After WW2, the ground was taken over by Thomas Meadows and efforts were made to stem the R. Pool by building up the land 8ft. This buried the elegant semicircular red brick steps of the pagoda-style pavilion but prevented the flooding. Today, visitors to boot sales at the Footsie Club can be barely aware of the river of my childhood, flowing as it does now deep down between the banks.

Now that the river had lost its flood plain, it exaggerated the flooding of the Chaffinch Brook at Clockhouse. Many alive today will remember the rainfall of Friday night 15.9.1958 when the flooding of our local streams fed by the rain in the Shirley hills caused the Beck to pour out of the Kelsey Park gates like a bore 4ft high. Clockhouse station was flooded twice; first by the Chaffinch coming from the direction of the up line and then by a tidal wave from Elmers End. Large lakes appeared all over the borough: - Shortlands, New Beckenham, Birkbeck, Lower Sydenham, Worsley Bridge, Rising Sun, White Hart at West Wickham and Sparrows Den where the downpour had revealed the forgotten streambed of the Bourne.

      

The club house in the 1930’s

The electric train service ceased through Clockhouse station until a steam train was used to pull the coaches along. The whole of the Elmers End Green was covered and the Churchfield allotments were inundated. The Borough stream (Pool) had swept through the Reddons Rd gardens, flooding cellars forcing up the floorboards in the houses. Mr Nash, the caretaker at the Girls’ Grammar School in Lennard Rd (now Cator Park School), was kept busy trying to control the 2ft of water that had entered the school. The drainage system could not cope and all the local streams overflowed. A man seen skulling along Clockhouse Rd in a canoe was unable to negotiate the bend because of the speed of the current, but someone put out a notice “Boats for hire”. Without the Yokohama field to overflow into, the Pool River poured over the bridge in Worsley Bridge road and covered the area in a huge sheet of water two feet deep. In 1960, the Kent County Council formulated plans to put the rivers into culverts and so their beauty disappeared, but we still have floods, it seems at 10-year intervals. On Saturday, 1st August 1998, we were reminded that flash floods still occur when Cedars and Beckenham roads were turned into rivers as 2 ins of rain cascaded down in 1.5 hours. Attempts are being made to return the river to its former attractive self with the landscaping at the new Sava centre on the old gasworks site at Lower Sydenham2.

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