#sydenham

[unteriors]

Niederwald Road, Sydenham, London.

[hotcelebsworld]

[kvetch19]

[walkingsophie]

Victorian Folly Ruins in Sydenham Hill Woods

[dame-de-pique]

Crystal Palace. The nave, looking towards the north. The length of the nave is 1608 feet; its width, 72 feet; and its height, from the floor to the top of the arch, 104 feet, 1850-60

[thefatmfanclub]

Dog Days Are Over unseen outtakes

By Tom Beard, shot in Sydenham Hill Wood (London), 2008

[londiniumlundene]

Sydenham Wells Park

In the 1640s, springs in the Sydenham area were discovered to have “medicinal” properties, attracting crowds to come to drink the waters. Amongst these visitors was King George III; it is said that as he took the waters a band played to drown out his curses, as the waters were very bitter. This could be attributed to large quantities of magnesium sulfate (Epsom salts), and it was perhaps this unpalatable nature of the water that led to the decline in the wells’ popularity and their covering in the early 19th Century.

After the arrival of the nearby Crystal Palace, and a subsequent increase in demand for housing in Sydenham, there were concerns that the wells would be built over. A local campaign group successfully lobbied to have the site of the wells turned into a public park, which opened in 1901. It was laid out with broad paths and ornamental gardens, with perhaps it most interesting feature being a miniature watercourse designed in imitation of the river Rhine, an apparent tribute to the small German community that lived in the area at the time.

Over the years features in the park have come and gone – bandstands, bowling greens, paddling pools, tennis courts, a quoits pitch, playgrounds and a sensory garden, to the point where it now resembles most other small landscaped parks of south London. One small distinguishing feature is that in 1995 the gardens of two Victorian houses were added to the park, creating a woodland nature area. The park has been a pleasant place to have visited whilst London remains under lockdown - although I am still uncertain whether the concrete channel is the remains of the supposed Rhine watercourse!

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Hospital closings = death

By Stephen Millies

Will hospitals be able to cope with all the expected patients during the Covid-19 pandemic? New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo doesn’t think so. He told NBC’s Today Show on March 19 that “the health care system is going to be overwhelmed.”

Just as capitalism has shut down thousands of factories in the U.S., so has it closed hundreds of hospitals. “Since 2010, 121 rural hospitals have closed. The National Rural Health Association says more than one-third of all rural U.S. hospitals are at serious risk of shutting down.”

For over 40 years, the capitalist class in New York City has been on a hospital-closing binge. Twenty-one hospitals in the city were shut just between 2000 and 2013. The biggest victims were the Asian, Black and Latinx communities. In Brooklyn, there are just two hospital beds per thousand people.