For centuries before the creation of Crofton Park, the London suburb we know and love, this area was a patchwork of fields and farms around Brockley Green. Here is a visual guide to the changes and shows where the modern streets and map follows the boundaries of those ancient fields and footpaths.
The original version of this map -- shown here sideways -- dates from Tudor times and is in London Metropolitan Archives. The Brockley Road is the orange line running (roughly) down the middle. In this illustration Mike has overlaid the field boundaries in red.
Here is a map from 1868 with much the same view as before. The pink line is the Brockley Road, which meanders down the middle with the cemetery to the right and fields marked on the left. Field borders are outlined in bold black lines, to the left.
Brockley Grove, as it is known today, is the pink line which branches off the Brockley Road and borders the north side of Brockley Hall. The thin red line cutting across the lower part of the page, from left to right is the public footpath, at that time running from Nunhead to Catford.
Today you can see parts of the same footpath, for example linking Buckthorne Road and Cypress Gardens.
This is the 1916 map of the area. Roads marked on the 1868 map are shown here in green. The Brockley Road is the green line running from top to bottom, and to the left; the field borders from earlier maps are overlaid in red.
The dotted line across the top marks the boundary between Lewisham and Greenwich.
On the left, near the bottom of this map, the old footpath from Nunhead crosses the railway line, the Brockley Road and the Brockley Hall estate -- where today it follows a similar route to Sevenoaks Road -- and ending on this map at Crofton Park Road.
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