No Sleep 'Til Croydon

One day, long after our civilisation has crumbled and centuries after mankind has died out, alien beings will land on earth and stand puzzled amid the ruins of Croydon, wondering what this strange place once was. They’ll surely realise that London was the capital and wonder why they’ve found what looks like the remains of a great civilisation only ten miles away. Could it have been a breakaway republic? Or was London destroyed first and this place built as a replacement? After pondering this and realising it will forever remain a mystery, the visitors will return to their home planet and silence will descend over Croydon once again.

Unloved and unlovely, Croydon always comes across as an unwelcome growth on the underbelly of London and instead of basking in the glory of its proximity to the capital seems to have developed a reputation for being everything that London isn’t; whilst one stands for excitement and progress the other has become almost a byword for everything that’s suburban and mundane. David Bowie reputedly used the phrase ‘That’s So Croydon!’ to refer to anything boring and unadventurous, and the only time I ever heard about the place was when the latest murder there was reported on the news. So I knew I had to visit. I caught the 264 bus from Tooting and set out on my historic journey. What would await me? A shiny vision of the future? A grimy vision of the past? Or just a sign saying ‘WELCOME TO CROYDON. NO FATAL STABBINGS FOR 3 DAYS’?

Before it got to Croydon the bus dragged me through Mitcham. I’d spent a miserable six months there working in a temporary job and knew it to be the graveyard of hope, dreams and civilisation, so felt a distinct sense of unease until we’d passed through it. Barely a mile from a London postcode, it’s a different world entirely, a no man’s land of pound shops and budget supermarkets, where the inhabitants seem to spend half their time in Wetherspoon’s and the other half screaming at inanimate objects in the street and wondering how their lives have evaporated right before their eyes. To confirm how far from civilisation it was, there was even a Farmfoods, the supermarket for people who think Iceland is a bit too upmarket. And if Mitcham was like this then what would my ultimate destination be like? It didn’t take long to find out. The skyline of downtown Croydon soon appeared on the horizon and before long we had arrived.

I wasn’t sure if Croydon counted as London. The buses and Greater London boundary said yes but everything else said no and in the end it was the postcode that ruled it out: CR0. I found it slightly sinister that the first part of a postcode could have a zero in it, as if it was telling me that Croydon was a blank slate with its own language and customs. It was once the future, and ambitious town planners tried to turn it into a dazzling metropolis in the decades following the war, but something went wrong in the early 1970s and they abandoned the place along with anyone else who had any sense. I’d always thought Croydon was a new town, a Milton Keynes to satellite London, but found out it’s actually in the Domesday Book. In Croydon, nothing is real and everything is permitted.

I warily began to explore the place. What do people do for kicks around here, I wondered, apart from stab each other? As far as I could see, Croydon was simply a sprawling suburb with a few office blocks and shopping centres planted in the middle, with some of them large and modern and others virtually abandoned and only housing the occasional strange shop. One was a Spud-U-Like, which I didn’t even know was a real shop as the only time I’d heard of it before was when Wayne and Waynetta Slob considered naming their baby Spudulika before settling on Frogmella. Another shop was selling flags and decorations to celebrate American Independence Day. What was this, I wondered? Was it just another case of people celebrating something without grasping the history behind it, like Catholics celebrating Guy Fawkes Night, or had Croydon slyly broken away from the United Kingdom to become the 51st state?

I walked on. I didn’t want to buy anything so it appeared that Croydon had little to offer me. It seemed that it had been forgotten for thirty years until new buildings were put up at the turn of the 21st century, so the brutalist architecture of the postwar era sat uncomfortably side by side with recently constructed futuristic creations, and whilst John Betjeman had freely slagged off Slough, his verses about Croydon were altogether more elegiac and mournful. Once again, Croydon was a town of paradoxes.

One more thing occurred to me: had Croydon deliberately cultivated its mundane image in the hope that London would overlook it the next time it undertook some ruthless expansionism? I’d seen how Mitcham had gone from a leafy village with a pond and cricket pitch to a faceless semi-suburb and wondered if Croydon was keeping a low profile in the hope of avoiding a similar fate.

On the other hand, I couldn’t help feeling slightly disappointed that Croydon wasn’t as bad as I’d expected or even hoped; I’d gone on a glorious summer’s day and although it meant that there was a parade of burnt and glistening flesh on display as the townsfolk tried to make the most of the sunshine, it made Croydon look… almost beautiful.

But not that beautiful. Soon I had exhausted Croydon’s charms and headed back to the bus stop. Never had Tooting seemed so cosmopolitan. Before long I was back on the 264 and as the Croydon skyline finally disappeared from view I felt a shiver run down my back.
I had been to Croydon.
I was still alive.