In this episode:
* Live Broadcast format – get involved!
* Marden PARK not Lodge
* January Analytics
* Prepping for Benjamin Beeson talk
* Bomb Mapping – East Surrey
* East Surrey Museum talk to be arranged
* Video Live – Haliloo & Slines Oak area
* Filming soon in Woodside area
* Country walk for Feb mapped & ready
* Hamsey Green walk with CNHSS
– I said 2023 when of course I meant 2024!
Links referred to in the show:
My Benjamin Beeson video: https://youtu.be/iHykEUsqw0I
My Cooden Beach video: https://youtu.be/d5VdgjjM2J8
My Riddlesdown Walk video: https://youtu.be/B5Uk-kPgF2s
CNHSS Events: https://cnhss.co.uk/our-event-programme-for-2023-4/
Bomb Sites – Exploring Surrey’s Past: https://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/themes/subjects/military/bomb_damage/world-war-two-bomb-damage/
Masters of the Air (Apple TV): https://tv.apple.com/gb/show/masters-of-the-air/umc.cmc.7bxcni0vwgll9kmicq738k5q2
Slow Horses (Apple TV): https://tv.apple.com/gb/show/slow-horses/umc.cmc.2szz3fdt71tl1ulnbp8utgq5o
World War 2 from the Front Line (Netflix): https://www.netflix.com/title/81303911
Okay, I’m up and running. Hi folks, Welcome to episode 167 of the Phil Swallow podcast. This is entitled Up & Running and I’m recording it on Monday the 5th February 2023 (2024!!) . I hope this will go a little bit smoother than the last one.
I’ve done some digging around and some learning and I actually had some nice feedback that, well people enjoyed it, they’re the ones that joined and that was great. Views have been pretty good for the show afterwards but someone liked the fact that I started it live (I meant to say “early”)
Because I know a lot of these don’t. I’m trying to buck the trend. So it’s 19:28, I think I’ve been up since 19:27. Yeah, my dad was born. I’m basically just going to sit here for now. Obviously I’m not going to go anywhere. I leave the walking for my videos.
I’m going to sit here and I’m going to try and find my little script and that’s easier said than done. Minimize the window. It’s interesting doing all this stuff from a technical perspective. So I will sit quiet and, is that possible? I hear you say. Am I in the right position? No,
I’m about right. This is great for the audio one. So usual thing, sorry I’ve just eaten and that was a saga. I’ve not been in the house long. So still do the audio and if you are listening in audio and I forget the fact that it’s in audio, I apologize in advance.
This is still intended to be broadly the same podcast that it usually is. Collar’s gone a bit weird. Oh, my reminder has just come through to start the podcast. I’m already there. So yes, this is meant to be, I forgot where I was. I started early. Well hey, Chromium Photography. Thank you.
Good to see you, mate. Started early, went to make a brew! Yeah, don’t worry because it’s a very, three concurrent viewers. Thank you all, you three. It’s weird when you build up to these, I think. Is anyone going to join? And it’s brilliant that people have. Yes,
I absolutely don’t mean to catch anyone out with this and my commitment is to not really push out any kind of, any of the main content in my agenda in this early part. This is a kind of assembling and getting going and all that kind of nice stuff.
I’ve had a visit to the software and the settings. What I do here is use wired internet. Normally I don’t, normally we use Wi-Fi. I won’t bore you with the whole setup, but we’ve basically got two services into the house, a very fast Virgin Media and a slower Sky.
And actually the Sky is often more stable, but I use the fast stuff for all the video work. And yeah, so if you have joined and if you would be so kind, just pop a little “Hi” in the Chat. That would be great. Something just flies past me.
And when we’ve actually got into the swing of things, it’s still only one minute past the actual starting time. Then I will start to work my way through the agenda and talk about the up and running aspects of my start to 2024. So anyway, I hope you’ve got time to make your brew.
And as I say, we’ve just been a bit mad. I just picked Sue up from the tram stop and quickly necked some food. I might have the other half of my dinner later. It’s all been a bit manic after a fairly quiet day. Hi mate. Ah, Bonsoir. Bonsoir, Julie.
And thanks for your nice comments on my videos today, Julie. It’s good to hear. It’s great fun doing this stuff. It really is. I feel that, I mean, it’s not a job per se.
