Summer 2021 also saw the return of a number of fabulous events in Penge and Cator.  These are just a few:

• Penge Day, with the amazing Dinosaurs walking amongst us, live music and stalls, plus a SE20 Street Art Trail and Heritage Trail
• Pengefest, a German style beer festival with oompah band, beer and sausages, and stalls
• Paws in the Park, a dog show family event with competitions and stalls
• Penge Festival, including the Penge Fete on Royston Fields
• Live music at the Bowl in CP Park, numerous pop, rock, dance and classical gigs
• Performances and plays at the Bridge House Theatre
• Maple Road market, a small for now, market returned to its historic home, with monthly stalls

Next up, after the Halloween Trail, will be Pengemas in early December.

The post Prepare to be scared – PTB Halloween Trail returns and a look back at 2021 events appeared first on Penge Tourist Board.

The Bridge House offers intimacy as a theatre space. Now well-established as a Fringe venue, it also boasts decent lighting, good-quality sound and some mercifully comfy seats. The whole space is utilised in this show and on the way in, the audience is greeted by actors playing musical instruments as they set the tone for a friendly evening of story-telling and music.

The story starts on Christmas Eve, in the Victorian office of Ebenezer Scrooge. It is the seventh anniversary of his former business partner’s death and the ghost of said Jacob Marley returns to warn Scrooge he has quite a night ahead of him. Marley tells Scrooge to mend his ways, to reject making money at other people’s expense and get back in touch with his humanity. He also mentions that he will be visited by three ghosts. So follows Scrooge’s journey to himself as the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future take this businessman on a whistle-stop tour through his life. He revisits key childhood moments, views the Christmas of his contemporaries and ends up looking at his own bleak future. Terrified, Scrooge begs for a second chance. Happily, Dickens chose to give him one and ‘A Christmas Carol’ has a happy ending.

This production emphasises Community. From the warm welcome onwards, the audience is invited into Scrooge’s world. The set is reasonably simple but the lights and the sound combine to create a number of believable locations, as Scrooge is whisked from one part of London to another by the Christmas Spirits. There are a few songs and plenty of incidental music to support the action. The combination of guitar, cello and piano works well, with the original music by Ben Woods featuring just enough to add but not so much it drowns out the play. This is not a musical, it’s a show with music. Near the interval, there’s even a game of Charades involving the audience. This is a night out prepared with audience enjoyment and comfort firmly in mind.

Rachel Izen’s Scrooge manages the transformation in character credibly. However, perhaps the most impressive aspect of her performance is its androgyny. Her Scrooge is a believable man but, without too many of the traditional scowls, his humanity becomes visible. Izen’s is a three-dimensional, controlled performance that makes sense of Scrooge’s redemption. Ben Woods delivers with a clear love for Dickens’ language as his voice works the theatre space like velvet. Jamie Ross offers a decent Bob Cratchitt, though his real tour-de-force is a buoyant Scottish ‘Spirit of Christmas Present’. Saoria Wright slips effortlessly between characters, at least once mid-sentence. She also plays a mean cello.

This is an ensemble piece. The cast need to move precisely on a small stage and deliver their lines with similar accuracy as characters appear and disappear, sometimes in quick succession. This being a first night, there were a few fluffed lines and one or two slightly clumsy moments of stagecraft. However, this is an intricate production, as The Bridge House once again offers fringe theatre that is a cut above the rest. Director Guy Retallack will be tweaking and tightening for a few days yet. If previous experience is any guide, this production will mature, quickly, with age.

A timely reminder of the need for Community in a time of food banks and the Homeless on London’s streets, ‘A Christmas Carol’ is an enjoyable, musical production. The CEO of Amazon would certainly get something from this good night out at The Bridge House.

Jon Preston, November 2019

Tickets from https://www.bhtheatre.com/whatson/index.php

The post A Christmas Carol at the Bridge House Theatre – A Review appeared first on Penge Tourist Board.

The campaign has already attracted hundreds of supporters, including local residents, businesses and award-winning architects Tonkin Liu. This week the Mayor of London confirmed his support for the plan, pledging £30,000 towards the scheme as part of ‘Crowdfund London’.

However, the charity still needs to raise more than £35,000 between now and 17 December.

Individuals and businesses can pledge at https://www.spacehive.com/bridges-to-the-crystal-palace-dinosaurs.

Please give what you can to help these iconic Penge beasts.

