Chelsfield
Brigadoon with tinnitus
There's a persistent, low humming noise all over Chelsfield, a small, damp, hilly collection of houses on the other side of Orpington. Arriving by train deep into a cutting on the side of a hill, it's immediately obvious why this is. Half of the platform and the surrounding area is taken up by this thing – an enormous electrical substation:
The parts of the station you can touch without killing yourself are made of rotting metal and brown brick. There's a cafe ("warm and friendly... BBC News 24 on TV") and a taxi firm, but less welcoming are the notices for Save Waldens Farm, a campaign aiming to evict travellers from nearby land. It appeals to the heart: "Want to see the value of your houses halve?"
Chelsfield has a strange, unsubstantial feel about it, like it's going to vanish at any moment. Constant background hum sounds as if there's an alien spaceship slumbering under the hill. Not many people are about – in fact, most of the activity around involves getting into or out of cars – but it wouldn't be too surprising if any of the several Mitsubishis parked in the neighbourhood started buzzing loudly before disappearing through a wormhole. You can almost perceive a faint, blue glow around several cats roaming the area. One wouldn't want to risk stroking them unless you were wearing rubber soles.
Residents of Zone 6, #31 – Chelsfield
 | A jowly old man gets out of the car dressed in funeral clothing, but is carrying a bright orange birthday present. |
There are a mixture of well-off houses with the car : window ratio set around 4:15, and tidy tan-coloured blocks of flats. The high street, or what approximates to it, contains no more than seven shops. These include a Thresher's, a curry house and a Doors Galore. The vet, which is where cats must get plugged in and recharged, has silhouettes of several very fey, limp-wristed animals on the front.
Entertainment? There's the obligatory pub, which in a stroke of brilliant imagination is called the Chelsfield. Instead of a kebab stand outside, there's a flower stall. It's quite possible to believe that nothing has ever happened here in Chelsfield.
On now to Chelsfield Village, a quite different place to Chelsfield; the two are separated by a three-quarter mile, arrow-straight road with no pavement. You can walk from the station to the village along a thin verge if you feel like taking your chances with the traffic.
Litter dropped from car windows between Chelsfield and Chelsfield Village:
- Beer cans
- Cigarette ends
- Polystyrene coffee cups
- Orange peel
- An empty packet of 20 cocktail sausage rolls. Pig.
When you break out of the hedgerows, by dodging into somebody's potato field, the views from here are quite pretty. The potato field leads to a well-tended graveyard, a description one might be tempted to use on Chelsfield itself. It belongs to St Martin of Tours, which at the time of visiting has raised the £293,000 needed to build an ugly extension. There's a spiky ploughshare statue outside the church, and the area around it is quite Goth-like; you expect to see old ladies wearing purple makeup and black-rinse hair coughing on clove cigarettes outside.
Chelsfield Village is tiny, although there are buses back to Orpington from here. It's a small collection of candy-coloured terraced houses with matching parking spaces. It's also a strange place to put a private clinic, Chelsfield Park, that specialises in cosmetic surgery and stomach stapling. There's an allotment outside – what the scarecrows are made of I wouldn't like to speculate.
Statistics
Time to Zone 1 29mins on South Eastern (London Bridge)
Last trains to Zone 1 Mon-Fri 2330, Sun 2223
What to do if you get stuck in Chelsfield after the last train to Zone 1
Take a cab back to Orpington with the not-at-all-scary-honest cab firm outside the station entrance.
