South Croxted: A Memoir
A childhood memoir of South London during the swinging 1960s and 1970s, miniskirts and the Beatles, where life was anything but normal. From villains and bent coppers to gunrunning in Africa and imprisonment, all brought to a focus by an IRA terrorist assassination plot that punctuated the end of an era. This is the story of small time scoundrel, Victor Richardson, a character larger than life but smaller than human, seen through the eyes of his son, Martin, who pieces together fragments from the past to present an insightful picture of gangland London at its height, painting an autobiographical account of his father’s ill-fated life.
South Croxted is one of the longest roads in South London. It is also the boundary between the London boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark. It is an A-road, the A2199, and the main north-south arterial road for West Dulwich, meeting the east-west A205 South Circular next to West Dulwich railway station. It comprises two roads: the northern half is Croxted Road and at its southern end, after Park Hall Road, it becomes South Croxted. It stretches from the dizzy heights of Crystal Palace, where one can admire an unbroken vista of the City of London from Gipsy Hill, down toward Herne Hill where its once famous Velodrome played host to the 1948 Olympic cycling track races, and beyond that, the constantly changing ethnic mix of Brixton.
During the tenebrous sixties and lucent seventies, South Croxted was brought to the attention of the world press reporting on underworld crime and an IRA assassination attempt. We can never know the true story, the factuality of what occurred in South Croxted, because so much was hidden, or has been forgotten, Only through letters, photographs and newspaper articles can we extract a history, together with my own account of my family’s harrowing journey through early memoir. In unravelling my father’s involvement I hoped to understand my own, hoped to find something that made sense of that time, but instead, I found a place far more unpredictable than one could ever imagine. The road was far from straight…