Here’s more info about what the funds will be used for, from the Spacehive site:

The Dinosaurs are a unique set of sculptures in Crystal Palace Park. They are located on islands which the public can’t usually get on to. The sculptures are Grade I listed heritage assets and are internationally important, as they were a pivotal event in the history of science. The Friends of the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs are frequently asked ‘Can we get onto the islands, get up close & find out more about the Dinosaurs?’ This is currently possible only a few times per year, when we pay to have an expensive and ugly temporary bridge erected. We need a new, permanent bridge. A physical bridge to the island will enable us to build imaginative bridges to the past. With a bridge we can deliver an exciting, interactive programme of events on ‘Dinosaur Island’ on a regular basis. We will run tours by experts in history, science, art and conservation. Volunteers will be able to get stuck in to projects around the sculptures. Gardeners and conservators can keep the site in shape.

What we’ll deliver:

• A permanent, elegantly-designed bridge to Dinosaur Island
• Regular tours of Dinosaur Island
• Greater access for wider community engagement, schools, conservation and maintenance
• Increasd security for the site

Why it’s a great idea:

The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs are a unique and widely-loved symbol of the local area. They were built in the 1850s in the grounds of the Crystal Palace and were the first ever life-sized reconstructions of extinct animals. 95% visitors told us in a recent survey that they would like a tour of the island. A new bridge would allow us to run tours for around 1200 people per year, helping to build love of the Dinos, an understanding of the history of the local area and of natural history among a wide range of residents – the Dinosaurs are loved by young & old. Increasing visitor numbers to the park could help to improve the mental health of our population: there are strong links between well-being & spending time in the outdoors, learning new things and spending time with friends & family. A permanent bridge will also allow easier access for wider engagement, access for other groups & make routine maintenance easier & cheaper – helping to conserve the Dinosaurs for the long term.

Steps to get it done:

• 15-16 September 2018: Dino Days – launch of project at Heritage Open Days weekend
• September- December 2018: fundraising
• September – December 2018: finalise bridge design
• Early 2019 – June 2019: bridge construction
• Summer 2019 onwards: delivery of tours & volunteer events

The post Last call to help fund the Bridge to Penge’s iconic dinosaurs appeared first on Penge Tourist Board.

Even the weather Gods smiled down on SE20 with the early rain clouds lifting for the duration of the event.   The children made their merry way down the High Street collecting stickers before reaching the Bridge House, where they received an Easter egg and and a chance to lay down some dance moves to a child friendly disco.

All told, two hundred and fifty littluns took part, many dressed in bonnets, bunny ears, etc, and a good time was had by all.

We are very grateful to Ian and Judy of the Penge Traders Association and the eighteen traders who made the day so special:

Bridge House
Aqua dry cleaners
De Niros barber
Himalayan Kitchen
SE20 cycles
Chez Yves
Penge Bistro cafe
Favorite chicken
McDonalds
Solitaire Jewellers
Designer Drapes
Macks Chemist
Fashion House
Property World
SE20 dry cleaners
Dew Beauty
Goldsmiths Pub
Alexandra pub

Also a big thank you to the Bluebelle Cafe, Brian McGee and Roger and Jean at the Penge East Community Centre who contributed money to fund the day’s activities.

The post Penge Easter Trail 2018 appeared first on Penge Tourist Board.

Let’s face it, Penge is widely regarded as a bit of a joke, and a lot of that is down to its name. But why exactly is the name thought to be so funny? Is it because it’s a single syllable? Is it the dialectical interplay between the initial plosive ‘P’ and the extended nasal ‘enge’? I have no idea. But those of us who choose to live here must simply learn to live it.

In fact, Penge is a very unusual place-name: the only pre-English, British place-name in Greater London. As we’d expect, most places around here have English names: Beckenham, Bromley, Croydon, Dulwich and Sydenham are all modern versions of good old English place-names which go back to Anglo-Saxon times. But Penge is older still. It derives from the British language spoken by the native population before the Anglo-Saxon settlement, the language from which modern Welsh is descended.

The name has two parts. The ‘Pen’ part means ‘head’ or ‘hill’ or ‘high’ or possibly ‘end’. The ‘ge’ part is a squashed survival of the word ‘coed’ which means ‘wood’. If Penge’s name were English, it would be something like Woodhill, or Woodhead, or Woodend, or High Wood, all of which would be sort of OK, but much less interesting, less exotic, than Penge.

How did this ancient British place-name survive so long? We know that this whole area was heavily wooded (it was part of the Great North Wood, remembered in ‘Norwood’), so maybe it was a sort of refuge, where British-speakers kept their own language alive while most of their neighbours came to speak English.

There are other place-names in South London which hint at the same thing. The ‘Camber’ in ‘Camberwell’ may be related to ‘Cymry’ which is the modern Welsh word for Welsh people. And in nearby ‘Walworth’ the ‘Wal’ element may be related to the word ‘Welsh’ itself. The implication is that, during the Anglo-Saxon settlement, English only became the dominant language very slowly, and for a while there was an ethnic and linguistic patch-work, with some British-speaking communities hanging doggedly on. And in one case – the case of Penge – the British place-name hung on for so long, and became so familiar to English-speakers as well, that it stuck.

Penge enters written history as ‘Paenge’ in a charter of 957, issued by King Eadwig:

Herto ge byreo se pude pe hatte Paenge . seofen milen . seofen furlang . and seofen fet embeganges. (“Hereto belongeth the wood that is called Penge, seven miles and seven furlongs and seven feet round about”).

The place to which Penge ‘belonged’ was the manor of Battersea, which then occupied a large swathe of South London. Battersea owned Penge for its woods, valuable both for grazing animals, and as a source of timber for building.

Incidentally, this link between Penge and Battersea continued for the next 900 years. Even today you can see a metal boundary post in Upper Norwood which reads ‘Battersea 1854’. This seems insane given that Battersea is nearly ten miles away. But in 1854 the post was quite correct: it was marking the boundary between Penge – then a “detached hamlet of Battersea” – and Croydon.

After 957, Penge’s next documentary appearance was in a charter of 1067. In that year, fresh from his victory at Hastings, William the Conqueror gave Battersea to the Abbot of Westminster – which meant that the Abbot was also entitled to “the hunting of the Wood which appertains to Battersea”, that wood being Penge.

There is another oblique reference in the Domesday Book of 1086, where Battersea’s wealth is said to include “wood for fifty hogs of pannage” – that is to say, enough acorn-producing woodland to graze fifty pigs. Again, this must be Penge, because Penge was the only extensive woodland that Battersea possessed.

An intriguing document from King John’s reign records a legal settlement between the Abbot of Westminster, and William de Ginnei and his wife Matilda from Beckenham. The settlement stated that “his wood of Pange” belonged to the Abbot; but it also granted William and Matilda, alone among Beckenham residents, extensive rights to graze their pigs, cattle and sheep in the woods. This looks like a pretty good result for a middle-ranking couple up against one of the most powerful churchmen in the land.

Even 400 years later, when Penge started to appear on printed maps, it was still identified as a wooded, rural, ‘green’ place. In John Speed’s 1610 map of Surrey it is shown as ‘Pensgreene’, and in John Rocque’s map of 1746 the cluster of houses around the Crooked Billet appears as ‘Penge Green’, with Penge Common stretching round to the north and west.

So, the next time some idiot pokes fun at Penge, you can round on them and say:

Aha! The joke is on you, my friend! For Penge is a unique survival from the ancient British tongue which is ancestral to modern Welsh!! I wonder if you can laugh at that!!!”.

And you will find that indeed they can.

You can read more about the history of Penge in Martin’s terrific book ‘The Making of a London Suburb: Capital Comes to Penge’, available in local bookshops and online.

The post Would Penge by any other name smell so sweet? The origins of the P word appeared first on Penge Tourist Board.

The event was backed by the Mayor of London as part of a community programme. Members of the Pengelicious team succesfully pitched to the Sadiq Khan’s community funding team to secure the final funding for the food fair, but the majority of the funds was raised from within the local community, with over 150 individuals contributing to the set-up costs and many more local businesses (including  propertyworld, Designer Drapes, Kirvan Bond, Premier Food & Wine and The Bridge House) providing sponsorship.

The event took place in beautiful sunshine in Penge’s picturesque Recreation Ground and featured a number of stalls offering food from around the world including Algerian, Caribbean, Nepalese, Jamaican, Persian and Chillean (geddit) oh and Porcine (ok BBQ ribs!), as well as local craft ales.  Also present were the record breaking Penge Food Assembly, who source great ingredients for residents all year long, and for a bit of fun, the event had cooking competitions for the enthusiastic amateurs.

The turnout exceeded all expectations, so expect Pengelicious 2017 to be even bigger and better!

Here are some highlights of the event:

Busy, busy, busy!

Penge Food Assembly

Tasty offerings from Cafe Chic

Mmmm beer…

A Penge bake-off delight

Winner of the Pimp My Plate competition: Millie!

