Stoneleigh
Concrete oasis in the suburban desert
Adrift in a vast sea of suburban semi-detached houses you will find Stoneleigh station, which is a big concrete bridge (right) that straddles the railway line. On either side of the track there is a parade of shops, the larger being on the east side. Stoneleigh Broadway, ostensibly a main shopping street, is in actual fact an bloody enormous car park.
The station office itself lives in the bridge, and billposters apologise to passengers, who are apparently unable to buy returns to London because the ticket machines can't cope with them. Another poster excitedly tells commuters about the upgrades to the Isle of Wight line and Watford Junction station. It is dated 1988. This, along with the big grey structure it's housed in, makes one nostalgic for the USSR.
Residents of Zone 6, #21 – Stoneleigh
 | Arguing with husband: "NO! NO! Sainsbury's don't stock that! They never had! How could you think that?!" |
Stoneleigh Broadway, a long strip of quiet shops with Georgian-style red-brick council blocks on top, is best characterised by slightly weatherbeaten gift shops, electrical stores that sell 'Henry', dentists' surgeries no longer taking on NHS patients and groceries selling dead or dying flowers. The main focus is the Stoneleigh Inn, your average John Barras pub full of white people smoking and watching Chelsea. A couple of empty cafes lie with their doors propped open; one of which, The Avenue, promises an IQ test every Thursday evening.
Curios found in shop window of Gavantiques, Stoneleigh
- Rubber bowling balls
- Various porcelain cats
- Shiny silver bus on top of hardback book about the Royals
- Small model of a basketball with shapely female legs
There seems to be a large appetite around these parts for psychic readings and palmistry. The chemists, which incidentally sells 'Beddy Bear' microwaveable rabbits which are manifestly not bears in any way, shape or form, also advertises PSYCHIC READINGS BY ROSEMARY. One of the newsagents a letter from one of these psychic people, excerpted here, has been inexplicably blu-tacked onto the window:
To whom it may concern.
I have enclosed my CV... Following the last report of child abuse in the scouting movement involving over 5 thousand people to the police, I can offer you a service exchange, but I am still currently off sick receiving medication after having an Opiate spiked drink... I am dealing with the symptom but am feeling narcoleptic...
(continues in this vein for quite a while)
xxxx xxxxxxxx [Name removed], Psycho Analytical Psychotherpay and Hypnotherapy, specialist area's drugs, music, multimedia words and cultural language, food trade and multilevel marketing, design, abuse, rates may vary.
Erm, right then.
The only other major feature of the larger part of Stoneleigh Broadway is right at the end of the strip. Here you can find a large roundabout with palm trees on. Just poking above the tops of the trees there's a CCTV camera.
Cross the concrete bridge and you get to a tiny parade of shops that still manages to include a dentist, an antique shop and some kind of takeaway. Opposite there is a small church with the parish hall practically on the station platform. The noticeboard outside, which advertises such religious endeavours as Jim The Clown, has a nasty infection of WordArt.
Alas for Stoneleigh, there's not much else here unless you dive into the world of semi-detachedness. There are roundabouts sponsored by garden centres liberally dotted around the residential streets, and the odd strange-looking house; if you keep your eyes peeled, you can find a stained-glass attic. If you manage to make it through the maze to the main road, you will see another long parade of shops equally as pointless as those near the station, featuring the rather unpromisingly badly-spelt Spanish language school "Don Quijote".
As an aside, if you look at a train map and at an A-Z, you will see Stoneleigh jumps straight from Zone 4 into Zone 6, and there really isn't much of an enormous distance between the place and the previous station, Worcester Park. This injustice was not lost on one reader of South West Trains' E-Motions rag, who asked the then MD of SWT, Andrew Haines, in an online 'meet the punters' session, what the fuck was going on.
Haines replied: "The zones were set in the 1980s between BR and London Underground, and as Stoneleigh Station actually lies outside the Greater London boundary I think it is unlikely that you will succeed in getting Stoneleigh moved from Zone Six to Zone Five. Any move would require the agreement of TfL." So Cheam and Belmont are allowed to do it, but not you. Hardy har!
Statistics
Time to Zone 1 27mins on South West Trains (Vauxhall)
Last trains to Zone 1 Mon-Sat 2325 Sun 2329
What to do if you get stuck in Stoneleigh after the last train to Zone 1
Not far up the busy road into London you can find North Cheam, if you can find your way there through the acres of identical houses in the dark. Connect into the night bus network there with the superbly pointless N213, which goes between Kingston and Croydon and nowhere in particular inbetween.
(With many thanks to Geoff Marshall for chaperoning me around this area.)