I always try and do these things to the best of my ability and my skill level at any given time, but there’s just a real big fun element to it now. And the comments on the videos are brilliant because it’s kind of feedback. You know, people get some enjoyment, some value, some nostalgia,
And that seems to be a running theme, particularly with the walks. So when I’m able to get around to the walks, but I’ve got some other subjects coming up. I missed good weather to record one recently. It’s all prepped and good to go.
So I’m hopeful I might be able to nip out tomorrow morning and do that, be a shorter video. Yay. I hear you say They are what they are. You know, if I go on a two hour walk, I still shrink it down to about 40 odd minutes.
The last thing you’d want to do is follow it in real time. I’m sure. So this is the live broadcast format and I’m going to gradually tick my way through the agenda. And I’m glad Chromium Photography you’re here because when we spoke about Marden in the last video, last podcast,
I on the playback and when I was doing the captions, which I kind of do afterwards, I realized I was referring to Marden Lodge and I meant Marden Park. Marden Park is Woldingham School and Marden Park was the base for the Canadian troops, the really big grand house,
Lovely property in the valley there at Woldingham. So apologies if that sent anyone all over the place. And one of the other things, I didn’t put this in the agenda, but this is just a funnier side. So mum has a carer that visits a couple of times a day
And mum told me the other week that the carer just came in for an afternoon visit and said, I was at a client’s house the other day and your son was on the TV. So basically one of my videos, one of the walk & talk videos was being played
By this client and I’m sure I’m not breaching any confidentiality or anything like that, but the lady was watching is 100 years old. How wonderful is that? So I’ve got the full spectrum of viewership, probably not the younger ones, but hey ho.
History is something you get into more once you’ve kind of understood a bit of history, I think, but it will be great to have a wider appeal. Now I’m just, I’m not being rude here, I’m looking up a stat because YouTube’s great at giving you these analytics. They do a little,
A weekly kind of set of numbers and a monthly one. So the January one, if I can find my recap for January, most of, I’ll just read out a couple of these, I won’t go into it deep. Most viewers were new to my channel,
83% of new viewers and that’s in about 7,000 views of videos last month, 17% returning and they watched both recent and older uploads. So 12% of viewers watched stuff that was published in January, 28% watched stuff that was published August to December and 60% watched stuff that was published over six months ago,
Which is cool. I’m delighted with that. And it says other things, 204 likes, 84 shares, 43 comments. But the nice thing is it says, “Your solid catalogue can help you be less reliant on frequent uploads.” So YouTube often wants you to upload highly frequently. Hi Dave, good afternoon to you from New York.
And, ah, right, okay, just saw the alert. No, you haven’t missed much Ramzi, so I start this very slowly. Thanks for coming on the chat. No, I’m just gradually easing into it. So the only bit I’ve really covered so far, Up the Palace,
The only bit I’ve covered so far is the fact I meant Marden Park instead of Marden Lodge in the last episode and I’ve just been going through some stats. Yeah, so a lot of YouTubers and the whole kind of YouTube algorithm is keep releasing regularly.
And I know there’s some very active accounts that do kind of two, maybe three videos a week. That’s not for me guys. Hooray, another cheer I hear in the background. But I, let’s hope it’s quality over quantity. But what I’ve found since doing this,
Now I’m doing things like more involvement in other local history groups and doing talks. And obviously just having my life as well. We like to go to the pictures and out for food and stuff like that. Just trying to balance all of that together.
I think I’m going to usually do some kind of release about every week to 10 days, whether it’s one of these or whether it’s a video that I do a walk & talk on or a country walk or maybe even one of the then & now slide transition type things that I do.
So yeah, I was just quite pleased with those analytics. They’ve been strong, even though over Christmas people don’t really spend time in YouTube or maybe they do, but no, the numbers seemed a little bit lower over Christmas, but obviously they picked up.
So I love the fact that people do that and support what I do. And it makes me kind of hungry to do even more. So yeah, January analytics, good picture. One of the other things I’ve been doing is preparing for my February talk. So last Wednesday of the month,
The Sanderstead local history group meet and I’m going to be doing a talk on Benjamin Beeson. Now I made a video 18 months ago, something like that. That’s from memory on his story. So you can have a look at that one on YouTube. Fascinating story. The guy was born in Norfolk.
