Serious work deals in facts and truths. Check the Wikipedia for South London and you will read of our extensive train links and temperate maritime climate. My work deals opinions and vague feelings - like a comment on the last post said, I'm "fuzzy on the specifics," but by the end of this post you will have a much better understanding of what being in South London entails than if you were to solely read the wiki. You can never get the whole story from facts and figures alone, otherwise poets would just do econ and Ronaldo would be universally acknowledged as better than Messi, which you guys know is wrong because I've been subliminally reinforcing it for months now. James C. Scott makes a distinction between metis, a localised, experience-based form of knowing things, and episteme, the more abstract, generalized, theoretical knowledge, and Samzdat writes about the ramifications of that here. This post will provide you with the metis that Wikipedia cannot.
If you would like an insight into the kind of insufferable child I was, we were once given a simple task in Year One - take this map of London, colour in north of the river in red to represent North London, and south of the river in blue to represent South. A stubby brown hand is raised immediately. "Miss, what about Fulham?" I said. "That's north of the river but still in South London, isn't it?" I don't remember what Miss Collins said in response, but it wasn't a swear, and that is in itself an achievement.
Like I said, this blog is predicated on vague feelings over facts, and Fulham just feels like it's in South London. Not the South London you're thinking of, the Brixton and Peckham South London, which we'll get to, but the South of Wimbledon and Kingston. A place of Waitrose, big houses, and low-key snobbery. And yet, it retains a little bit of the grit required to succeed as an area of South London. Part of this is down to being home to Craven Cottage and especially Stamford Bridge, which means all sorts of hooligans will be intimately familiar with the area. New wave legends Elvis Costello and Ian Dury reference the place too, which earns it a few points, and it makes sense - I can't really imagine Dury singing about being the ticket man at Gloucester Road, in incredibly posh and firmly central/western Kensington, but Fulham Broadway fits his aesthetic. The episteme agrees with me by the way, it's right there on the wiki page for Fulham: it's an "affluent area of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham in South West London." So, for our first map, I'm delineating all of South London as: Greater London south of the Thames, and then an area bordered by Hammersmith Bridge, the A4 (West Cromwell Road), and the Overground line between junctions Willesden and Clapham. That gives us the following:
I considered adding Epsom in almost out of spite. They've tried desperately the past fifty years to get away from us despite baitly being a London suburb. There's the Greater London situation Jay describes up there for one thing, and the fact that they refuse to introduce the Oyster system, which makes things much more difficult than they need to be. I did my work experience in Epsom and was not informed it wasn't in the zone until I tried to get home (my dad had driven me in), and I'm still salty to be honest. And yet, I won't have them in my South. Firstly, I like South London, and I dislike Epsom, so this works for both parties. Secondly, just as saying Fulham is in SW London feels right, saying Epsom is feels wrong. Finally, there is nothing more Surrey than vehemently denying you have anything to do with London, so I will leave them be. Chessington (that weird protrusion to the left) and Biggin Hill (to the right) should also really be in Surrey/Kent rather than London, they're noticeably less urbanised and don't feel like South, but I'll let it slide because I'm lazy.
Key districts: Eltham, Blackheath
Key landmarks: The Valley, The O2, the Blackwall Tunnel so you can leave
This is where we get to the "Four South Londons" of the title. There are vast differences in culture between the areas, so when someone tells you "Oh, I'm from South London" you need to be wary of where they mean.
