Nirvana: South London

We live among acres of sports fields, parks, ponds, woods and tree-lined avenues of mansions, slap bang in the middle of London. Spring in Dulwich is beautiful; Autumn is sublime. Lucky buggers, that’s what we are.

Out of the house and a short clump down to the folly. This staggering and reeling is supposed to be jogging. Past the pub, which stands on the site where Byron once went to school, I struggle up the oak-lined avenue and turn into the woods. Here be woodpeckers, foxes and magpies, squirrels, jays and owls, bats, badgers and snakes, and, until about six or eight years ago, an old hermit who rode a Moulton bike, wore a leather flying helmet and lived in a windowless shed. Up near there I once I saw a safe with its bottom blown out.

When they were little, I dragged the kids up there for a walk. I extended my arms, breathed deeply and informed them that this was just like the countryside. But, indelibly London girls, they’d spotted the gates and fences and were filled with dread. “Will we get locked in the countryside dad?” They were similarly spooked when we got to the sealed railway tunnel entrance and I told them about the trainload of Edwardian passengers that was rumoured to be still in there.

Years ago you could run out onto the golf course. I did so one Spring morning, stared down at London glistening like some far off Camelot and breathed, ‘Thank you God.’ Thanks seemed appropriate even for a pagan like me.

Down between the allotments and the golf course is the Grange, owned by the Sainsbury family and once stuffed with modern art. Right at the tollgate and past the old college, I ponder on its most celebrated old boy Shackleton; his dinghy, the James Caird is moored up in its cloister. In it, he and his men undertook a three-week wind-whipped voyage across Antarctic seas to South Georgia - a man from Sydenham at the end of the world.

To starboard are clapboard cottages and a duck pond. After the main road is another clapboard, the gleaming white Pickwick cottage where Dickens retired his affable Mr. Pickwick. “The house I have taken is at Dulwich. It has a large garden and is situated in one of the most pleasant spots near London.” Some of the houses down here were old even before Mr. Pickwick.

Before ducking into the park, I pass the gallery, complete with a rather incongruous mausoleum parked in the middle of it, the chamfered roof of which inspired the red British telephone box. A skein of Canada geese sweep over, then I nod at the grumpy heron on the island in the boating lake.

The final leg leads me past the rhododendron bushes where it’s said Michael Caine lost his virginity and then up the trail past the site of the Victorian fire station taken out by V1 rockets.

In three miles I’ve crossed only one road yet this isn’t the shires; Brixton’s just up the road and I get my veg down in Peckham. As my mate once remarked, “When they do put a tube station down here, they should call it ‘Nirvana, south London.’”

© Steve Overbury 2009