Just inside the less obvious entrance to Victoria station is a map of the Southern Railways network which I would guess was painted onto the tiles in the twenties. It’s a handsome piece of work, and includes a number of long-dead stations local to The World of Quark such as Selsdon, the outline of which can still be glimpsed from Sanderstead trains, and Bingham Road Halt, where Tony Hancock filmed a scene for ‘The Rebel’.
More bewilderingly, it also mentions a mythical beast called ‘Spencer Road Halt’. This rather marvellous website reveals Spencer Road to have been only fleetingly in use, between 1906 and 1915; but rather than being pulled down, it seems to have been left to rot – and can still be found, just about, between two streets of houses, one of which is Birdhurst Rise, best known for a series of notorious murders a decade or so after Spencer Road Halt closed.
A footpath links Birdhurst Rise and the eponymous Spencer Road. Weaving behind houses, flats and a Scout hut, you suddenly come across a large metal bridge which looms improbably up at you, as if someone’s left it there by mistake. It’s impossible to tell it was a bridge over a railway track – nowadays, it overlooks a long stream of large trees, which have dramatically reclaimed the area.
Endearingly, someone at Southern Railways has taken the instruction ‘Catalogue everything we own, Nigel’ to an extreme and even though Spencer Halt is now just an inappropriate bridge glub-glub-glubbing under waves of foliage, the bridge still has an official number and the edge of each step has been carefully painted yellow, so that very lost people, the phantoms of commuters and Scoutmasters don’t come a cropper. Thoughtfully, someone has even dumped some bags of rubbish to give that authentic ‘old station’ feel.
And then out onto Spencer Road, with a slight feeling of: ‘Did that really happen…?’
Wednesday, 1 September 2010
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