He joined the army in the mid 1800s. He fought and survived the Charge of the Light Brigade. And that’s a story in itself. Then he joined the police force and he was the Sanderstead Mounted Policeman where there was a police station on Limpsfield road, opposite Orchard Road in Hamsey green.
And he was buried alongside his wife in All Saints Churchyard in Sanderstead on top of the hill. So that’s a few seconds of story, but please have a look at the video if you’ve not seen it already. And I’m going to be doing a kind of more detailed talk when I,
When I go to the history group at the end of the month. Nice thing about these is they’re kind of offline, their slides and I can borrow things off the internet that may be copyrighted. I always put them back. So that was the way I’ve been doing some of my spare time stuff.
I went to a meeting last week at the Soper Hall in Caterham and this was to do with a project that’s underway to map the bomb sites for the whole of East Surrey. It’s a two year project. They fought long and hard at the Surrey History Center
To get this off the ground and get some budget and they’ve made quite good progress so far. In fact, one of the shining lights of all the various regions that make up Surrey or Surrey as it was in the war is Croydon. Croydon’s data for the bomb raids or bomb drops themselves.
What do you call them? Yeah. Bomb sites themselves. And also importantly, where there were injuries and deaths that occurred on the back of those, they are able to merge all that data together and put a picture and accounts, a kind of storybook almost of what happened when bombs fell in the Croydon area.
So that’s a positive, but the slight negative from where they called people together for requests for volunteers is that there are many sites in Surrey and even just outside Croydon. So, you know, Coulsdon, Epsom, Reigate, those sort of areas, even Merton and Morden where they just haven’t really got the data.
It should be available in Croydon and they want people to spend some time and help to build those stories. So it’s not that a bomb dropped there, it’s can we tell the story of what happened when that bomb dropped there? So it’s quite interesting. And you had to register for this event,
Which I sent my email off to East Surrey. And when they came back, word had got around that I’d given a talk recently at the Bourne Society and they said, could I do a talk for the East Surrey Museum?
So that will be arranged probably later this year and not sure on the size. From this one going from originally going to be held in the small museum there in Caterham to then hiring out the Soper Hall. I don’t know, it’d be nice if I needed a bigger room, but we shall see.
So I haven’t decided on content, may even do a new slide deck for that one. So that was cool. It’s nice that through word of mouth and contacts and the network that I kind of set out to build really when I started to do this stuff,
Because if I build a network there’s a better chance of getting traction and people finding out that you’re the guy that investigates these things and tells stories and the like. So yeah, so getting building the network has started to pay off. So that’s really cool.
Did the video for Halliloo and Slines Oak area That was a good one. I quite enjoyed that one because it was quite different in some of the stuff that I uncovered in the map kind of research that I do beforehand.
I found this kind of Pump House and I still don’t know the story about it. A couple of people have suggested things to me, but I’m not sure, probably need to follow them up. But it was a really beautiful day. In the rain that we’ve been having,
It was a rare sunny day and quite a rich area. I found out just chatting to a friend today that there were quite a few World War II related incidents there, plane crashes and the like. So maybe a revisit when I’ve got a bit more detail on that. And of course,
Because we went to Slines, we, me and you, that is me and the camera went to Slines Oak area. I had to tell the story of the incident that took place there. And apparently people have seen ghostly apparitions of coach and horses since then. So if you haven’t seen that, Oh, thank you,
Julie. Yeah. I tried to be a bit creative with the video to put a little ghostly image of a coach and horses above the pond. Hopefully that worked. Oh good. Posting some comments later. Thank you. That has led me to research the area a bit more for my next couple of videos.
So there’s one, if you know the area, you’ll probably know where I’m heading. So I realised I can, I could actually have walked beyond the barrier, although that wasn’t part of my, my route for that video. So if you go beyond the barrier at Ledger’s Road
Up to where the huge gravel pit was and a bit further, there’s a very interesting site there. So it won’t say too much, but I’ll be doing some work there and a walk at some point and a walk kind of landed in my lap, so to speak, from a GPS site.
