Greendale bridge mystery

[vladi]

Can someone explain why Greendale features an extremely wide bridge over the railway tracks near ND station. The width of Greendale stays the same all the way down the hill and then narrows by half before rising up the hill on the other side.  Seems odd.

[creditwheredue]

Presumably it used to be a road.

[Earl Aelfheah]

Some info on it's history here https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/londons-alleys-green-dale-se5-74976/

 

"Later, in 1955, the alley was fully closed to road traffic"... Don't tell OneDulwich!

[Friernlocal]

Greendale/Green Lane is an ancient thoroughfare that connected Dulwich Village to Camberwell. This allowed for easy access as Dulwich was in the parish of Camberwell and the parish church was St Giles. It would have been used as a track for foot and horse drawn vehicles.
The bridge was built on Dulwich College land, and they leased building plots on both sides from East Dulwich Grove up to the bridge (see attached picture). So, the track would have been widened for this. If you look from the bridge in the direction of North Dulwich Station, you can see another bridge built by the railway company for a road that Dulwich College planned but never built.
The old Dulwich College Estate maps right back to 1806 show Green Lane as a road that joined, as it still does to Champion Hill. The estate map of 1886 shows the college proposed widening Green Lane all the way to the top and connecting it to Denmark Hill, but once again this didn’t happen, and the widening appear to stop about a third of the way up the lane.
When Camberwell Borough Council acquired a lot of the land on the upper portion of the hill, I assume they decided that the path could be narrowed from Wanley Road up to Champion Hill to maximise space to build the housing estate. The attached photo is of Green Lane looking up the hill with what would be Wanley Road on the right.

[Rockets]

Superb research!

 

What is the domed building in the picture? Is that looking up the hill towards Camberwell?

[Earl Aelfheah]

Henry Bessemer’s Observatory!

 

https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/londons-alleys-green-dale-se5-74976/

[Friernlocal]

The dome was Sir Henry Bessemer's Observatory.

[mrwb]

So it looked 10x as nice in the 19th century as it does now? 

[Rockets]

Superb - thanks both.

 

I have never seen the sign on the bench but will seek it out.

[ianr]

There's an article about some of its residents, "Greendale - Who lived in a road like this?", by Sharon O’Connor, at https://www.dulwichsociety.com/the-journal/winter-2022/greendale.

Edited March 28, 2025 by ianr

[Rockets]

Emma Ermengarde Ogilvy Greville-Nugent seems like an interesting character!

[ed_pete]

My map of 1916 shows that the road narrowed where it currently has lanes left (Bessemer School) and right (Hamlet FC) so I guess it's been like that for a while.

 

[CPR Dave]

That’s an interesting map! The houses on the north of East Dulwich grove next to greendale look like they would have been typical Victorian terraces at that point.

[Jenijenjen]

4 hours ago, CPR Dave said:

That’s an interesting map! The houses on the north of East Dulwich grove next to greendale look like they would have been typical Victorian terraces at that point.

Now the site of what's known as The Dutch Estate.  Here's a bit of background again from the Dulwich Society website:

"The Council acquired the site from the Dulwich Estate in March 1960. The existing old houses on the site were relatively large and, by the late 1950s, were in very poor condition; as their leases were due to expire in 1964.  A report at the Dulwich Estate’s Finance and General Purposes Committee on 27th February 1960 confirmed that this land (the sites of Nos. 131-173 (odd) and 90-140 (even) East Dulwich Grove and ‘Lyncote’ and ‘Ferrodene’ Green Dale) was to be leased to Camberwell Council for 200 years from 25th March 1960 together with the benefit of the leases expiring on 25th March 1964. The ground rent was to be £750 up to that date and £1600 per annum thereafter."

https://www.dulwichsociety.com/the-journal/winter-2010/dulwich-estate

[ed_pete]

4 hours ago, CPR Dave said:

That’s an interesting map! The houses on the north of East Dulwich grove next to greendale look like they would have been typical Victorian terraces at that point.

Here's a post from a couple of years ago with a some photos of the houses.

Quite grand I imagine, originally.