The Orient is not really my scene. It's the part of South London I know the least about, have visited the least, and have the worst impression of. Essentially, The Orient is the easternmost (duh) section of South London, all places that would have originally been in Kent, and has over time become the area where a lot of displaced people from more central areas would move. Let me explain what I mean by this. The East End culture that you guys see on, well, EastEnders, doesn't really exist to the same extent in Tower Hamlets anymore because of immigrant influxes from the Second World War to now - Whitechapel is plurality British Asian, for example - and the rapid development of Canary Wharf and the rest of the Docklands under Thatcher, which changed the character of the Docklands completely. It always comes back to Thatcher, lads. All this is to say that a lot of the working class white Danny Dyer types you're probably expecting aren't in Bromley-by-Bow anymore, they're on the outskirts of London, in places like Becontree or Havering, or further out into Essex. The same is true of South London. As places like Southwark or Bermondsey got alternately bourgie-fied or wog-ified, the indigenous population moved to, like, Sidcup, in the Orient, or out into Kent. This is not to say that immigrants and posh people can't REALLY be from South - I am a posh immigrant child and I'm writing this whole thing - I'm just saying the vibe is slightly different to what you may be expecting in Rotherhithe or Wapping. You may be thinking this is just a roundabout way of saying the Orient is super racist and that's why I don't go there. That's not strictly true - I don't go because there's fuck all happening there - but do bear in mind that this is where Stephen Lawrence was murdered. It's all stereotyping on my part, I'm sure they're lovely people in Mottingham, but I don't care enough to get past it. Millwall should 100% be in this section of South, but it's not.
Anyway, I define the Orient as South London, east of the A21. This gets us as far as Lewisham, and then I've used the Deptford Creek to take us the Thames. That looks like this, new line in orange:
Key districts: Wimbledon, Fulham, Kingston
Key landmarks: the All England Club, Stamford Bridge, Wimbledon Common, Kew Botanical Gardens
This is the most affluent section of our half of the city, and therefore holds all the posh things like the tennis tournaments and the parks where monarchs hunted. I have a soft spot for the Great South West (named after a road that's not actually in South but sounds cool) because I spent most of my teenage years in the Burger King in the middle of Wimbledon, and despite being bourgie as fuck it's still a nice place to be. I highlight it only because I think a lot of people hear South and expect brutalist architecture and widespread deprivation, but that's not the whole story. Roehampton is basically the only place out here you'll find anything vaguely brutal. What you will find is a lot of green spaces, the best curry house in the world, and, of course, the odd Waitrose.
The boundaries get a bit more complex here - we'll need to start at Wandsworth Bridge, take the dual carriageway Trinity Road through posh Wandsworth Common, turn right onto Upper Tooting Road by Tooting Bec tube, and then follow the A24 as it meanders through Wimbledon and Morden towards... Epsom, unfortunately. We can thankfully stop in North Cheam though. All that looks like this on the map, new line in green:
Key districts: Brixton, Peckham, Clapham
Key landmarks: Champion Hill, The Shard, The O2 Academy
For this, I've stolen some terminology from the Yanks. In America they make the distinction between the Deep South, the bit with all theslavery cotton next to the Gulf of Mexico, and the Upland South, the bit with the yeomanry dominated by the Appalachians. London is kind of in a basin, and that means there are a lot of hills on both sides of the river that offer gorgeous views of the centre. If you've ever been to Alexandra Palace or Primrose Hill to the north you'll know what I mean, and our southern equivalents include Gipsy Hill and Crystal Palace Park. The southern hills also happen to be the perfect place to put the divide between the two remaining parts of South London, so I simply reversed the American terminology and called this section the Lowland South.
The Lowland South is the archetypal "South London." This is, unfortunately, drill music and frequent stabbings South London, incompetent Labour councils South London, but it is in the process of getting gentrified. You must be careful, though - central Brixton might be perfectly safe yuppie territory at this point, but Angell Town a few seconds east most certainly is not. The tension between the rich and poor aspects of London is part of what I think makes the city what it is, and nowhere is that more pronounced than the Lowland South. Dulwich Village, where old Maggie retired to, is basically an exclave of Surrey, replete with village green and war memorial, Pizza Express and Picture Gallery. Ten minutes north and you're in the heart of majority black Peckham, walking along Rye Lane smelling more cuisines and hearing more languages than you thought existed. "Why are you so obsessed with demographics?" I honestly don't know, maybe I'm just racist, but I think it's important to know - the world isn't actually colourblind, as much as we wish it could be, and the ethnic makeup of a place really shapes its culture, which is what I'm trying to describe.