They do GPS for cycling and walking. I’ve actually featured my Warlingham Walk & Talk video on their site, which is very nice of them done a kind of YouTube link to it. And yeah, so sort of Botley Hill in the region area is likely to be my February country walk.
Just want some nice weather. If the weather’s calm enough, I might take the drone on that one as well. So we’ll see, give that a bit of a blow off the cobwebs of my drone. So I think that’d be nice setup for that one. Did I mention this filming soon Woodside area?
If you know, you know, that’s all I’m saying about that one. Some interesting history. I did, went to a talk that, I forgot his last name, but it will come to me. John from the Croydon Natural History and Scientific Society. The history of Woodside is really rich actually.
So it’ll be nice to go there. And then perhaps from there, I may do some more stuff in the sort of Addiscombe area. AA battery near Botley Hill. Yep. And actually, it’s just that reminds me, anti-aircraft. If you’ve got Apple TV, Masters of the Air, very good series.
We’ve had three episodes so far and it’s about the US Army Air Force being based in Norfolk, Thorpe Abbots, I think off the top of my head, the 100th Airborne division, I think they were called. They’ve paid a lot of attention to accuracy on that particular series.
I heard the guy who put it together, the producer on a podcast last week, I think it was Dan Snow podcast. Anyway, somebody, and it was really good, really good detail. I saw also a series on Netflix where they did World War II on the Front Line.
And between the end of episode four and the start of five, or the end of three and the start of four, they actually feature the very content that’s covered in Masters of the Air. But this is real wartime footage and it illustrates just how accurate they got that series. So yeah, Apple TV,
Masters of the Air. Also, if you’ve got Apple TV, Slow Horses, it’s great. So Apple are starting to get a nice kind of, not a foothold as such, but they’re making a contribution, adding some value there. It’s another subscription, I know, in this world of subscriptions that we live in. So yes,
And the last thing I’ve got on my agenda before we open it up for questions. No, we will see how that goes. Yeah, so, oh, I love that. I love that response, Ramzi. So I read that correctly as an anti-aircraft battery. And as Ramzi has replied,
There’s an AA battery on my desk right now! Brilliant, brilliant. Yeah, so the Croydon Natural History and Scientific Society, they are doing a walk in Hamsey Green on the 25th of February, if anyone’s in the area and are interested. I’m planning to attend that. Sue’s on stage in the afternoon,
A kind of in-house workshop-y thing that she’s doing, and they’re doing a performance. So I’ve got to get up to London quickly after, but I think it’s a one and a half, two hour walk, mainly on the ecology, but it’s around Tithepit Shaw Lane, the fields at the back of there towards Riddlesdown.
Basically, it’s the video that I did in August, July or August. It mentions Riddlesdown in the title. It was one of my summer countryside walks. I had beautiful weather that day. And yeah, so we’re going to be covering that area perhaps with more of an emphasis on some of the natural history.
So where we go? The mighty eighth. Yes, it did. It did. You’re right. So that’s something else that’s in diary. It’s nice. Sometimes I go to these things thinking, oh, I can revisit that and make a film of it. And this is like the other way around.
I’ve already made a film of it and now I can visit it. Now I wanted to share something with you. I kind of mentioned/teased a little while ago that I was doing some research on a subject. I think it was in the last video actually.
I wasn’t sure how I would release this information because I was unclear on sensitivities for the particular subject matter. I found a record for the gentleman that I’ve been doing the research on. This is someone who lived in Selsdon just after the war until the mid fifties.
And there was a lock on the record, on his record until the year 2071. And I requested a Freedom of Information request to get some information. And they said that they’re doing checks to see whether it’s in the public interest to release the information. I’m just kind of cribbing from a video,
An email here. If it has decided that public interest would not be served by releasing the information, we will explain the reasons for this. As a bit of background, the public interest test is a legal requirement under the Freedom of Information Act.
It involves weighing up the risks in releasing certain information into the public domain. I would like to clarify by saying that this information does not necessarily relate directly to the subject individual of the file. In cases such as this one where a public interest test is required,
It is usually because the files in question have some material within generated by MI5. Now, a little bit more for this story, there was a naturalisation request for this person. So that’s why, and it said MI5 were routinely involved in that. Now, what I don’t quite understand in this,
And I know it’s still a bit riddley until I can release more information, is that I’ve seen the Certificate of Nationalisation and the entry in the London Gazette to show that this person was kind of stamped, passport stamped as it were, to say that they could become a citizen of the UK.