The post Pengelicious 2016: Penge’s First Food Festival appeared first on Penge Tourist Board.

This page summarises the event and says thanks to the amazing volunteers and shopkeepers who took part and helped to make it a very special day.

The event poster:

The Trail map:

A full sticker sheet:

The Designer Drapes bunny and chick:

Outside Propertyworld:

Littluns with booty:

Littluns with booty 2:

Party:

CREDITS

We all had a great time but thanks are due to the following people in particular:

The participating shops:

Goldsmiths Pub – 1
Property World – 2
SE20 Dry Cleaners – 3
Fun Cuts – 4
Dew Beauty and Wellness – 5
Macks Chemist – 6
Designer Drapes – 7
Murray Bros – 8
Cafe Casbah – 9
Fashion House -10
MacDonalds -11
Fosdicks – 12
Solitaire Jewellers -13
Chic Boutique – 14
Penge Cafe Bistro – 15
Crooked Billett – 16
Maple Road Cafe – 17
Bonnys Beauty – 18
SE20 Cycles – 19
Bridge House Pub – 20

The staff and managers at the Goldsmiths and Bridge House for letting us use their facilities and being so patient.

The Penge Traders Association, especially Judy and Ian of Designer Drapes and Andy at Press Gang for so much hard work printing the stickers, acquiring the eggs, etc.

Rosie for DJing

Additionally, the following were unable to take part but wanted to support us financially:

Galloways Estate Agents
Kirvan Bond Solicitors
Press Gang
Roger at the Penge East Community Centre
Ewings Solicitors
Bluebelle Cafe
Baxter Lambert
Kathy Bance (local councillor)

We also collected lots of money for the Penge Day 2 event and the Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs community group.

Thanks once again for being such a great community,

Team PTB

The post Penge Easter Trail 2016 – In Pictures appeared first on Penge Tourist Board.

Mmmm, if we can wait that long… where’s the phonebook…?

NB: Closing date for votes 9 February 2016.

The Best Takeaway in SE20 is..

The post Vote for the Best Takeaway in SE20 appeared first on Penge Tourist Board.

Come nightfall, Penge High Street is pretty much a ghost town, bar the inviting pub lights. But Friends of Flavours, located on Green Lane just past the old police station, is a shining beacon. Michael, along with chef Bruno Guidi, and a rotating crew of waitresses and waiters have made this restaurant not just a rare sit-down eatery in a sea of takeaways, but a destination venue that attracts customers from Penge but also Beckenham, Crystal Palace, Sydenham and beyond.

Serving authentic and high quality Italian food with a Neapolitan flavour owing to Michael’s upbringing in the port city of Naples, assorted Napoli football team memorabilia decorating the restaurant’s walls, its focus on pasta, seafood and meat dishes — eschewing typical staples like pizza — differentiates it from the pack (and helpfully Sicilian Art down the road).

Having recently been spruced up with a new covered terrace area practically doubling the size of the place, most nights it’s busy, and packed at weekends. Up for best local restaurant in the Time Out Love London Awards, it came top in the first round, so Friends of Flavours is clearly a heavyweight contender. Penge Tourist Board sat down with Michael to learn more about one of Penge’s biggest draws…

What’s the history of the restaurant? You used to be in Clock House, right?

“It used to be Flavours then. Initially it was a deli kind of thing, it opened in 2001. When you start up you have to start something small. Eventually we did a restaurant there and it was going well. Unfortunately I was not getting on with the landlord, so I closed that one down. The lease expired actually. And I meant to do a coffee bar here [in Penge].”

So Friends of Flavours was a coffee bar to start with?

“We had ice cream, nice coffee. It was 2009, when I started I still had Flavours.  In the beginning it was going well, we had all this chocolate, very trendy expensive stuff. People were coming in, but then in the credit crunch, the first thing you cut is coffee, obviously. People lost their jobs. I closed and then reopened first as a pasta bar. I had a big row with Bromley council. It took a long time, they only allowed me to open up to eight o’clock, so I got fed up, closed completely, put up a sign explaining the situation to people. Eventually so many people wrote in, they had so many complaints, ‘Why don’t you try to help local businesses?’ Eventually they gave me the full [license], which means you can cook, can have a restaurant. It’s just over three years now as a restaurant.”

Why did you choose Penge for the new location of Friends of Flavours?

“I have a good deal here I must admit, and everybody was saying, ‘Penge is going up’. I had a look around and there was not much. So I said, ‘If we have nice coffee with a nice garden, I think we’ll do very well’.”

