensive kiln-fired bricks.  Normally workers housing had cheaper bricks make in a clamp in the middle of the road; This process produces a large number of over-cooked burnt bricks and under-fired bricks, which were then used for interior walls.  Houses in Havelock Road have these over-fired and fragmentary bricks for the inside walls.  

chunks of blacken bricks set at angles in a wall

Overfired bricks in a local wall on Masons Hill, fashionable in the early part of C20.

brickmakers stacking bricks

Victorian brickmakers building a clamp to fire bricks

 

Narrator: The photos in the British Geologic Survey’s archive, taken in 1924, noted that the pit produced ‘white’ bricks from a huge pile of chalk at the Bourne Road side of the site.  The white bricks can be seen fronting the more up-market terraces along Southlands Road.

 

Tinted black & white photo of cliffs with a terrace of 6 houses roofs just visible

Tinted photo of Peill’s Brick pit now Havelock Rec with the houses on the SE end of Bourne Road in the background.

Peills Pit in 1924 when it was being worked. Note geologist J. Rhodes, and wheelbarrow.

little nest holes in cliff

Sand Martin nesting holes in the Blackheath beds

sands and gravels in cliff

Even bedded sands and gravels of the Blackheath beds 

 

Sandra: Eventually they had dug all the clay out of the pit, and then started extracting the sands and gravels of the Blackheath beds underneath. 

Narrator:  Brick workers were known as a rough bunch, and apparently no Friday night was complete without a hullabaloo and fight on Havelock Road !

Narrator: Continue down the made path until you reach the Homesdale Road entrance way and the next stop.

misty view of path n trees

Misty view of Raglan Avenue

 

Posted in Audio Tour Transcript Page Virtual & Audio Memory Tour | Tagged Audio-tour-transcript-page Virtual-Audio-Tour-With-Memories

Transcript of Stop 1 on Virtual & Audio Tour Featuring Memories & Local History

Posted on January 24, 2021 by Kerry Hood

The Friends of Havelock Rec present: A Virtual and Audio Tour of Havelock Rec, featuring Memories and Local History.

Havelock Rec is in the London Borough of Bromley, United Kingdom.

Start at the noticeboard, at the Havelock Road/Wellington Road entrance to the park, where the driveway to the nursery is. 

Stop 1 – Of an extensive Brick-pit and when Bromley was in the Tropics

 Next Stop

Narrator:  This audio guide looks at some of the heritage and memories of this park, affectionately known as the “Brickie” or “Brickfield” to locals.

The trail takes you around the outside of the park in a clockwise direction from the here, the main entrance, off Havelock Road – so listen in, take your time and stroll around the park.

Entrance to Havelock Rec 2008

Phil:  Look over the park in front of you. It’s hard to imagine, but this was a ramp into a huge pit, supposedly 60 feet deep.  Then look at the edge to your left – in the summer this is greener than the rest of the park because, under the ground here is the London Clay – whilst the middle is all rubble infill.

 

Tinted black & white photo of cliffs with a terrace of 6 houses roofs just visible

Tinted photo of Peill’s Brick pit now Havelock Rec with the houses on the SE end of Bourne Road in the background. Original is BGS asset 16386.

Until the 1830s the whole park was some fields on clay soil.  The clay was laid down under the sea 70 million years ago, when England was close to the equator, where it was similar to present day Thailand and Malaysia (somewhat hard to imagine!) – and – we were just offshore from a mangrove forest!

If you go to the cliffs north of Minster, on the Isle of Sheppy, where there is also London Clay, you can find fossil seeds, fossil crabs, fossil sharks teeth and fossil stemless palm seeds on the beach.  The stemless palm tree only grows in the tropics, so the discovery of these seeds gave the Victorians a headache – how could London have ever been in the tropics? Was there some kind of super-warm current coming up from the Tropics – even warmer than the Gulf stream? Or had stemless palm trees evolved and in the distant past they could grow where there are frosts?  Nowadays we understand that it was Continental Drift and that the continents move slowly across the crust of the Earth.

coloured drawing of stemless palms reeds and lillies

Reconstruction of a London Clay swamp by Ian& Tonya West, Southampton University, 2007

Narrator: Go into the park and just past the container, go a short way down the path between two rows of trees, that we call Raglan Avenue. 

Posted in Audio Tour Transcript Page Virtual & Audio Memory Tour | Tagged Audio-tour-transcript-page Virtual-Audio-Tour-With-Memories

Transcript of Stop 2 on Virtual & Audio Tour Featuring Memories & Local History

Posted on January 24, 2021 by Kerry Hood

A short way down Raglan Avenue, by the twin-trunked Silver Birch tree.

Stop 2 – Of the Old Bay Tree, the Brick pit and Brick Making

Previous Stop – Next Stop

Narrator:  Look in front of you, on the left, for the large (evergreen) bay tree. One of the earliest records, in the 1850s is of a farm on Brick Kiln Lane (the old name for Homesdale Road) just north of where Havelock Road is now, with a large bay tree – which still resides in one of the back gardens of Havelock Road.  