Nothing sums up why I love South London more than Dulwich Hamlet Football Club. It's not to do with the football, really. It's a combination of all the separate strands of Londoner coming together as one. You've got the young boys who play with the club from their time at the Aspire Academy, as a healthy outlet and escape from the all-pervasive shittiness of being in ends. You've got the aforementioned yuppies that live in East Dulwich (less old money posh than Dulwich Village, more of an Islington-esque paradise for rich 20-somethings that don't want to give up the ghost and raise a family in the Home Counties just yet) that come to the club because of its family-friendly attitude and leftist stances, ordering halloumi from the snack van for their daughters November and Chaffinch. You've got the spirit of old South London, a pub-rock actually-working-class vibe from before the gentrification, exemplified by the folks over at deserter.co.uk, who essentially get pissed in as many bars in this fine half-city as possible and avoid anything that looks like work. And then you have me, simultaneously a part of, but apart from, all these cultures, trying to convince my friends that yes, Nathan Green is actually way better than Marcos Alonso, and yes, you should hate Billericay FUCKING Town as much as you hate Manchester United. It's a lovely institution, so lovely that I choose to support them despite growing up the next road over from the original home of their bitter rivals Tooting and Mitcham United. Speaking of, let's get to the final part of South London...
Like I said, the boundary of the Lowland South is the chain of hills that runs from Streatham in the west to Sydenham in the east. Between Tooting Bec and Crystal Palace Park we'll use the A214 as proxy for the hills, and then we'll take the A212 through Sydenham until it meets the A21 in Bellingham. We end up with this, new line in blue:
Key districts: Tooting, Mitcham, Sutton, Croydon
Key landmarks: pretty much everywhere that's ever mattered to me
At last, we get to my ends. You were probably wondering why I didn't call this the upland south if it's uphill from the rest. That's because we're further away from Central, and thus "deeper" into London. And people will not stop reminding us of this fact.
Anyway, the Deep South sprawls in a way the Lowland South doesn't. Everything needs to be very compact in Inner London - space doesn't last very long because someone will immediately build a skyscraper or some fuck-off flats. The Deep South feels more laid back. We have our fair share of deprived areas (e.g. Mitcham, where I spent my childhood) and posh neighbourhoods (e.g. Wallington, where I spent my teens). We have basically all of the Tramlink too (protip: if you get off at Dundonald and walk for 5mins instead of going all the way to Wimbledon you don't have to use your Oyster), which is good because the Tube doesn't really come to the Lowland South, let alone us hicks. Croydon is in a rapid state of gentrification but still retains some of its culture, from the chicken shops to the grotty pubs - there is a Boxpark now, though, so it can only be downhill from here. Sutton is another place that's filled with a lot of ex-Inner Londoners - this time it's thanks to the massive government project of St Helier - but I like Sutton so it doesn't bother me the way Eltham does. Tooting is, for me, the centre of South London - like a Dulwich Hamlet game, it contains people following all these separate ways of being a South Londoner, right on the border of three different sections, but never falls cleanly into one or the other. It's also where I was born, so that may factor in somewhat. The Deep South is definitely where the stereotypes and conceptions I have about the other three areas blend together, and I will forever fight for its validity as a true part of South London, no matter what the mean tweet people say.
I'm writing this now in part because Dave released Psychodrama last week, and as Dave will tell you, he grew up in Streatham. Streatham Vale to be precise, just over the railway line from my childhood home in North Mitcham, and this is what makes it all the realer for me. I know how lucky I am to have had the opportunities I've had - to be able to move out of Mitcham in the first place, go to a good school, go to a good uni - and Dave underlines that essentially by showing what my life could've been like had things been slightly different. His skill is undeniable, and while I wish the album was a bit more energetic - perhaps a dumb claim, but it's missing more bangers in the 'Thiago Silva' mould - there may never be a better document of the Deep South. You have no idea how much it means to hear someone mention Mitcham Lane even in passing, and I don't think I'll ever get over that "sutt'n (something) in common" bar, and that's just one song ('Streatham').