So that one is ongoing. Yes, Julie, I will send those details to you. I’ll forward an email later for that walk on the 25th. Quite looking forward to that. I’ve not done any of their walks as yet, but I think it’s just, you know, you may need to register,
But I think generally you just turn up. They’ve put some names down of a couple of people to ask for, and it’ll probably be a usual, you know, stout walking shoes or boots or something. But I don’t, I think it’s quite flat over there. It certainly was in the summer.
I don’t think we’re going to go trekking over the edge of the quarry or anything. Well, we wouldn’t, but yes. So that’s something else to consider. And there was something else that I thought of earlier that has escaped me. I’ve got coming up, I’ve got Bromley History Society tomorrow. I’ve not,
I joined them December time. I think they cancelled one of the events because someone had COVID or something else happened. And I’ll be honest, I’ve looked at their agendas and if there’s something that’s perhaps on the other side of the borough where I may not have as much interest in,
Then I’ve not necessarily turned up. But tomorrow it’s got a Biggin Hill reference in it. I think it’s Biggin Hill, the area, perhaps a church or something. So I’m going to go along there tomorrow and meet some of the people there.
The idea with what I do is that I’ve already found close to home, there’s loads of information and I’m trying to share that information in forms of video stories and stuff. And I’m happy to go a bit further, but it’s how far I go because things still crop up locally. So Biggin Hill,
Bromley, perhaps West Wickham, there’s some quite interesting stories around West Wickham High Street actually. And if you, here’s a little teaser for you. If you go up Corkscrew Hill towards West Wickham and you’ll invariably wait at the traffic lights where there’s, is it the Swan Pub on the other side?
But invariably there’ll be the traffic lights. And if you go straight ahead at the lights, you go down to the swimming pool area, if you know West Wickham. Now, if you’re waiting at those lights, there’s an estate agent immediately on your left.
Take a look at that building that houses the estate agents and the first few shops. It’s nothing like a normal shop style building. It’s quite deep. It goes back quite a long way. And that’s because it wasn’t always just a building to house shops at the base. It was a much grander building.
So I plan at some point to tell the story there. So West Wickham’s got some nice history. It’s also got some really nice parades of shops further down. It catches the sun quite nicely there in the morning, morning lunchtime. And they’ve got these parades where they kind of mark at the top.
I think there’s Market Parade and something else and something else. Generally kind of 1930s Art Deco style. There’s the lovely Croft Radio, little radio shop, electrical shop on the corner of Ravensbourne Road, I’m guessing. I think it begins with R, but it’s where there’s a Sainsbury’s Car Park.
So that’s quite a nice place over at West Wickham. And then Wednesday, the Bourne Society. So had a nice discussion with them, which I’m pretty certain I covered last time about research and I need to pick up on where that’s going.
Because what I wanted to do with the research is to pool all of our resources. Because I know pre-internet, the only way you had to find anything out was go to local study centres, go to national archives, go to parish records.
And typically these things weren’t easily regularly digitised since we’ve got the internet. But there is an appetite now for them. But I’ve found so much, I would say pretty much everything I’ve done, with one or two exceptions I’ve found from online sources, and Ancestry and the like,
And some of this stuff that you can get off National Archives online. I’ve got some stuff from Croydon, I’ve got some stuff from Caterham Library. So it’s a mix really of the two. So that’s going to be that. So it’s quite a history related week really,
Because I’ve got those two things coming on. Trying to get some filming in. The weather doesn’t look great. I think we’re going to be getting stronger winds, some rain. Some areas of the country have got snow warning for a few days time. There’s me hoping we’re going to get some spring weather.
But what I try to do is to get into a position of being organised in terms of having all my research ready. Then if we get the weather, I keep the batteries charged, bung the stuff in a bag, go out, film, and hopefully it comes across quite polished on the back of that.
