Jerk Cookout is Back

As part of the 696 festival of Black music in south London, the Horniman Museum is hosting the Jerk Cookout, a family-friendly food and music festival on Saturday 31st July.

Back in 2009, this proved to be possibly the most popular event ever hosted in Forest Hill. With over 20,000 people attending the event it was a little too popular for a small park!
This year's event will be much smaller and will require tickets to be booked in advance. Adults £13.56, concessions £8, under 16s go free.

To find out more and book tickets, visit:
www.horniman.ac.uk/event/the-original-jerk-cookout/

Planning Application: 59-61 Dartmouth Road

The Forest Hill Society has written to object to a recent planning application at 59-61 Dartmouth Road

 
I am writing on behalf of the Forest Hill Society regarding the proposed development at 59-61 DARTMOUTH ROAD, application DC/21/121195: The construction of an additional storey at 59-61 Dartmouth Road, SE23 together with an additional storey on the existing rear projection at No. 61, a four storey enclosed stairwell to the rear of No.59 and rear dormers to provide a 5 person HMO, 1x two bedroom and 1x three bedroom self-contained units and all associated works.

Recently we have been made aware of aspects of this application that we cannot support, and we wish to register our objection to this application.

 

The plans and application form state that the first floor of this property is an HMO. There is no record of a previous planning application for this change of use in a conservation area, nor is this property registered with Lewisham Council as an HMO. The application states that there is existing permitted use for C4 (HMO) for 131.7m. We believe this to be inaccurate information that significantly changes the nature of this application.

This planning application should be considered with reference to Lewisham Local Plan DM policy 6

DM Policy 6 - Houses in multiple occupation (HMOs)

1. The Council will only consider the provision of new Houses in Multiple

Occupation where they:

a. are located in an area with a public transport accessibility level (PTAL) of 3 or higher

b. do not give rise to any significant amenity impact(s) on the surrounding neighbourhood

c. do not result in the loss of existing larger housing suitable for family occupation

 

The conversion that has already been made (without planning permission) has resulted in the loss of an existing larger housing suitable for family occupation. There have also been numerous reports by neighbouring residents and shopkeepers of anti-social and criminal behaviour in and around the existing HMO.

 

The addition of two units above a poorly managed HMO would make it unsuitable for families due to the existing anti-social behaviour, as a result there continues to be a net loss of family housing on this site, which goes against planning policy.

 

For the reasons set out above, we would encourage Lewisham Council to refuse this planning application.

New Shops in SE23

It has been a hard year for our local businesses, particularly those who have opened their doors in the midst of the pandemic. We’d like to celebrate those who in the last six months have started new businesses in SE23 offering lifestyle products, clothing, art, antiques and food and drink and much more. 

Alkemi – 2a Westbourne Drive

Alkemi is a lifestyle store focused on simple, functional items from the best in Korean and Japanese designers and contemporary local makers.  The Forest Hill shop is their second location.

Twitter – AlkemiStore
Facebook - @AlkemiStore
Instagram - @alkemistore

Ansa – 95 Dartmouth Road

A vintage and pre-loved women’s fashion store.

Instagram - @ansa_vintage_london

ArtDog gallery – 23 Brockley Rise

This new commercial gallery represents a select and diverse range of artists from the UK and globally  They have a strong emphasis on contemporary abstract painting and photo-realistic work as well as range of etchings, prints, ceramics and studio glass. 

Twitter – artdoglondon

Instagram - @artdoglondon
Facebook - @artdog.london

Greenjay Boutique – 5 Devonshire Road

A boutique where you can find quirky, retro bling, vintage fashion, nostalgic nik-naks, object, art, old tech & unique upcycled desirables.

Facebook - @greenjayboutique

 

 

Pantry – 14 Perry Vale

Pantry is a refreshing addition to Perry Vale, selling high quality season vegetables and fruits, cheeses and charcuterie along with deli items, coffee and pastries.

Instagram - @pantry_foresthill

Pat & Rob’s Emporium – 37-39 Honor Oak Park

A new addition to HOP featuring fruit & veg, baked and fresh goods and other sundries.  Run by the people next door at Dondes Tapas. 

 

Magazyn 105 – 105 Dartmouth Road

A brand new sustainable, eco-friendly shop selling beautifully curated homewares and gifts for the conscious buyer.  Magazyn 105 champions sustainable and planet friendly homewares and gifts from all over the world, making it even easier to spend your money wisely and consciously.