I'm also writing this because very soon I will no longer be a Londoner. My father has finally escaped London for the simplicity of the South Coast, so when I return from university I won't be returning to these places. I could write for aeons about the things I've seen and done out here, but this post is long enough. Just know that there is nowhere I would rather have grown up on this earth, and everyone from North London is a prick.
We don't need to add any more boundaries, so here is the complete map of South London one last time, with some things highlighted. Key's underneath. Come South some time.
1 - The O2
2 - The Valley (Charlton)
3 - The Den (Millwall)
4 - Eltham Palace
5 - Champion Hill (Dulwich Hamlet)
6 - Rye Lane, Peckham
7 - Nunhead Green, formerly home to the best Bajan takeaway of all time, now home to craft beer shops and Portuguese cuisine. That's not gentrification's fault btw, the place was just really poorly run like all West Indian restaurants.
8 - Clapham Junction train station
9 - Sandy Lane (formerly Tooting & Mitcham United)
10 - Streatham Vale. I think that's roughly the Lidl on Rowan Road.
11 - Angell Town Estate
12 - South Bank, Bankside, Borough Market, and all that tourist shit.
13 - The dots represent all the Waitroses in Fulham alone.
14 - Kew Gardens
15 - The All England Club, where Wimbledon happens.
16 - Munal's Tandoori, Putney
17 - Dundonald Road tram stop
18 - St Helier estate
19 - Selhurst Park (Crystal Palace)
20 - Wallington train station, from which it only takes like half an hour to get to Victoria if you take the Norbury branch rather than the Gipsy Hill branch, fuck you
21 - Imperial Fields (Tooting & Mitcham United)
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| You already know what it is. |
What's London?
Before we do South London, it'd be nice to know what London is, i.e. where its boundaries are. Luckily I don't have to put any effort into this part because the wonderful Jay Foreman has already done that. This video explains to you why what we call Greater London is what it is in style.What's South London, then?
Oh boy. There's a lot of disagreement on this, but I'm going to make it simple enough. South London is all of Greater London south of the River Thames, with a key exception in Fulham, and an honourable mention for Epsom.If you would like an insight into the kind of insufferable child I was, we were once given a simple task in Year One - take this map of London, colour in north of the river in red to represent North London, and south of the river in blue to represent South. A stubby brown hand is raised immediately. "Miss, what about Fulham?" I said. "That's north of the river but still in South London, isn't it?" I don't remember what Miss Collins said in response, but it wasn't a swear, and that is in itself an achievement.
Like I said, this blog is predicated on vague feelings over facts, and Fulham just feels like it's in South London. Not the South London you're thinking of, the Brixton and Peckham South London, which we'll get to, but the South of Wimbledon and Kingston. A place of Waitrose, big houses, and low-key snobbery. And yet, it retains a little bit of the grit required to succeed as an area of South London. Part of this is down to being home to Craven Cottage and especially Stamford Bridge, which means all sorts of hooligans will be intimately familiar with the area. New wave legends Elvis Costello and Ian Dury reference the place too, which earns it a few points, and it makes sense - I can't really imagine Dury singing about being the ticket man at Gloucester Road, in incredibly posh and firmly central/western Kensington, but Fulham Broadway fits his aesthetic. The episteme agrees with me by the way, it's right there on the wiki page for Fulham: it's an "affluent area of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham in South West London." So, for our first map, I'm delineating all of South London as: Greater London south of the Thames, and then an area bordered by Hammersmith Bridge, the A4 (West Cromwell Road), and the Overground line between junctions Willesden and Clapham. That gives us the following:
South London #1: The Orient
Rough borough approximation: Bexley, Greenwich, and half of BromleyKey districts: Eltham, Blackheath
Key landmarks: The Valley, The O2, the Blackwall Tunnel so you can leave
This is where we get to the "Four South Londons" of the title. There are vast differences in culture between the areas, so when someone tells you "Oh, I'm from South London" you need to be wary of where they mean.