You’re from Naples originally. I just saw the Napoli team flag there actually…

“There’s a proper one there (he motions). It’s signed by players, somebody who used to work with the Napoli coach gave it to me, he used to come here.”

What influenced your choices with the menu? Is it a particular kind of Italian cuisine?

“Obviously being from Naples, I started this job in Italy. So you always grow up with some kinds of flavours, I think we all do. You remember when your mum used to cook a dish, those flavours remain in your palate forever. I’m from there and as you can see we’ve got a lot of seafood. We specialise in seafood, the seafood from Naples. Even if you go to north Italy, you see Napoli, they’re going to say, ‘Proper pizza, nice seafood’. We do everything, but seafood is our main thing, we eat it every day nearly.”

The restaurant is very popular. Have you been noticing it getting busier in the last year or so?

“I must admit for the first two years, we’d hardly get anyone from Penge. Only my old customers. But the last year I think people from Penge started to appreciate it. They like it, so we do get lots of locals now.”

You’ve lived in Penge for a long time…

“I’m a Penge boy! (laughs). I’ve been in Penge for a while but I like it. Everyone says Beckenham, Beckenham, but I can’t see that much difference between Penge and Beckenham, obviously I’m not from here. To my eyes. I prefer our parks in Penge, even Crystal Palace Park, it’s a more natural kind of park, and I enjoy more walking there, for instance. It’s all small shops, even though they’re not building up yet. There’s potential. If you’ve got a big chain, they accommodate you very well, you get big premises. But they can never offer what you give, the quality and everything else with it.”

So you think that Penge would be better with more independent businesses?

“I think it has the potential, because the way I look at it, there’s already Crystal Palace, we’re kind of in the middle. I know what it’s like, as you start… once I was a little bit upset with the council because they really gave me a hard time, but they seem to be ok now. There seems to be lots of positive energy at the moment. A place I love and go to all the time for the coffee, is the Alexandra Nurseries, it’s really nice. I like the Bridge House too.”

What do you make of the pizza restaurant, Sicilian Art?

“It’s ok. The more places, the better. I don’t want to be big-headed but the quality at the price we give is very difficult to achieve. It takes years to achieve, it’s not easy. Even now, most of our customers, I think they come from Beckenham. We bring the customers here, still 70%. For people to come to a place that is not buzzing, means we must do something that people like, that they don’t find in Beckenham or Crystal Palace otherwise they wouldn’t be bothered to come here. Everybody thinks they’re the best in their head but you can only go with the response of the customer, what they think.”

Do you have regulars?

“Yeah funnily enough, I was saying to my friend the other day, ‘I can’t believe we have customers who’ve been coming for 15 years’. I don’t think it’s easy for any business. For instance, I remember a man met his wife here, they had a birthday party with friends. They’ve got kids, they’re married [now]. I’m very proud of that. They keep telling me I have to move to Beckenham. I won’t do it. It’s like a football team.”

You changed the menu recently, didn’t you?

“Yes. I made it smaller, slightly smaller. But I’m doing more specials. Something different. Before people didn’t like my menu, it was too small. But I don’t like to freeze stuff, I like to keep the menu small even though I know, the bigger menu the better. It’s hard, even though we have a vacuum pack machine, every fridge for everything, meat there, fish there, still it’s difficult to keep everything fresh with a big menu.”

So you have an emphasis on fresh ingredients?

“Yeah I’m not compromising that. We put the price up a little bit but we improved the quality. It’s important. We look to improve all the time, the more popular we get the better we’re going to improve all the time.”

Who else works for you?

“There’s Pollyanna, she’s a waitress, we’ve got Alina. Then we’ve got lots of part timers. Leo, a very professional waiter who works every weekend, Giacomo who is from Penge. Then we have Maria, who works on and off, Pietro. Lots of part timers, which is handy for us. We call it a long bench!”

You’ve been doing well in the Time Out Love London Awards. If you win, what do you want to do?

“Have a party on Penge High Street somewhere, we’ll get a stall and cook real pasta, two or three types of pasta, everybody can try it. Have a party to get the community together.”

Writer and Penge resident  Ben Murphy donned the bib and devoured the squid for the PTB.

The post Penge’s Passion for Pasta: Friends of Flavours appeared first on Penge Tourist Board.

Penge author David Owen has based his first novel on a spooky local legend. We met him to find out more…

One night, when David Owen was about seven or eight, he saw a police helicopter circling above his house on Chesham Road, beaming down a spotlight on the allotments out the back. They were looking for the fabled Penge Panther (also known as the Beast of Sydenham) – a big cat supposedly on the run in southeast London.

