COPERS
COPE FARM
By
Pat Manning
Part
II - The farmland
The
rural life of Copers Cope was soon to change as
the railways came to Beckenham with the opening
of Beckenham Junction station in 1857. By 1864,
New Beckenham had come into existence with its
own station, level crossing to link the roads on
either side of the lines, St Paul’s church
in Brackley Rd and the first houses where
Brackley Rd joined Copers Cope Rd. These earliest
properties are part of the Copers Cope Rd
Conservation Area of 16 large houses with
unusually large front gardens screened by trees
and shrubs. In a twinkling, the farm was gone, to
be replaced by a road system of its field names,
while farmer Michael Mathew had moved to Stone
Farm at Park Langley. The farmhouse is part of
the Southend Rd Conservation Area which not only
includes the most architecturally interesting
building in the shape of the farmhouse but also
the houses opposite of 8-22 Southend Rd that
predated the railways. Today they retain the
semicircular driveways used once by coach and
horses. The 1930s block of South Park Court and
the yellow brick gate lodges of Beckenham Place
Park are also in the Conservation Area.
The
large Victorian houses for the wealthy built on
the tree-lined roads of the old farmland provided
employment for a multitude of craftsmen,
gardeners and servants and were largely
responsible for the development of the shopping
area at Beckenham Junction. Partly because of the
incidence of flooding of the River Pool down in
the valley but also because house sales fell off
towards the bottom end of Copers Cope Rd, houses
were only built as far as number 169 and the
remaining land was left open for sports grounds
used by the Banks and Insurance companies.
 One of the distant fields was the
8-acre fileld by Lower Sydenham station. The
Yokohama Specie Bank leased 5.5 acres leaving the
rest for the winter grazing of cattle and the
seaside donkeys from Southend. I know this
because it was there that I spent an idyllic
childhood, paddling in the river, listening to
the skylarks and grasshoppers, feeding the
donkeys and boating on the lake when the river
flooded and transformed our field. It didn’t
matter to me that we had no gas or electricity.
The pump –up Tilley lamps gave out a
brilliant light, the solid fuel stoves kept us
really warm and the accumulators kept the
wireless going to listen to ITMA. We could always
pop on the train to visit the Plaza cinema and
all the Catford shops. However in the late 1930s,
the donkeys lost their winter haven when three
factories, Maybreys, Gallenkamps and John Bell,
Hills and Lucas were built on their field.
Today
our beautiful field is a travesty of what it was,
now used by the Footsie Club for social occasions
and boot sales. When the Japanese entered the war
on 7 December 1941 with the attack on Pearl
Harbour, we moved to one of the Victorian houses
in Copers Cope Rd where we lived for 25 years.
The Yokohama field was raised eight feet using
rubble from bombed buildings and even the
circular steps of the pavilion disappeared. Few
visitors realise that there is a river winding
among the trees at the bottom of the field.
The
trees in the background were in Worsley Bridge
Rd, not visible today as the factories block the
view. The garden in the foreground was used to
build dressing rooms, now joined on to the
pavilion
To
be concluded
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