Purley

Tudor clapboard road junction finds God

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The first thing you notice when you arrive at Purley, a suprisingly mainline station given well, it's in Purley, is the enormous brick-red signal box. This is around forty feet tall, and appears to have been turned into a concrete mixer. If you leave the station through the back entrance into the vast car park, you find that it's joined by an England flag and a recycling centre. Somehow, the thing hasn't been knocked down and is being put to good use.

Pity the same can't be said of the station. Built in 1899, it's now a dank, dark turquoise drainpipe with the front wall of a Victorian house pasted onto the end. There are posters all over the walls showing pictures of cows and Brighton, and a constantly wailing ticket machine alarm. The damp ticket office has a community notice board, half of which is taken up by Purley Baptist Church (more of which later). Other notices include adverts for therapeutic counselling, and if that doesn't work, ladies-only kickboxing.

Residents of Zone 6, #28 – Purley

It's Radioactive woman, who is wearing three pots of foundation but still manages to be purple with sunburn.

The front of the station opens onto a cobbled forecourt of skips and empty shops. Here, Michigan's Hand Cleaners will remove your hands, clean them, and deliver them back to you next Thursday. A choice of dodgy pathways around a big brown turd of a car park wind their way down to one of Purley's main high streets.

On the corner of this street there lives the Bank of Scotland HQ, which is rather surprising considering Purley isn't in Scotland. It's served by quite a phenomenal range of restaurants, not all of which are popular. Thai restaurants outnumber the rest by a ratio of 3:1. The best one is the Chinese kebab shop, outside of which a man is smoking a hookah pipe.

Startlingly odd mascot on window of Mr Sausage greasy spoon, Purley

The central, beating heart of Purley is Purley Cross, which is less a cross and more the Hangar Lane Gyratory System drawn by a four-year-old. Catapulting traffic off in random directions through the town's one-way system, it's also home to Purley's Tesco. Down a ramp and under a bridge in the centre of the roundabout, there are loads of those talking Tesco trollies from the advert, probably using the subway to smoke crack.

Tesco in Purley is huge and is getting bigger; many sections of the shop (such as the 'home' store) are stored in prefabricated buildings while they expand the store. The sandwich section is a bit of a mess, but Tescos are as Tescos go.

Despite the ever-expanding Tesco, Purley does seem to have its share of weird shops dotted around its mental one way system. Nora's shoe repair shop sells bags, which is bad news if you are a shoe. There's a carpet shop called Keith Harris Carpets; luckily nothing to do with Orville the Duck. The Downlands Precinct Shopping Centre is a really successful try at making a mall that smells of piss. And there's a very expensive beauty salon:

But even bigger than the Tesco is Purley Baptist Church. You can tell something is amiss when you read the sign on the church information centre, which takes up a huge chunk of the roundabout in itself. How much land does this thing have?

Number one in the following list? A new church complex, of course. As for the church information centre, that's the place you pick up bus timetables. Why are they taking it upon themselves to do this?

Walk around to the front of the complex -- where you'll actually find the church -- past a dingy library and a huge residential care home called 'Sunrise Care' that looks closely modelled on the Bank of Scotland HQ. The church, a surprisingly small building considering the sheer amount of land that they must own, is advertising the 'God Zone' and 'Reflections'. There's even a basketball court here, with a skip graffitied THE CAGE: TUES 8:45. Come on! This isn't the Bronx. Churches don't need to graffiti skips.

The main road to Brighton, the A23, passes through Purley Cross. It goes beneath a huge blue-green noisy railway bridge. Afterwards, you hit countryside almost immediately, with countless Gatso cameras and squat brick shops that sell paint and terracotta and things. Thank goodness for Public Footpath 110, which winds up the embankment back to the station.

There is one thing Purley is excels at, and it's not just concerted attempts to baptise the town's population. It has achieved the award for the best tramp in Zone 6. He's blind, smokes roll-ups, and carries around a wooden carriage clock. Trampwise, now, that's unbeatable.

Statistics

Time to Zone 1 26mins on Southern (Victoria)
Last trains to Zone 1 Perhaps uniquely in Zone 6, trains to Victoria run throughout the night. After 0011, trains arrive at 22 minutes past every hour until 5am (33 minutes past on Sundays).

What to do if you get stuck in Purley after the last train to Zone 1

As just mentioned above, there's no last train from Purley. If you are determined to get the nightbus for retro or sado-masochistic reasons, get an N68 from just past the entrance to the big Tesco.