‘I can’t be sure it wasn’t a dream,’ he says, ‘but I think it’s real, because I’ve asked my mum about it and she remembers it as well. Just the other side of the allotments there’s a lady she knows who’d thought she’d seen it. The police came out with a helicopter and swept a searchlight over. I was only young, but the sight of the helicopter going over, and the idea of this thing being so close, was just really captivating.’

After that, the story would surface again every so often. In 2005, a man in Sydenham claimed to have been attacked in his back garden by a snarling creature the size of a Labrador. And in 2009 a jogger said he’d been chased through Dulwich Wood by what looked like a brown cheetah. ‘I’ve been fascinated by it ever since – whether it exists or not. Just the possibility of it,’ says David.

That fascination eventually inspired David’s first novel, Panther, which is published on 7^th May. It’s about Derrick, who lives with his mum and his seriously depressed older sister in a south London suburb stalked by a mysterious beast. When his life starts spiralling out of control, Derrick becomes obsessed with the idea of capturing the panther, which seems to embody the darkness and chaos engulfing his family…

Depression is often called ‘the black dog’. Was it a conscious decision to turn it into a black cat?

I think the panther just worked very nicely, because of this idea of something that’s really dark and powerful and can lurk easily, unseen… something that sort of disappears during the day – the way people suppress their depression to go about their daily lives – but is always lurking under the surface. And also something that people refuse to believe exists, which is a big problem with depression and mental health generally. Plus it tied really nicely into the memory I had of this thing that may or may not have lived round here.

Social media plays quite an important part in the plot. Do you think social media is having a negative effect on young people’s mental health?

Social media can really be a good or a bad thing – as in the book, you do get social media bullying, which is a big issue. Obviously if people want access to you to do harmful things, they can do it remarkably easily now. But at the same time, social media can be a really good outlet for people. If you’re feeling depressed, you can reach out to other people in a way that feels slightly more anonymous, without having to pluck up the courage to talk to someone face to face.

How much of the book is based on real people and places?

A lot of it is based on reality, but it very quickly took on a life of its own. The characters did start off as real people, but then they became people in their own right. And the same with the setting, really – it started as very much this area, but I’ve played a bit fast and loose with geography to fit with the story.

The character that’s closest to me is Derrick – there’s a fair amount of me in him. (Though I must point out that the crazy things he does in the book are not things I’ve done.) I hope that though he does fairly extreme stuff, he’s still quite likeable.

The story’s loosely set in Penge. There’s the allotments, obviously, and elements of the high street (you might recognise the description of McDonald’s being near Fashion House).  The butcher’s in the story I don’t think is there anymore. There was one – it might be a phone shop now? – at the far end of the high street, beyond Fosdick’s, on that side. I think it’s gone now.

Tell us about your Penge upbringing.

I’ve been here pretty much my entire life, really. I’ve only just moved away from Penge, for work. I lived here until I was 18 – I went to primary school at Royston, then on to Kelsey Park for secondary. Then I went to Winchester for university, where I studied creative writing. I ended up living there for a while afterwards, working in a pet shop. That was a bit rubbish, so I came back here for a fair few years while I did some freelance journalism. I wrote the book here, too.

How do you feel about Penge, having grown up here?

I do joke about Penge a fair bit but I definitely do it fondly. I do like it – it’s got a lot of personality in its own way. It’s obviously not the most glamorous place in the world, but that’s part of its charm. It’s got such a mix of people. Obviously there’s a lot of pound shops and betting shops and whatnot on the high street, which isn’t great, but there are some really interesting things happening here as well.

What do you think about the resurgence of Penge? Do you worry about it becoming over-gentrified?

Personally, I don’t feel too protective of it, if I’m honest, though I know some people are. My sister runs the SE20 Craft Fair, and I was manning her stall once while she was away. This guy who’d lived here all his life came up and started questioning me, and asking me whether I was new to Penge. I got the sense that if I’d said yes, he’d have been unhappy about it. But when I said I’d been here most of my life, it sort of appeased him.

It’d be a shame if it got completely gentrified and lost its personality. But at the same time, there’s no harm in trying to improve certain things about it, because there are definitely things about Penge that could be better. So we need a balance between the two, really.

Panther is published on 7^th May by Constable & Robinson. Find out more about David at www.davidowenbooks.com, or follow him on Twitter @davidowenauthor.

Photo caption: David Owen in front of the Lower Chesham Allotments, which inspired Panther.

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