Sydenham, Middlesex
Historical Description
Sydenham, a suburb of London, within the parliamentary borough of Lewisham, and in the administrative county of London. The L.B. & S.C.R. has a station at Sydenham, and another at the Crystal Palace; the Mid Kent line of the S.E.R. a station at Lower Sydenham; and the L.C. & D.R. stations at the Crystal Palace and Upper Sydenham. It was originally a small village, adjacent to mineral springs; rose, through temporary celebrity of these springs, into considerable importance; attracted numerous families to permanent residence, by the salubrity of its air and the beauty of its environs; rose into further prominence through the erection in its vicinity of the Crystal Palace; is now a very fine metropolitan suburb, with a multitude of handsome villas and good roads all round it. Most of the chief features, within the limits and immediately adjacent, have been noticed in our articles CRYSTAL PALACE, FOREST-HILL, PENGE, SYDENHAM ANERLEY, NORWOOD, LEWISHAM, and others. St Bartholomew's Church was built in 1830, and mainly rebuilt in 1874-75. Christ Church was built in 1854. St Philip's Church occupies the site of the mineral well, was built in 1869 at a cost of £6350, and is in the Early English style, and cruciform. The church of St Michael and All Angels is a building of stone in the Perpendicular style. Holy Trinity Church was built in 1867, and is in the Gothic style. St Matthew's is a structure of brick in the French-Gothic style, and was erected in 1879. There are also Roman Catholic, Wesleyan, Primitive Methodist, and Bible Christian chapels; a public lecture-hall, a school-college, a handsome Tudor edifice, with a large staff of professors, a literary institution, a working men's institution, and a horticultural society. The statistics and value of the livings are given in the article LONDON.
Land and Property
A full transcript of the Return of Owners of Land in 1873 for Middlesex is online.
Newspapers and Periodicals
The British Newspaper Archive have fully searchable digitised copies of the following Kent newspapers online:
- Kent & Sussex Courier
- Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald
- Dover Express
- Kentish Gazette
- Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgate & Cheriton Herald
- Kentish Chronicle
- Maidstone Telegraph
Visitations Heraldic
The Visitation of Kent, 1619 is available on the Heraldry page, as is also The Visitation of Kent, 1663-68.