Malham Road, Forest Hill, c. 1910

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The West Kent Park Estate, in the angle of Stanstead Road and Brockley Rise, was laid out c.1850 by a Farrington Street wine merchant named Arthur Gurney.

He was lucky to buy the fields a few years before the Crystal Palace boom hugely inflated the land prices in the area, but unlucky to have sold it again almost immediately in small plots.

As a result West Kent Park became a rare poor area, almost a slum, in the middle of wealthy Forest Hill.

Malham Road, which was originally called South Road, was demolished with nearly all of West Kent Park in the 1970s and replaced by flats.

See historic maps of Forest Hill