Now I’m delighted to see that views have gone up to 11. I don’t think we’ve had as many of that before. Concurrent views, four. So yeah, I mean, this is really the main kind of contents that I wanted to get across covered. But while you’re here,
Is there anything that you’d like to ask or suggest or share? That would be great. I mean, just fire away in the chat and I will do my best to get involved. So we’ve been going about, what are we on? About half an hour, 27 minutes since I actually fired it up.
And it certainly seems to have been a bit smoother. Also, I would say that the, I’ve mentioned before, there’s an automatic process for the video kind of being published on YouTube. It takes about 24 hours before the comments go on for some reason. Just their processing, they’ve got thousands of servers and things.
Do I hire out my drone services? That’s a very good question. I haven’t yet. I’ve got a degree of basic kind of qualifications, if you like, well, just the online tests that you do. I’ve got a DJI Mini, so it’s quite a basic drone. And that’s why I mentioned about the wind earlier,
Because it’s not great in the wind. It’s got reasonably good wind stability, but you also shouldn’t do it over a certain MPH. Ramzi, maybe I should get you to come out and we’ll share drone hints,
Because I know you’ve got the same drone and do some nice stuff where you go out on your travels. But yeah, so I haven’t done that. There’s probably guys who would do it more polished than I would. Next walk & talk, Julie. Good question. The country walk will probably be the Botley one.
So that’s going to be this month for the countryside. The next townie one, I want to do Caterham, but I might do a revisit to Sanderstead because I found an online walk for Sanderstead that was, I think it was put together in the late 80s,
Early 90s and some of the sites aren’t there anymore. So it’s interesting how some of those may not feature, but I know a bit more about Sanderstead now and I might again take the walk and vary it to suit some of the things that I’ve picked up on.
So it’s almost going to be a Sanderstead walk & talk part two where I cover that. And again, it’s nice and local. So the other thing is, a conversation I had today, so there’s a guy called Jonathan Harrison, who’s been doing some absolutely fantastic detailed research into ironically bomb sites,
Because I mentioned about that earlier. And he discovered a while ago that there was an Italian Prisoner of War camp in Byron Road in Selsdon. Now Byron Road was the first road to be built by Costains when they started to develop all the main housing in the kind of core part of Selsdon.
And there’s an aerial map that was produced, aerial map, aerial photograph that was produced. It’s on historic Britain or I think it’s something like called aerial photo explorer, which is part of historic Britain. And you can see what’s happened is I believe that a bomb or bombs
Have taken out houses towards the end of the road. So not the Addington Road end, but the other end as it goes to Little Heath. And there’s a kind of square plot, which is the size of about two houses. And actually there’s one similar across the road.
Now these would have been a fairly temporary structure. We can’t find any detail. So it could have been a short term mock-up camp. When I say detail, what I mean is we’ve got good intelligence to say that that’s what it was, but we’d appreciate more information to be able to reference it.
When was it built? When was it kind of pulled down after the war? And at what stages they build the houses, which the houses were probably rebuilt by Costain because I think they fitted in perfectly with what was there. So this stuff is all around us people.
So I thought it was quite interesting that there was an Italian PoW camp there. We did find a picture on an old newspaper report article and I believe it was in, I think they might’ve just said it was Surrey, so it could have been anywhere,
But the Italian prisoners of war were out in the fields with hay and stuff like that, helping to farm the land, which is cool. So yes, so that’s something that we’re trying to pick up. The other thing which we’re desperate to find out,
Because I think I’ve been speaking to Jonathan for a couple of years about this, and we know that the Canadian troops provided brilliant service and they were dotted around all over the place, even in the road next to this one.
But we don’t have any information on their regiments and that would be really cool to know because then we can start to again get some more information about when did they come, when did they go, at what point did they kind of move off towards supporting D-Day and all that kind of stuff.
We just don’t have that information. So any information that anyone has about Canadian forces in the area, that would be great. I guess some of it may just not be easily obtainable. Troop movements and stuff like that would have been kept very quiet.
So it may be that we might always struggle for that one, or it’s just been lost to time. So we will see where that goes. Cool. So I will do the walk afterwards, Julie. I’ll send you that email. I’m a bit of a rusty drone operator.
I had some great fun with it when we had some time down in… I’ve forgotten the name of it. I shouldn’t forget the name because it’s where we got married, but it’s just along from Bexhill. Cooden Beach. Oops, don’t tell Sue. Cooden Beach. We stayed, this wasn’t when we got married.
