London Life Archive

"London is like no other city I know in its ability to become beautiful. You can suddenly turn a corner and there are odd moments - of light, of weather."

Graham Swift 

'A landmark’s physical presence is usually the thing that draws me to it, but in the case of Honor Oak’s One Tree Hill, it was the name that attracted me. So when I walked there from West Norwood recently it seemed appropriate that for almost the entire journey One Tree Hill itself wasn’t visible. Only once I was a street away could I see it. In a sense my destination was as much a walk towards an idea as it was towards a physical place.

The route I took – accompanied by my three year old son – reminded me of a children’s book I had liked a lot when around the same age myself. In Bears in the Night, a family of young bears make an episodic Fairy Tale journey down a tree, over a bridge, round a rock, under an arch, through the woods and up Spook Hill.

Our way was not dissimilar – through woods, across a stream, in and out of public gardens, across a cemetery, a park and up One Tree Hill.

The woods in our case were Dulwich and Sydenham hill woods, which are elevated themselves as they lie on a part of the Norwood Ridge. Amongst the trees we alternately chased, or were chased by, imaginary monsters as we slipped off the main path and skirted around the wood’s edge to take in the spectacular view looking North West over the Grange Lane allotments.'