A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how Woolwich was like an urban palimpsest: a modern area of London fast being redeveloped, but where you can still see fascinating fragments of the city’s history if you look. Of course, Woolwich isn’t the only suburb which you can say that about. Not far from Eltham is Lee Green, a small collection of houses and shops just south of Blackheath. I go through there fairly often on my way to Lewisham. It’s much smaller than suburbs like Greenwich, Woolwich or even Charlton, and indeed still has the aura of a compact little village. In fact I would even go as far as likening it to Alsager or even Swettenham in my native Cheshire: both are villages of less than a couple of thousand people, surrounded by fields.

Indeed, reading a bit about the history of Lee Green from one of the handy information boards in the area earlier, I learned that until the late nineteenth century, it was in fact a small village surrounded by fields. As you can read here, Eighteenth century maps show the area as little more than a collection of houses around a village green, surrounded by farmland and woodland. A large inn, The Old Tiger’s Head, dating back centuries, served customers coming through the village on their way between London and Dover; and in 1815 troops passed through the village en route to the Battle of Waterloo.

Such history fascinates me. Of course, the whole of London is full of stories like this, but it is only when you stop and look, when you take your time to find out about areas like Lee Green or Woolwich, that you realise how intriguing they are. Thousands of cars, busses and lorries thunder through that small area every day, around the roundabout which was once the green, oblivious to what was there a century or two ago. Yet to me, such areas are what make London so rich. It is a metropolis of thousands of such smaller spaces: all unique; all with their own fascinating histories; yet all coming together to form one vast, dynamic metropolis. London is a place where villages amid fields have grown and been absorbed into one vast, vibrant space, while retaining their history and diversity. That is what I find so fascinating, so intriguing, so engrossing about it, for what better metaphor could there be for humanity itself?