The Orient is not really my scene. It's the part of South London I know the least about, have visited the least, and have the worst impression of. Essentially, The Orient is the easternmost (duh) section of South London, all places that would have originally been in Kent, and has over time become the area where a lot of displaced people from more central areas would move. Let me explain what I mean by this. The East End culture that you guys see on, well, EastEnders, doesn't really exist to the same extent in Tower Hamlets anymore because of immigrant influxes from the Second World War to now - Whitechapel is plurality British Asian, for example - and the rapid development of Canary Wharf and the rest of the Docklands under Thatcher, which changed the character of the Docklands completely. It always comes back to Thatcher, lads. All this is to say that a lot of the working class white Danny Dyer types you're probably expecting aren't in Bromley-by-Bow anymore, they're on the outskirts of London, in places like Becontree or Havering, or further out into Essex. The same is true of South London. As places like Southwark or Bermondsey got alternately bourgie-fied or wog-ified, the indigenous population moved to, like, Sidcup, in the Orient, or out into Kent. This is not to say that immigrants and posh people can't REALLY be from South - I am a posh immigrant child and I'm writing this whole thing - I'm just saying the vibe is slightly different to what you may be expecting in Rotherhithe or Wapping. You may be thinking this is just a roundabout way of saying the Orient is super racist and that's why I don't go there. That's not strictly true - I don't go because there's fuck all happening there - but do bear in mind that this is where Stephen Lawrence was murdered. It's all stereotyping on my part, I'm sure they're lovely people in Mottingham, but I don't care enough to get past it. Millwall should 100% be in this section of South, but it's not.
Anyway, I define the Orient as South London, east of the A21. This gets us as far as Lewisham, and then I've used the Deptford Creek to take us the Thames. That looks like this, new line in orange:
South London #2 - The Great South West
Rough borough approximation: some Hammersmith and Fulham, Kingston, some Merton, Richmond south of the river, some WandsworthKey districts: Wimbledon, Fulham, Kingston
Key landmarks: the All England Club, Stamford Bridge, Wimbledon Common, Kew Botanical Gardens
he's gonna have to share a pied-a-terre in parsons green with someone called tarquin— william nylander fan account (@volvicstorm98) March 1, 2019
This is the most affluent section of our half of the city, and therefore holds all the posh things like the tennis tournaments and the parks where monarchs hunted. I have a soft spot for the Great South West (named after a road that's not actually in South but sounds cool) because I spent most of my teenage years in the Burger King in the middle of Wimbledon, and despite being bourgie as fuck it's still a nice place to be. I highlight it only because I think a lot of people hear South and expect brutalist architecture and widespread deprivation, but that's not the whole story. Roehampton is basically the only place out here you'll find anything vaguely brutal. What you will find is a lot of green spaces, the best curry house in the world, and, of course, the odd Waitrose.
