00 Old Photos – High Street Broadway

It’s hard to imagine Bromley when the lower high street was fields or suburban villas, but some of these photos bring those distant eras back. Even when the railway came to Bromley in 1850s, it took another 40 years before it became part of London, here’s a description from one of HG Well’s books (see our page for more):

“The outskirts of Bromstead [Bromley] were maze of exploitation, roads that led nowhere, that ended in tarred fences studded with nails… It was a multitude of uncoordinated fresh starts, each more sweeping and destructive than the last, and none of them ever really worked out to a ripe and satisfactory completion.”