Forest Hill

A tea merchant's collection of everything, at the top of a hill named for a wood.

The forest in the name is the Great North Wood, which ran from Deptford to Selhurst and of which the largest surviving piece is still up the hill at Sydenham Hill Wood. The Croydon Canal came through in 1809 and failed; the London and Croydon Railway bought the bed and laid track along it in 1839, and the fields became a suburb in the usual way. What makes the place is what Frederick Horniman did with his money. His father's firm was the largest tea business in the world, and he spent the proceeds on collecting - masks, instruments, stuffed animals, whatever came back from his travels - until there were thirty thousand objects and he opened his own house to anyone who wanted to look. The museum built for the collection, by Charles Harrison Townsend in pale Doulting stone with a clock tower and a mosaic across the front, opened in 1901 and was given to the people of London. It holds 350,000 objects now, an aquarium in the basement, sixteen acres of gardens with a conservatory brought from Croydon, and a walrus that a taxidermist who had never seen one stuffed until every fold was gone. The view from the top of the gardens runs across the whole of London.

Photo by No Swan So Fine, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons