Patrick Comerford
There was a time in the 1970s and 1980s when I seemed to know the area around Lewisham in south London quite well, staying occasionally with family connections in Catford at a time when I was very active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and speaking at some of the large anti-war demonstrations in London.
Catford was only half an hour’s walk, at most, from Comerford Road in Brockley, and both are in the London Borough of Lewisham. Yet, in all those years, I never visited Comerford Road until yesterday afternoon.
I caught a bus from Waterloo to the junction of Brockley Road and Comerford Road at lunch time on Tuesday afternoon, and in the summer sunshine enjoyed the opportunity to explore a part of London I had never known before.
Comerford Road is in the SE4 postal code area and is immediately off Brockley Road, facing the main entrance to a large local cemetery. The area developed rapidly from market gardens, pear orchards and brickfields into a built-up residential shopping hub during the Victorian suburban boom.
Brockley may mean ‘Broca’s clearing in the woods’ or perhaps ‘the clearing by the brook’. Brockley was once in Kent, but it has been part of London from 1900 on. It first developed as a small settlement on the Lewisham side of the boundary between Lewisham and Deptford. Today, it stretches from Lewisham Way to Forest Hill.
Before the rapid Victorian expansion, the land sat within the ancient Manor of Brockley, created in 1189. It lay near the path of the Croydon Canal, which opened in 1809, and historic agricultural routes.
The area was built up in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. Until that time the principal buildings were Brockley Farm, Manor Farm, Brockley Hall, the home of the Noakes family of brewers, and the Brockley Jack public house, then a picturesque timber-framed building owned by the Noakes family and said to have been a favourite haunt of highwaymen. The old Brockley Jack was once one of the most photographed pubs in south-east London.
The London and Croydon Railway, which runs through Brockley, opened in 1839, but Brockley Station was not built until 1871. Brockley Lane station, now closed, followed in 1872, and Crofton Park station in 1892.
The area of the original Brockley is now called Crofton Park, after the railway station which in turn was named after a building estate. The central focus of Brockley has since become the junction of Drakefell, Shardeloes, Brockley and Upper Brockley Roads, which is known as Brockley Cross.
The north part of Brockley was owned by the Tyrwhitt-Drake family who developed the estate – previously used for market gardening – from the late 1840s. They built substantial three- or four-storeyed houses for the professional classes, though many were later divided into flats.
Comerford Road was developed and named during the late Victorian expansion of the area in the 1870s to 1880s. However, I have been unable to find sources that confirm suggestions that Comerford Road in Brockley was named after Maurice Comerford (1853-1920), who was involved in establishing The Stage newspaper. Maurice Comerford was the business manager and co-founded the entertainment trade paper The Stage in 1880 with the founding editor Charles Lionel Carson.
There are certainly other possibilities for the origins of the name of Comerford Road, and there were Comerford families in nearby Deptford from the early 19th century.
For example, Michael Comerford (1814-1867). He was born ca 1814, in Deptford, then in Kent but now part of the East End of London. He was the immediate ancestor the Comerford family of music hall artists and actors. They were also descended from some of the most interesting Sephardic families of Seville, Venice, Amsterdam and the East End of London.
The building on the corner of Comerford Road and Brockley Road dates from 1840, and by 1900 the junction of Comerford Road and Brockley Road had been firmly established as a local parade. Old postcards from the time show the junction as a central shopping parade, overlooked in the distance by Saint Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, built in 1882.
Saint Mary Magdalen Church was built at the corner of Comerford Road and Howson Road in 1898-1899, and was designed by the architect Young Bolton.
Many parts of Brockley and Crofton Park were damaged during World War II, particularly by V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets, and the area north of Crofton Park Station on Brockley Road suffering many strikes.
Comerford Road suffered bomb damage on the first day of the Blitz, 7 September 1940, when houses at 46-48 and 41-53 Comerford Road were damaged. An incendiary bomb fell on enclosed ground at rear of 75 Comerford Road, and a time bomb damaged Saint Mary Magdalene Church on 16 September 1940.
At its west end, beside Saint Mary Magdalen Church, Comerford Road is crossed by Howson Road, where the poet and painter David Jones (1895-1974) lived for much of his life. Other famous residents of Brockley have included the Irish socialist Jim Connell (1852-1929), author of the anthem ‘The Red Flag’, the actress Lillie Langtry (1853-1929), the radio and music hall comedian Will Hay (1888-1949) and the comedian Spike Milligan (1918-2002).
Brockley was named in 2021 as the best area of London to live in. In many ways, By and large, Comerford Road is typical of a part of south-east London that remains rich in Victorian and Edwardian domestic architecture, historic trees and original lanes and mews.
The outstanding feature on Comerford Road is Saint Mary Magdalen Church at 73 Comerford Road with a War Memorial in the church grounds that has a Grade II listing of its own.
But more about the church on Comerford Road and its war memorial in the days to come, hopefully.
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