I didn’t take the drone then, but a couple of summers ago we went down there for a few days. And I got up early and went out and got some of the classic bird’s eye view down of the waves coming in and stuff like that. And it was a lovely day.
So I think I did a short video, might only be a couple of minutes, a day in the life of Cooden Beach, something like that. So have a look way back on the channel and you can get an idea. Does New Addington have history? It certainly has a lot of history, Julie.
I know they use it as a huge burial ground post plague. So plague pits. I didn’t know that. So that’s interesting. So New Addington had Castle Hill and there was Castle Hill Farm, assuming there was a castle at some point up there. If you think of it strategically, it’s on a hill.
It’s very cold up there. They used to call it Little Siberia, I believe. And I think chiefly because you’ve got the connection with King Henry VIII, you’ve got the connection with the archbishops of Canterbury at the palace. I’m assuming that would have just been, I mean, I can check on the tithe records,
But that would have just been extended land covering that whole area. And this is the thing, you know, you had, oh, Ramz’i has just dropped off. Oh, you’re back again after dropping off. Okay. I hope when you say dropping off, you didn’t mean nodding off, did you? Ramzi, I did say earlier,
We’ll have to get together and take drones out and stuff, compare notes. Yes. So New Addington is, there’s also another quite interesting bit. So when I was doing some research into New Addington and the Addington area history, I kept coming across Addington Lodge and Addington Lodge still exists to a degree.
It was actually became Addington Lodge Farm and there is a building still there. And it’s like offices for the Refuse and Recycling Centre, otherwise known as the Dump. So there is still a historic area of where a historical building was in Addington. Oh,
So that’s where the burial start and graves end is where they finish hence the name. Do you know what? In all the research I’ve done, I’ve never really looked at that angle, Julie. So I will take that away and look at some of the older history. Okay.
So introduce me to the books of your old headmaster at Monks Hill, Johnny Johnson. He was a head teacher that hired Roy Hodgson as a 27 year old PE teacher. Wow. Yes, please do Ramzi. That’d be good. That’d be good.
There was on my sometimes I with the Croydon Walk & Talk video that I did November. I am hi, Jeff. I’ll catch up with you one second. Yes. In the walk in the where was I? Lost it. Lost it completely. November Croydon Walk & Talk.
I put the comments on Hold for Review because sometimes people put some nasty stuff in there and I don’t want it on the channel and nor would you. So a guy put on a comment yesterday and it was so detailed. There was so much brilliant information on there.
So if you look that up, his name was John Carlisle, John Carlton, top of my head, personal references, just references, general things that you would look up and understand. I had a little look for the plane crash at Limpsfield Road past Slines Oak.
That’s kind of Jeff part of another piece of work that I’m doing. So on the, which I mentioned earlier, the guy from East Surrey archive that’s doing the bomb site analysis and they’ve already got a live website for this. You can actually exploring surrey’s past.org.uk/bombsites.
I’ll put the link in the video when it’s all kind of published. And this guy was also putting information relating to crashed aircraft. Now that can have issues if people know that there was the potential site of a crashed aircraft because people appear with metal detectors and spades and things.
And there’s so many permissions you’ve got to get to even start to look at doing something like that. And it’s better to know kind of a general level of information just to avoid that kind of thing happening. But Jeff, I will take that up because I know people that will know.
I think I probably did a little bit of searching after you made that comment before. Yes. So the Worms Heath area is actually, I believe just past Ledger’s Road, kind of roughly where the gravel quarry was, gravel quarry, gravel pit. That’s, I think the official Worms Heath area.
So I will have a look because the information will be around. And as I say, I know people that know, so that’s something I can look at. This area was so hectic, I suppose, in wartime. We were on that whole kind of corner of the country from European invaders, the Luftwaffe,
Coming over towards London. And we were so close to it that often we were right in the firing line. So that’s hence we got a lot of history, which spreads out. But yes, closer to London, it’s much more of a problem. A few murders in New Addington,
A torso found on Addington Court Golf Club near the tram lines a couple of decades ago. I seem to recall that as well. I also remember a body being found near Woodpecker Mount when I lived there in the 80s. Not sure what the story was there. Yeah, a few murders in New Addington.