Instagram - @magazyn_105

 

20th Century History of Forest Hill

 

If you are unable to see the recording in this post, you can view it on YouTube.

Recording of the discussion that took place on 20th April 2021 with panelists:

Pip Wedge lived in Forest Hill from 1928 to 1954, including most of the Second World War, and assisted people when Forest Hill station was bombed. He will be joining us from Canada where he has lived since 1965.

Angela Finch is part of the Finch family who have been trading in Forest Hill since 1947. Finches currently focus on bikes, skiing and extreme sports, but once they were one of the largest removal firms in London.

John Hodgett moved to Forest Hill in 1949 when he was two years old, and has lived in the area ever since - in a variety of different streets. John remembers many of the old shops around Forest Hill, some great concerts at the Glenlyn Ballroom in the 1960s, and taking steam trains direct from Forest Hill to Brighton.

Lewisham Local Plan Consultation

 
The Forest Hill Society has responded to the Lewisham Local Plan Consultation. While broadly supportive of the draft LLP, we would like to see some changes in priorities on some specific issues and these are described in the submission. We also feel some elements should be more precisely articulated all to bring a clear vision for the Forest Hill area over the next twenty years.

The Forest Hill Society’s (the Society) response to the Lewisham Local Plan (LLP) stems largely from the Forest Hill Station and Town Centre Master Plan (Master Plan) created in 2016 in partnership with the Society and Forest Hill-based Discourse Architecture. This Plan focussed on the urban renewal of the town centre particularly around Forest Hill Station and embodied many of the LLP’s Strategic Objectives, particularly around economic growth and housing and are reflected in this submission.

“We have a once in a 100 years’ opportunity to shape the centre of Forest Hill, reflecting the needs and aspirations of people who live and work in the area.”

Included within the response is consideration of:

• Forest Hill Station and Town Centre
• Site Allocations in Forest Hill
• Public Realm Issues
• Cultural Heritage Issues
• Environmental and Local Green Space 
• Aircraft Noise and Flight Paths
  

You can read the full submission here.

Town Centre Planting

Springtime in Forest Hill, so it’s planting/tidy-up time:
If you would like to join in some light community gardening we meet in front of the main entrance to Forest Hill station at 2.30pm on Saturday, 10th April. Gloves are essential, and a trowel, although we do have some spares.

No experience needed, but please note that because of the proximity to moving traffic this event is not suitable for small children. We look forward to meeting new gardeners as well as old.

How it started, ten years ago in 2011:

 

Forest Hill Tunnel Bypass to Open in April 2023

While the high street has suffered under lockdown over the last year, underneath the high street the Forest Hill Society embarked on a top-secret project to radically improve the future of Forest Hill town centre.

In April 2020 a small group of local residents started digging the tunnels to enable the South Circular to travel beneath the town centre, providing a pedestrianised surface level shopping, with all the traffic going underground from Dulwich Common to Waldram Park Road.

Three sites were chosen for the secret tunnel entrances to begin the three sections of tunnel; the former site of the Coop - once rumoured to become a hotel - has been turned into the eastern entrance tunnel, the western tunnel entrance has started from the car park of the former Harvester, and a mid-point tunnel had begun from the former Fairlawn nursery site on Waldenshaw Road. Until they are connected, the three separate tunnels have been nicknamed ‘Rod’, ‘Jane’ and ‘Freddy’. The first “break-through” is expected to occur in June this year, when Jane and Freddy will meet for the first time, completing the first half of the project.

 

 

At the Harvester site, volunteers have donned baggy jeans and beanie hats to smuggle out earth and have constructed a skate park as a distraction from the tunnelling.

Lockdown and Covid restrictions presented some difficulties for the mining volunteers, but the use of breathing apparatus and the three separate entrances, has allowed work to continue below ground with up to 18 people at any time while maintaining social distancing. Many of the volunteers are from the Forest Hill library, but the temporary closure of the library has meant that many have had spare time to devote to digging - it turns out library staff make excellent miners - and remarkably quiet. The school closures during lockdown allowed us to make use of child labour, with children as young as four able to enter the smaller tunnels sections before adults.

