Woodside
Woodside is a neighbourhood in Croydon located between Addiscombe and South Norwood. Woodside is a suburban zone of residential streets based around Woodside Green, a small sized area of green land.
At one end of the green is a war monument. It is surrounded by residential properties, with the main shopping parade at one end. Portland Road, an important distributor road, leads away from the green towards South Norwood, and has numerous more shops, eating places, pubs and a nice swimming pool. The green still has a somewhat village feel with several old houses and cottages around it. Housing is largely Victorian terraces or more modern developments of small flats. There are some appealing pubs including the Joiner’s Arms.
Woodside was first referred to in 1332, one of the older settlements in the area. It’s likely to signify ‘at the side of the Great North Wood’, which gives its name to Norwood. Woodside was largely farming land, but its heavy soil enabled a brick-making industry to form from 1815. The brickworks’ chimneys commanded the area, and following their closure in 1974, a new open space called Brickfield Meadows serves the residential area. Woodside Racecourse opened in 1866 on nearby Stroud Green Farm, now the site of Ashburton Community School, closing in 1890. Woodside station was built to serve visitors to the racecourse in 1871. The station was served by the Woodside and South Croydon Railway. It’s now served by Tramlink routes 1 and 2, with services to Croydon and the London Borough of Bromley.
Woodside Green.
One of the earliest records of Woodside Green is in an indenture of 1662 which mentions “land lying up on a green called Woodside Green”. The Croydon Enclosure Map of 1800 shows an area ” Woodside Green”. In 1870, an agent of the Ecclesiastical Commissioner instructed builders to dig out the ground plan of a church at the north eastern end of the land. A local resident saw this as an invasion of a public open space and therefore employed workmen to backfill the foundations as rapidly as they were dug. The Commissioners threatened legal action but eventually the matter was compromised and a site for the purposed church was found elsewhere.
In 1871 a grant of copyhold estate in Woodside was made at the general court baron of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to the Croydon Local Board of Health upon condition that it should be appropriated by the Boar “to be forever kept as an open space and used as, and for, a place of recreation for the use of inhabitants of the parish of Croydon and of the neighbourhood and for no other purpose”.
The area although more built up now, retains a small village feel.