Wow. I hope it didn’t interrupt play too much. I shouldn’t say that. So yes, I mean, guys, I hope that you know you can contact me on anything. I try and make it as easy as possible to contact me.
So I’ve got a bio link to all of the ways you can contact me, whether that’s on Messenger. Sometimes people just go onto my website and use the contact me from there, which is great. Get an email and I can follow that up. But yes, anything that you want.
If you didn’t want to kind of make a public comment on a video, then just I’m on WhatsApp, Facebook. I switched off my, I just got a swig of water. Sorry. I switched off my Facebook page for my photography stuff recently because I’ve gone public on my Facebook profile.
I just wanted to simplify things really. I’ve not been posting on there for a while. I think Facebook said I’ve not posted on there for, I don’t know, 200 days or something. It’s almost like you get told off, don’t you, by these social media sites for not posting. Talking of Forestdale,
Was it just fields before the estate was built? Yes, I think it was a mixture of fields. There was a pig farm. There were small holdings galore on that whole valley area, I believe, probably from where we are off Featherbed Lane all the way through to Selsdon Vale on and off.
Johnny Johnson writes on murders in the Surrey and Sussex areas. Oh, yeah, share links to some of his books, please do. Sounds interesting. Yeah. I think with a lot of these, I try if possible to get a different angle.
Every person is going to tell a story differently to the last person or the next person. We’ve all got our own style, personality and so on. I try and look for a different angle. I did the walk around Biggin Hill and I’d spoken to the people in the museum,
I think probably mentioned on the video. He said that the guy that I spoke with said, “It’s kind of been done so many different ways the whole Biggin Hill in the Battle of Britain story. Could we find something a bit different? I’m going to meet up in springtime
With someone who got in touch with me following my video and we’re going to have a little walk around the area. He knows the area very well. Hopefully we might find some stuff that would just tell a slightly different story about the area and what it holds. Great numbers. There’s seven concurrent viewers,
17 views. I know that these numbers are better than last time. That’s great. Thank you so much. Again, the numbers once published are also improving. I briefly touched on it earlier about captions. When I go through those stats that I talked about earlier, people quite often look at my videos with captions on.
Read into that what you will. I do wherever possible try and either correct them if they’re auto-generated by YouTube or just completely create them and upload them as soon as possible when a new video goes live. An example of that would be any of the walks & talks that I do
As part of the publishing process I’ve got some software that generates captions using AI and it’s very good. It doesn’t get everything right but you can update it. It gets a lot right. It’s quite a bit of extra work but I think it’s worth it because people do look at the stuff with…
They look at it on their TVs quite a lot, hence the 100 year old lady, but also subtitles which often people need. I’m doing what I can to help people who have hearing needs to be able to read what I’m saying. Because something like this, there’s no real interference in the area.
I’m not putting music underneath this. There’s no sound effects and wind and cars rushing by that often feature. So it’s a bit easier and quicker to generate the subtitles or captioning. So that’s something I’ll be doing. Cool. Right. So, well, I’m so grateful for you coming in and joining in the conversation.
It’s absolutely brilliant. We’ve got a few little things that we can publish here. Now what I’ll do in fact is I will send you that link, Julie, but I’ll probably put it in this even though it’s time limited till the 25th of February of course.
I’ll put it in the video afterwards as well. So yeah, thank you very much for coming along and spending a bit of time with me. I’m probably going to do these about every three weeks I decided. I thought two a month might be a bit much. If I pick a Tuesday,
It’s probably going to clash with one of my history sessions. Same with the Wednesday. So it’s probably going to be a Monday and roughly every three weeks. And if you keep an eye on the channel on the community tab, I don’t know if it notifies you. It may do.
So make sure you get the notification switched on because when I do, when I book this in, when I kind of register this on YouTube, I’m going to do one of these. I publish the link in that box.
It’s still available if you go in and look on the podcast section of the sites. But the easiest way is if you switch on the notifications, I hope the little bell thing where you subscribe, the bell will mean that if I publish something to the site,
You’ll get a notification and then maybe put it in your diary or whatever. But thanks very much for coming along. Really appreciate it. And as I say in my videos, look after yourselves and I’ll see you in the next one.