South Croxted

South Croxted is one of the longest roads in South London. It is also the boundary between the London Boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark. It is an A-Road, the A2199, and the main north-south arterial road for West Dulwich meeting the east-west A205 South Circular next to West Dulwich railway station. It comprises two roads; the northern half is Croxted Road and at its southern end, after Park Hall Road, it becomes South Croxted. It stretches from the dizzy heights of Crystal Palace, where one can admire an unbroken vista of the City of London from Gipsy Hill, down toward Herne Hill where its once famous Velodrome played host to the 1948 Olympic cycling track races and beyond that the constantly changing ethnic mix of Brixton.

During the tenebrous sixties, and lucent seventies, South Croxted was bought to the attention of the world press reporting on underworld crime and an IRA assignation attempt. We can never know the true story, the factually of what occurred in South Croxted because so much was hidden, or has been forgotten. Only through letters, photographs and newspaper articles can we extract a history, together with my own account of that harrowing journey through early memoir. In unraveling my father’s involvement I hoped to understand my own, hoped to find something that made sense of that time, but instead found a place far more unpredictable than one could ever imagine. The road was far from straight…