The entrances were strategically chosen to avoid the need to dig down very far to pass under the hill. The South London Clay is easy to dig through without the need for machinery and will yield important raw materials for the local pottery industry.  In fact, there is now so much clay available that local schools have been drafted in to produce hundreds of vases for families and friends.

The lack of heavy tunnelling equipment has been challenging, particularly the use of small garden appliances borrowed from local allotments. Yet, the hardest part of the project has been keeping it secret until this point, and before it was discovered by the authorities.

In total, the tunnel will run for one mile and will be tall enough for a double-decker bus. Air shafts will bring in air from Sydenham Woods, and exhaust gases will be vented from a chimney at the top of the Horniman Hill. Concerns of how fumes might affect Horniman Heights are expected to blow over, but they are being addressed at the highest levels.

 

Flora Pilo, from the Network for Urban Transport Safety, said in a statement “Digging underneath TfL roads is not recommended and should be left to professionals, but would you be able to help with the Bakerloo Line extension?” 

The Forest Hill Society continue to look for new volunteers to join the digging, if you would be interested in helping, please email us.

* Press release issued by the Forest Hill Society on 1st April 2021. Some of the details in this article may not be valid on any other day of the year.

Forest Hill History Panel

On Tuesday 20th April (7:30pm), the Forest Hill Society is organising a panel discussion on the 20th Century history of Forest Hill. We are bringing together a group of people who live or have lived in Forest Hill since the 1920s. They will share their recollections of Forest Hill before and after the Second World War and how the area, the shops, and the transportation system has changed over the last hundred years.

As well as our panel, attendees are encouraged to share their own memories or ask questions about how the area has changed.

The event will take place on Zoom and pre-registration is required via https://shorturl.at/xFOR2

Tom Keating: The Forest Hill Forger

By Gary Thornton

Havelock Walk may be known for its community of artists, but 100 years ago, at the other end of Forest Hill, a small boy grew up to become the 20th century’s most notorious and gifted art forger, responsible for 2,000 fake painting by over 100 artists, many of which still hang undetected in galleries across the world.

Tom Keating claimed that his “Sexton Blakes” were his response to the corruption and vested interests he saw in art dealers and galleries, profiting whilst impoverished artists suffered and starved. In a practice meant to undermine these experts and give him a possible defence against charges of fraud, each painting contained a deliberate ‘time-bomb’ which gave a clue to its deception. He would write comments such as “You’ve been had!” on the blank canvas (revealed only under X-ray), deliberately use a modern pigment, or even add a layer of glycerine under the paint so that the painting would be destroyed when cleaned.

The early chapters of Keating’s fascinating autobiography, The Fake’s Progress, paint a detailed and affectionate portrait of the neighbourhood around Herschell Road, where he was born in 1917 in one of the 36 flats in a terrace of three-storey houses opposite St Saviour’s Church. It was then a poor working-class area of overcrowded and unsanitary dwellings, but where everyone looked out for everyone else. It was a nice enough place, writes Keating, better at least than the slums of the East End.

Keating’s father worked as a house-painter for the same building firm for 37 years, until the gas in his lungs from the Great War left him unable to work, and he was sent home with an hour’s pay in his pocket. The family were left to rely on the wages earned by Tom’s elder siblings for their survival.

Tom’s education started at Dalmain Road school, where he first found his talent for painting, although he soon ran away to Eltham, and spent three years living there with his grandparents. Returning to Dalmain Road, he passed the entrance exam for St Dunstan’s College in Catford. However, with his family unable to afford the fees, he left school for various jobs, selling parts for early wirelesses, and working as a barber’s assistant.

Called up to the Royal Navy for the Second World War, Keating married whilst at home on leave after his ship was torpedoed. After he was invalided out, the couple took a room in Sunderland Road. Ellen worked in munitions and Tom as a door-to-door salesman, selling Lazy Lady’s furniture polish. 

Then, in 1952, whilst studying at Goldsmith’s College, Keating met Albert Fripp, an art dealer on Dartmouth Road. Fripp’s business involved buying copies of Dutch flower paintings made by ‘little old ladies’ in Bromley, which he would age in an oven and sign before selling to West End galleries as period originals. When he realised that Tom — now living in Westbourne Drive — had a particular talent for restoring and copying paintings, he took him on, and Keating had found his vocation.

