Lost Hamlets: In Search of Bedon Well

My newest Lost Hamlets Video is now up on YouTube!

Here’s the script:

In my previous video, “In Search of Wricklemarsh”, I mentioned my assumption that it was a lost hamlet. We have quite a few of them in what is now south east London. Many still exist in our (sub)urban consciousness as “where the local shops are” but often all that remains is a road name and a couple of suspiciously old houses surrounded by later developments.

This is the case for the one which always “springs” to mind for me: the lost hamlet of Bedon Well. It’s very familiar, as I go through it a lot on the bus and used to walk all over the area as a care worker. It was a great way to stay in shape. Anyway, it turns out that so is searching for lost hamlets and so I decided that Bedon Well had to be next on my list.

Before we turn to the old maps, here’s where I’m talking about in modern times. We’re in the area north of the old Roman road of Watling Street, on the Kent side of Shooters Hill. Bedonwell Road is marked in pink.

The hamlet is named on Edward Hasted’s 1778 map. It is visible but not named on the 1805 Ordnance Survey map then named in the 1863 map. Closing in on the detailed 1870 edition we have a lovely view of the field boundaries and the hamlet. The springs and stream can be seen more clearly on the 1898 map, as can the encroaching suburbs.

So, the Bedon itself is a very minor tributary of the Thames and is mostly culverted now and we meet it where it is set free to join the River. We’re on the Thames Path by Corinthian Manorway, in Erith, also where the Green Chain Walk starts.

There’s no safe access to the foreshore here, so we’ll just have to enjoy a wider view. It’s not far off low tide, making it easy to imagine how this area might have looked in less industrial times – more reeds, less rubbish, and stretching for miles. The whole area between Woolwich and Erith would have been malarial swamps until the medieval monks of Lesnes Abbey started building the river walls and reclaiming farmland.

I know very little about “north of the River” and on checking Google maps I’m kinda perturbed to discover that Frog Island across the River there – which I assumed was some sort of nature reserve – is in reality the Waste Management Facility for the East London local authorities. The tumulus at the top there is the actual landfill.

For some reason, it’s at this point in writing my script that I remember the late great Erithite Linda Smith saying Erith wasn’t twinned with anywhere- but it did have “a suicide pact with Dagenham”. It’s so nice round here, non-locals might have to take my word for it but it’s a brilliant joke.

We will next head to Holly Hill Open Space, by Riverdale Road, the north side of the Bedon’s valley, and pick up the line of the stream there.

In 1493 a chap called Robert Henthorpe left three shillings and fourpence to mend “a well callyd Beton Well”, meaning “praying well”, but it’s also suggested that the name Bedon comes from an old English word “bydan” meaning “shallow valley”, and that is geographically accurate, as can be seen, although my back would beg to differ, at least on the way up.

Until relatively recently, the stream ran behind the houses on this stretch of Riverdale Road before joining an older culvert but was lost when the flats on the corner were built in the 1960s.
We have now descended to where the Bedon enters the drain, at the junction of Brook Street and Riverdale Road.

Like most of south-east London, the first suburban settlers round these parts were Victorian gentrifiers seeking the Kentish fresh air which would be doomed by their arrival; their tidy colonies were doomed in turn by the success of the railways that had first bought them here. Their villas were consumed by the inter- and postwar development that turned the area between the Bexleyheath and North Kent railway lines into what has been described as a nameless, “featureless sprawl”. This certainly looks true when glancing at a modern map and I think if forced at feather-point to name the area Bedonwell Road is in, most people would just say Bexleyheath or Belvedere. By which I don’t mean they’d say either of those options, but that “Bexleyheath or Belvedere?” would be their answer.

We saw on the older maps that back in the day the area was rather less anonymous, dotted with named hamlets, woods and farms. Some of these names survived to become modern road and estate names but others were lost with the arrival of suburban settlers. There was a big house and a smithy at Bedon Well, as well as a scattering of cottages. The stream fed the ponds serving the wealthy Parsonage Farm, once owned by the monks of Lesnes Abbey but by Victorian times owned by the wealthy Vinson family, who issued their own local trading tokens. The postwar development and allotments along Streamway are on the site of their farmland and watercress beds.