The boundaries get a bit more complex here - we'll need to start at Wandsworth Bridge, take the dual carriageway Trinity Road through posh Wandsworth Common, turn right onto Upper Tooting Road by Tooting Bec tube, and then follow the A24 as it meanders through Wimbledon and Morden towards... Epsom, unfortunately. We can thankfully stop in North Cheam though. All that looks like this on the map, new line in green:
South London #3 - The Lowland South
Rough borough approximation: Lambeth, Lewisham, Southwark, the rest of WandsworthKey districts: Brixton, Peckham, Clapham
Key landmarks: Champion Hill, The Shard, The O2 Academy
For this, I've stolen some terminology from the Yanks. In America they make the distinction between the Deep South, the bit with all the
The Lowland South is the archetypal "South London." This is, unfortunately, drill music and frequent stabbings South London, incompetent Labour councils South London, but it is in the process of getting gentrified. You must be careful, though - central Brixton might be perfectly safe yuppie territory at this point, but Angell Town a few seconds east most certainly is not. The tension between the rich and poor aspects of London is part of what I think makes the city what it is, and nowhere is that more pronounced than the Lowland South. Dulwich Village, where old Maggie retired to, is basically an exclave of Surrey, replete with village green and war memorial, Pizza Express and Picture Gallery. Ten minutes north and you're in the heart of majority black Peckham, walking along Rye Lane smelling more cuisines and hearing more languages than you thought existed. "Why are you so obsessed with demographics?" I honestly don't know, maybe I'm just racist, but I think it's important to know - the world isn't actually colourblind, as much as we wish it could be, and the ethnic makeup of a place really shapes its culture, which is what I'm trying to describe.
Nothing sums up why I love South London more than Dulwich Hamlet Football Club. It's not to do with the football, really. It's a combination of all the separate strands of Londoner coming together as one. You've got the young boys who play with the club from their time at the Aspire Academy, as a healthy outlet and escape from the all-pervasive shittiness of being in ends. You've got the aforementioned yuppies that live in East Dulwich (less old money posh than Dulwich Village, more of an Islington-esque paradise for rich 20-somethings that don't want to give up the ghost and raise a family in the Home Counties just yet) that come to the club because of its family-friendly attitude and leftist stances, ordering halloumi from the snack van for their daughters November and Chaffinch. You've got the spirit of old South London, a pub-rock actually-working-class vibe from before the gentrification, exemplified by the folks over at deserter.co.uk, who essentially get pissed in as many bars in this fine half-city as possible and avoid anything that looks like work. And then you have me, simultaneously a part of, but apart from, all these cultures, trying to convince my friends that yes, Nathan Green is actually way better than Marcos Alonso, and yes, you should hate Billericay FUCKING Town as much as you hate Manchester United. It's a lovely institution, so lovely that I choose to support them despite growing up the next road over from the original home of their bitter rivals Tooting and Mitcham United. Speaking of, let's get to the final part of South London...
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| he didn't even play left wing, it's mad... |
Like I said, the boundary of the Lowland South is the chain of hills that runs from Streatham in the west to Sydenham in the east. Between Tooting Bec and Crystal Palace Park we'll use the A214 as proxy for the hills, and then we'll take the A212 through Sydenham until it meets the A21 in Bellingham. We end up with this, new line in blue:
South London #4 - The Deep South
Rough borough approximation: the other halves of Bromley and Merton, Croydon, SuttonEvery time someone at uni not from south London asks where I'm from, I never say Mitcham, I just tell them Croydon— Imtiäz (@ICimmi) October 25, 2015
Key districts: Tooting, Mitcham, Sutton, Croydon
Key landmarks: pretty much everywhere that's ever mattered to me
At last, we get to my ends. You were probably wondering why I didn't call this the upland south if it's uphill from the rest. That's because we're further away from Central, and thus "deeper" into London. And people will not stop reminding us of this fact.