Tom scoured antique shops around Forest Hill, Sydenham and Dulwich for supplies of cheap old canvases and frames which would be the basis of his forgeries. Using descriptions found in old sale catalogues, and with meticulous background research, he would recreate ‘lost’ paintings by Dutch, English and Italian masters, French impressionists, and even German expressionists, which would then find their way into the hands of dealers, and were often authenticated using the very catalogues Keating had used to invent them in the first place.

In 1976, and by now living in rural Suffolk, he was charged with fraud when a collection of Samuel Palmer paintings in a London gallery were traced back to him, but the case was dropped when Keating fell dangerously ill. He recovered to become a minor celebrity, presenting a Channel 4 television series on the techniques of the Old Masters (Tom Keating on Painters), before he died in 1984 at the age of 66.

Since his death, the appreciation of Keating as an artist has risen, and his once worthless fakes now reach considerable prices. In a neat reversal of fortune, this has in turn fed a thriving market in counterfeit Keatings. Tom would probably have approved.

Public Service Broadcasting

By Claus Murmann

The Forest Hill Society’s communications committee thought it would be interesting to spotlight local artists in the Forest Hill area, and there was a rumour that a band called Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) were based in SE23. Since I happen to be a fan, I reached out to J. Willgoose, Esq., one of the band, on Twitter, and to my delight he offered to answer a few questions. 

If you’re thinking “Who are PSB?” then check out the ‘The Race for Space’ album, especially if you’re into anything related to the history of Sputnik, through to the Apollo landings. The album contains fantastic historical storytelling via archive recordings blended with synths. Check out his ‘best kept secret’ about SE23 below and you’ll see he’s posted some pictures of local owls on his Twitter @jwillgoose_esq.

Q: Describe PSB to someone who’s not familiar with the band.

We write new music based on old source material, essentially — we started off using only audio samples from public information films, archive footage and propaganda (especially for our 2012 release ‘The War Room’), but over the years it's diversified to include poems, oral history, fragments of melodies and even some original lyrics. I think we write, essentially, narrative albums, using music to tell a story.

Q: Which song (or album) would you recommend as a PSB starter?

I'd say the ‘The Race For Space’ is the most popular, because space is such an imagination-catching topic, and the source material for that record was very strong indeed.

Q: Best kept secret in SE23?

The local birdlife, I think. I've always loved birds, but I've got better at recognising them by their calls, which means I also see a lot more. In 2020 I've seen kingfishers, green & great spotted woodpeckers, nuthatches, goldcrests, blackcaps, long-tailed tits and our new local resident, the peregrine falcon. I even saw an owl recently. This is all without having to walk more than a mile from my front door, so I think we're very lucky to have so much wildlife on our doorstep.

Q: Do you shop locally — what’s your favourite local shop?

We try to, yes. One of the few benefits of the past year has been being on foot in the neighbourhood more and noticing how many new local shops are springing up and, it seems, flourishing. We've also started using the independent book shop Moon Lane Books more recently. As for pubs, there are loads of good ones (and a couple of dodgy ones). The Dartmouth Arms, the Blythe Hill Tavern and the Chandos are all good pubs that I enjoy visiting. Hopefully, all our locals will come through the other side of this in okay-shape.

Q: Have you ever been recognised whilst out and about in SE23?

No, thank god. I was walking down my street once and noticed that the man coming towards me was wearing one of our t-shirts, but, thankfully, he sailed right on by. It's nice to be anonymous.

Q: What new music are you looking forward to in 2021?

There's a new Mogwai album imminently — other than that, I'm keeping my head down for the moment, trying to finish ours. I don't listen to much new stuff when I get to this phase of finishing something as I just don't have room in my head. I'm looking forward to getting this done though and then being able to relax with music again, properly.

Q: Tim’s Twitter Listening Parties have been great in 2020 — Which ones (aside from the PSB’s!) were your favourites? Have these helped to promote music and support artists during lockdown?

I loved the British Sea Power’s 'The Decline of British Sea Power' one, The Avalanches’ ‘Since I Left You’ and The Flaming Lips’ ‘The Soft Bulletin’. I've lurked for quite a few more of them but I think those are the ones I got actively involved in. All three are very important records for me. 

Q: Did you record your solo ‘Late Night Final’ album this year from home? Do the neighbours ever bang on the walls? 

Yes, I've mixed all our records so far at home, and ‘Late Night Final’ was no different. We're on a corner so I think I'm relatively safe, plus I don't listen at insane levels.