The Old Bay Tree

The old bay tree, mentioned in sale documents before the brick pit in 1860

Phil:  From the 1860’s to 1934, clay and gravel was excavated from the brick pit. The Brickworks and kilns were situated where Mornington Avenue and Waldo Road are now.  

The brick-pit belonged to Mr Coles-Child, Lord of the Manor, a coal-merchant from Deptford, who had bought the Manor of Bromley from the Diocese of Rochester.  He expanded the pit from the existing small one (about where the dip is now) on Brick Kiln lane, into a large area – not just did it cover the whole of the park, it stretched all the way up to the south side of Waldo Road.   The Brickworks themselves are now the Waldo Road Waste Transfer Station.

old map showing large brick pit

1909 Ordnance Survey map of the Brick pit and surrounding roads

 

Sandra:  A condition of the railway passing through the Lord of Manor’s land, was it was to be on attractive brick arches, and using his bricks (this included the ill-fated ivy bridge, local historian Max Batten has described the Ivy Bridge disaster at Wendover Road on our website). These arches were buried by a cheaper embankment when the 2nd line went through (and Coles-Child was no longer on the company board).

Narrator: As Lord of the Manor, one of Coles-Child’s public-spirited projects, was to build a “new town hall” in Market Square.  He funded it, so it was built from ‘his’ bricks, from our brick-pit.  It contained the town’s first fire station, first police station, first library and an upstairs meeting room…. but it was never used by the body who ran the town, so was never actually the town hall.  By the1930s the high street was so congested that both the town hall and the ‘island’ row of buildings on the east side, were demolished, and the current square laid out, in 1933.

black and white photo of faintly Elizabethan brick style market hall

Postcard in 1899 of Old Town Hall, built in Elizabethan style Arts and Crafts architecture from the Brick-pit’s bricks

Andrew, reading a memory from an Anonymous Gentleman: Before this [that it was a dump] my Grandad used to work in the Brick pit, building bricks, and this is why it was originally called Havelock Brickfields.  It was a large hole until it was used as landfill of the wartime bombing rubbish.” 

Narrator:  Continue down the made path until you reach a young sweet chestnut tree on your left (the tree before the well grown young oak tree)

 

 

Posted in Audio Tour Transcript Page Virtual & Audio Memory Tour | Tagged Audio-tour-transcript-page Virtual-Audio-Tour-With-Memories

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Local History, Photos & Reminisces

Browse our collection of remarkable local reminisces in our oral history pages look at the park's previous incarnation as a working brickpit or a summary of it all here.

See also:

  • Bromley Civic Society
  • Friends of Whitehall Rec
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Check out the Gallery

Early morning landscape by Jon Emmanuel
Landscape by Jon Emmanuel
IYellow Lab Daphne playing with her friend Molly
It's snowing!
evening light over our park
snow angel!
2008 double rainbow brickfield
IMG_1001-3
snowmen and snow forts in 2009
10422371_10152598816492595_4131414265842496626_n
2002jul02 tansy with little cricket bat
HotBalloon060630-3
033 field water fight
dragging the sledge back up the dip
The firemen parachuted in to raise money in 2005
fun-in-the-snow
fun-in-the-snow2
fun-in-the-snow3
fun-in-the-snow4
fun-in-the-snow snowman making
sledging-the-dip
dog in the snow
15jul01_sunset_over_brickfield_havelock_rec.jpg
14jun08 50490 view pink clouds brickfield.JPG
15feb28 dog walkers in field.jpg
andy_loakes_snow_on_the_brickfield.jpg
P1090838.JPG
15mar14-brickfield-bulbplanting.jpg
16jul18 bug-day-tent-view.jpg
14jun08 50495 view sunset brickfield.JPG
15jun29_4567-brickfield-field-bindweed-768x1024.jpg
15jun29_4583-brickfield-elderflower-768x1024.jpg
15mar14-di-and-felix-litterpicking-brickfield.jpg
16jan18_volunteers-planting-hedge-brickfield.jpg
16jun12 big-lunch-tug-war.jpg
16sep12-hoedown-2.jpg
17sep09-brickfield-hoedown-20059-baker-girl-beauty-dancing-1024x768.jpg
17sep09-brickfield-hoedown-20064-andy-emma-connie-pimms-tent-768x1024.jpg
17sep09-brickfield-hoedown-20071-girls-umbrella-rainbowjpg-1024x768.jpg
1924 o-peills-brick-pit-half-mile-SW-Bickley-Stn-looking-S-16386_synch-l.jpg
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Recent Posts

  • Do the Audio/Virtual tour of our Park!
  • Transcript of Stop 12 on Virtual & Audio Tour Featuring Memories & Local History
  • Transcript of Stop 11 on Virtual & Audio Tour Featuring Memories & Local History
  • Transcript of Stop 10 on Virtual & Audio Tour Featuring Memories & Local History
  • Transcript of Stop 9 on Virtual & Audio Tour Featuring Memories & Local History

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