LONDONERS PLEASE....
 

Hi

I will be in London late this year and through the wonders of facebook have reconnected with a friend from International School in Ibadan. She now lives in Sydenham and suggested we meet her there and then we can go and celebrate.

I googled Sydenham but got only a very generalised idea. What sort of suburb/location is it?

Go to
UpMyStreet http://www.upmystreet.com/
for a profile of the area

It's just a typical south London suburb - inoffensive but not exactly exciting. Like most of London really.

Check it out here http://www.livinginlondon.net/SE26.htm

Many thanks

It looks like a family sort of suburb with dare I say few if any dining places and it seems that the public transport is somewhat lacking.

One of the sites said it was a suburb with a large number of black people - is it a suburb where migrants congregate? If so I would have expected some good dancing clubbing places or am i looking at it from the Aussie perspective?

You're seeing things from an Australian perspective.

There's no correlation between being black and being an immigrant, and hasn't been for a few decades. And the thought of Polish plumbers having the time, or Somali refugees having the money (or permission from Mohammed) to booze it up in bopperies is positively surreal. Sydenham's where immigrants' children and grandchildren go and live.

In fact the only real connection bewtween recent migration, bohemianism and Sydenham was back in the 1870s when a bunch of French Impressionists, most famously fronted by Pissarro, brought their filthy foreign habits (and art) to Sydenham's then-leafy lanes.