Bedonwell sits just south of Lessness Heath, the name of the Domesday settlement, the wider area when it was part of Kent and the heath itself. Part of that heath, to the east of the settlement, became known as Belvedere after the view and a later wooden tower built to look at it by local landowner Sir Culling Eardley, who inherited the land in 1847. He also improved the path over the heath to a road and built the first villa houses. As he continued to sell off his land and the railways arrived, a suburban village evolved and continued with the ancient name of Lessness Heath, quickly spreading as far as Bedonwell Road. However, it’s now usually known as Nuxley Village, a name applied by estate agents when Bexley Road, the road running north from Bedonwell, was renamed to Nuxley Road in 1939. The council road signs say Belvedere Village, but I don’t know anyone who actually calls it that.

Bexleyheath station is just to the south of Bedonwell, but it’s only in Bexleyheath because it’s where they put Bexleyheath station, and the town grew to meet it; the commercial centre is a good 10 minute bus ride away. Bexley New Town, as it was originally known, spread from the old Roman road over farmland and onto the heath which was once notorious for highwaymen. Here we see the area before the new town then its creeping progress towards the station, location marked with a pink spot, from 1805 before the town, to 1870, 1898, and then 1920, with the first new roads for the imminent explosion of interwar development.

We can still see the field boundaries and lanes reflected in the dense suburban layout of today, and some the developers turned into the main roads of the area, including Long Lane and Bedonwell Road. New roads included King Harold’s Way and Okehampton Crescent, which continued the line of the road to East Wickham.

Yeah, so that’s it, in terms of Bedonwell. There isn’t even an amusing historical name that sounds cheeky to modern ears. Apart from the UFO landings, there’s nothing interesting to report about this area.

Oh yes, the UFO landings! It turns out that this area is something of a hotbed of UFO activity. There was a sighting in 1952 over by Bexleyheath town centre, but then on a hot July Sunday in 1955 there was an actual UFO landing reported here, by multiple witnesses, including a young locum GP. Margaret Fry had been on her way with him to the doctor’s surgery in King Harold’s Way when she, the doctor and a load of kids had their close encounter, beginning when her car was overshadowed by the craft.

The UFO they saw was a classic flying saucer, which Mrs Fry described as “blue/ silver/ grey/ pewter texture, yet none of those colours.” Quite a group had been there, and the event had been covered in the local press after being reported by someone else. When the story was covered by the News Shopper fifty years later, they appealed for other potential witnesses and one of them, Rodney Maynard, who was 15 at the time, came forward.

He and his workmates were on their lunch at a building site here on Streamway and on hearing a commotion had run up to investigate. He confirmed he had seen a craft big enough to cover the junction and go over onto the pavements and described it as “black, sleek and streamlined with a surface like polished metal. It was very fine and beautiful. It certainly wasn’t a prank.” Mr Maynard saw it lift off from there and then hover briefly over the school before flying away.

Mr Maynard said he had never forgotten his close encounter, but told the Shopper he did not talk about it because “people would think you were barmy” and further, “our mums kept telling us we had not seen anything”.

Mrs. Fry, on the other hand, began a lifelong interest in ufology. Her 2004 book, available for Kindle, includes several other local sightings and encounters, and is £1.99 well spent as I had no idea we were so well connected round here. Pricelessly, Mrs. Fry also adds another layer of fun to the issue of where exactly we are, calling it Erith, reminding me that until the formation of modern greater London and with it the borough of Bexley in 1965, this area would have been in the borough of Erith, formed from the old Erith parish during the Victorian boom.

Mrs Fry describes further UFO incidents in the area in July 1978, including one witnessed by herself and several neighbours and another when an “egg shaped silver disc” flew down King Harold’s Way, witnessed by three older children, who she later interviewed and describes as “sensible”. As a fellow member of that generation, I like to think those safety films scared us into not being completely stupid, at least, but honestly? From the top of the 422 bus in good weather, the idea that this is something of an alien tourist route isn’t too far-fetched. It’s far more believable than the idea that this area is Erith!