Above photo, date unknown, by kind permission of the Beckenham History Society.

Above photo, 1985, by kind permission of the Beckenham History Society.

Above mural shown on the side of the pub.

From an email received 9 March 2017.

Hi, I'm the artist that created the Crystal Palace mural.

The idea for Anerley mural originated during the time I was commuting to and from central London. I was living in Penge and working at a young people's resource centre Orchard Lodge in Anerley. The Hollywood Arms rear wall could be seen from the platforms at Beckenham overground and from Penge East stations. I was during my days off creating simple street murals, really simple, of what I called ‘Vapourised People’ these were sprayed on walls in Soho and Covent Garden. They were black outlines of people and dogs suggesting their shadows were all that was left after a thermal nuclear attack. All that was needed to create these was sheets of cardboard and a can of Holts. A political comment of the time.

My thoughts were to engage the young people at the Centre in a community project, I approached the landlord of the pub and suggested we paint a building size mural of old Crystal Palace on the back of the pub, he loved the idea. I had incidentally, as the Arms was my local, spoken to a man one evening who remembered, as a child, the rivers of glass running down from Crystal Palace as it melted during the fire of ’36. He, too, loved the idea.

We should put into perspective that this was the early 80s and health and safety, although a concern and acknowledged, was not paramount in what we envisaged, otherwise it would not have been achieved.

I approached a local scaffolding company, who liking the concept erected scaffolding for us to stand on to paint, at no charge. I created a drawing based on photographs of old Crystal Palace scenes and squared it off into sections to correspond to the size of the wall, this design was then drawn onto the wall. A local Dulux supplier I approached gave us a white van load of paint and brushes, again at no cost.

With a number of colleagues supervising and a group of young people from all over London who did the painting, we, over a two month period, created what has continued to be an enduring local mural.

I created a ‘how to’ guide for other projects to utilise and we featured in the local press.

Francis Charlton.

www.francischarlton.co.uk