There are countless tweets like this, each more dehumanising than the last. We're not that isolated. Worse still, all these tweets make a point of lumping us in with Epsom, who, as we've discovered, a) suck, and b) ACTUALLY aren't in London.Croydon, Mitcham, Sutton, Epsom etc— SS🉐 (@SoulScherazi) May 3, 2018
Places like that are wilderness
Anyway, the Deep South sprawls in a way the Lowland South doesn't. Everything needs to be very compact in Inner London - space doesn't last very long because someone will immediately build a skyscraper or some fuck-off flats. The Deep South feels more laid back. We have our fair share of deprived areas (e.g. Mitcham, where I spent my childhood) and posh neighbourhoods (e.g. Wallington, where I spent my teens). We have basically all of the Tramlink too (protip: if you get off at Dundonald and walk for 5mins instead of going all the way to Wimbledon you don't have to use your Oyster), which is good because the Tube doesn't really come to the Lowland South, let alone us hicks. Croydon is in a rapid state of gentrification but still retains some of its culture, from the chicken shops to the grotty pubs - there is a Boxpark now, though, so it can only be downhill from here. Sutton is another place that's filled with a lot of ex-Inner Londoners - this time it's thanks to the massive government project of St Helier - but I like Sutton so it doesn't bother me the way Eltham does. Tooting is, for me, the centre of South London - like a Dulwich Hamlet game, it contains people following all these separate ways of being a South Londoner, right on the border of three different sections, but never falls cleanly into one or the other. It's also where I was born, so that may factor in somewhat. The Deep South is definitely where the stereotypes and conceptions I have about the other three areas blend together, and I will forever fight for its validity as a true part of South London, no matter what the mean tweet people say.
I'm writing this now in part because Dave released Psychodrama last week, and as Dave will tell you, he grew up in Streatham. Streatham Vale to be precise, just over the railway line from my childhood home in North Mitcham, and this is what makes it all the realer for me. I know how lucky I am to have had the opportunities I've had - to be able to move out of Mitcham in the first place, go to a good school, go to a good uni - and Dave underlines that essentially by showing what my life could've been like had things been slightly different. His skill is undeniable, and while I wish the album was a bit more energetic - perhaps a dumb claim, but it's missing more bangers in the 'Thiago Silva' mould - there may never be a better document of the Deep South. You have no idea how much it means to hear someone mention Mitcham Lane even in passing, and I don't think I'll ever get over that "sutt'n (something) in common" bar, and that's just one song ('Streatham').
I'm also writing this because very soon I will no longer be a Londoner. My father has finally escaped London for the simplicity of the South Coast, so when I return from university I won't be returning to these places. I could write for aeons about the things I've seen and done out here, but this post is long enough. Just know that there is nowhere I would rather have grown up on this earth, and everyone from North London is a prick.
We don't need to add any more boundaries, so here is the complete map of South London one last time, with some things highlighted. Key's underneath. Come South some time.
2 - The Valley (Charlton)
3 - The Den (Millwall)
4 - Eltham Palace
5 - Champion Hill (Dulwich Hamlet)
6 - Rye Lane, Peckham
7 - Nunhead Green, formerly home to the best Bajan takeaway of all time, now home to craft beer shops and Portuguese cuisine. That's not gentrification's fault btw, the place was just really poorly run like all West Indian restaurants.
8 - Clapham Junction train station
9 - Sandy Lane (formerly Tooting & Mitcham United)
10 - Streatham Vale. I think that's roughly the Lidl on Rowan Road.
11 - Angell Town Estate
12 - South Bank, Bankside, Borough Market, and all that tourist shit.
13 - The dots represent all the Waitroses in Fulham alone.
14 - Kew Gardens
15 - The All England Club, where Wimbledon happens.
16 - Munal's Tandoori, Putney
17 - Dundonald Road tram stop
18 - St Helier estate
19 - Selhurst Park (Crystal Palace)
20 - Wallington train station, from which it only takes like half an hour to get to Victoria if you take the Norbury branch rather than the Gipsy Hill branch, fuck you
21 - Imperial Fields (Tooting & Mitcham United)
Might be a bit biased here (Mainly so I don't have to be in the same area as Bexley, Eltham, Welling) but i do think the Orient border could be moved further east. Kidbrook, Woolwich, Grove Park, Downham and the other half of Catford have a lot more in common with Lewisham, Lambeth and the 'low south' than the Bexley, Bromley, Kent lot. Greenwich, Blackheath, Hither Green and Lee fit the Dulwich Village posh leafy suburb vibe (tho admittedly not as posh). I'd say make the border the Quaggy River instead of the Ravensbourne and then follow the south circular down to the river, then Eltham can stay with the Bexley lot.
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