Murder scene: large sections of Westow Hill were taped off by police as they investigated the stabbing in the early hours of Sunday
A man was stabbed to death on Westow Hill in Crystal Palace in the early hours of Sunday morning.
The Metropolitan Police have yet to name the victim, a man believed to be in his 30s.
Another man, aged 30, who was treated for stab injuries in hospital, has been arrested on suspicion of murder. Continue reading
Five people escaped the flames as a takeaway in Thornton Heath was destroyed by fire.
Four fire engines and around 25 firefighters attended a fire on Brigstock Road, Thornton Heath, in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
There were no reports of any injuries.
The LFB says that the fire originated “from a commercial fryer”. Continue reading
Game show hosts: Jake Yapp and Julie will be performing at Studio 55 (in Centrale) on July
There’s none of this Jim Bowen “This is what you might have won!” 1970s game show malarkey for Inside Croydon reader Mark Vaughan, because he and a guest have nabbed a pair of tickets for one of the hottest shows in town, Jake Yapp’s Cornershop Showdown, which is coming to Croydon in a little over a week.
Mark Vaughan is a paying subscriber to Inside Croydon, and so was eligible to enter our prize competition – one of the benefits for those who support our headline-making journalism. Continue reading
Smashed it: Alastair Webber, Nile Rodgers and BRIT School pupils on stage at the Palladium last month. Pic: Niamh Grace
Global music and entertainment company The Other Songs raised £400,000 at their all-star concert staged at the Palladium last month in support of the BRIT School.
The Other Songs Live featured a host of world-class songwriters and musicians take to the Palladium stage alongside BRIT School pupils to create “an unforgettable show”.
The line-up, which was kept under wraps right until curtain up, included Nile Rodgers, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cathy Dennis, Justin Tranter, Zach Nahome, with BRIT alumni Selorm Adonu and Cush Jumbo along with surprise performances from fellow alumnus, Rex Orange County, and Sam Ryder. Continue reading
St John Ambulance provides first aid advice for noticing and treating symptoms of common conditions including heat exhaustion, sunstroke and dehydration
Red warning: temperatures across southern England could reach 38C by Wednesday this week
The Met Office has this morning issued a Red heat warning for Croydon and much of southern England and parts of Wales for later this week.
A Red warning is the most severe level of alert which indicates dangerous weather is expected with a high likelihood of risk to life.
“Temperatures will increase significantly in the next few days with the potential for 38 or 39C by Wednesday and Thursday,” according to the BBC. Continue reading
Nebular rising: Sara Hayfa’s work takes inspiration from the night skies in Morocco
One night in Morocco in 2014, a young artist lay on the flat roof of her home and stared up at the stars in a clear sky. She thought about a documentary she had seen, about the use of eggshells in art and, although no one else she knew in the remote town of Sidi Slimane practised egg-shell art, she was inspired by the star-scape above her head to have a go at it.
Twelve years later, far from the sands of the Sahara, a modest handful of works have landed at the Turf Gallery in Croydon’s Whitgift Centre. You can see the stellar inspiration in Nebula Rising and in Solar Bloom, with their egg-shell light radiating out on a black background. The artist is Sara Hayfa, an “intuitive and mixed-media” practitioner.
“My direct inspiration,” she told me, “came entirely from the night sky, the stars and the cosmos.” Continue reading
Ready to be fleeced: the wool trade was once an important part of Croydon’s, and England’s, economy
CROYDON CHRONICLES: For much of the Victorian era, Croydon was a trading centre for Surrey farmers trading one of the products on which the nation’s economy had depended for centuries. But by 1876, all that was about to change. DAVID MORGAN explains
For centuries, Croydon has been defined as a transitional place, a town on the road between London and Brighton, between Lambeth Palace and Canterbury Cathedral.
And for all but the most recent hundred years of Croydon’s history, it also served as a market town, a place where farmers and herdsmen from the Surrey hills and North Downs would drive their stock for sale, or for slaughter.
A place’s history is often to be found in its place names. There’s Drovers Road in South Croydon. Tanfield Road is not so far away, a field where the hides of slaughtered cattle and sheep were left to tan. For centuries, Surrey Street had an alternative name which described its business function: Butchers Row.
And for most of the 19th Century, Surrey sheep farmers would gather in Croydon to barter and bargain for the best price of the by-product from their flocks, the wool. Continue reading
Political pantomime: having been once blocked by the Labour Party from standing in a by-election in the north-west, Andy Burnham saw off all challengers in Makerfield on Thursday
Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election this week. Here, ANDREW FISHER outlines what the result could mean for Britain, and for Croydon and its politicians
When I interviewed journalist Peter Geoghegan earlier this month, I put to him that his work had caused probably the most consequential by-election in British political history.
Geoghegan’s award-winning journalism exposed the role played by Labour Together, and how its then-director, Josh Simons, had hired a company to spy on journalists investigating his organisations dodgy donations. Ahead of the 2024 General Election, Simons was parachuted into the safe Labour seat of Makerfield in Greater Manchester, and duly became its MP. It was not long before Simons was given a junior post in Keir Starmer’s government.
But the exposure of his past machinations ended Simons’ fledgling ministerial career, and plausibly led to him deciding to end his tenure as an MP after just two years in office – making way for Andy Burnham. Continue reading
Charity is feeling the squeeze after its landlord – Croydon Council – makes it pay for all repairs and maintenance of its council-owned building. Now they are calling for public support at a fundraising festival on July 25
A Croydon woman is to run a 38-mile ultramarathon all the way around the boundary of the borough next month, to raise funds for one of the area’s longest-running youth organisations.
38-mile challenge: marathon runner Anna Shields is going the extra miles to help CYTO
Anna Shields is a trustee of CYTO, the Croydon Youth Theatre Organisation, and her first ultramarathon on Saturday, July 25, will have a finish line set up outside the Shoestring Theatre in South Norwood at the end of her gruelling challenge as part of a fund-raising campaign towards a £20,000 target to support the group’s projects and innovative programme.
Established in 1965, CYTO is the longest-running youth arts charity in Croydon. CYTO provides young people aged six to 19 with a supportive environment to explore acting, technical theatre, production design, scriptwriting and film-making.
Through weekly workshops and annual stage productions, CYTO acts as an authentic youth-led space, governed alongside a dedicated Youth Board who actively shape artistic programming, marketing and institutional policies. The charity explicitly targets barriers to arts access. Continue reading
The next phase of works on the A23 Streatham High Road is to begin on June 29, with overnight closures and traffic reduced to one lane in each direction. This phase of works is set to continue “until August”, according to Transport for London.
Phase 4: the latest stage of works to unblock the A23 on Streatham High Road begins at the end of this month
Work on this project, which is due to last 18 months, began in August 2025, with new pedestrian crossings, a protected cycling route and what TfL says will be improved bus lanes for quicker bus journeys.
Phase 4 of the project will see the construction of new central islands to provide safer waiting areas for pedestrians crossing the road and to help separate traffic flows. Continue reading
Selhurst Depot is meanwhile working on overhaul of Southern’s train fleet – including fixing squeaky chair-back tables
Trains on Thameslink, recently taken back into public ownership, are receiving a wash and brush-up as part of £3.6million refresh.
Thameslink trains run on the line from the south coast to Peterborough, Cambridge and Bedford, via Croydon and central London. The makeover is being carried out across the entire 115-train Class 700 fleet to “improve passenger experience on board”. Continue reading
Janet Nix, who was found guilty of the manslaughter of her five-year-old step-daughter by scalding her in a hot bath in Thornton Heath in 1978, has today at Isleworth Crown Court been sentenced to 12 years in jail.
Arrested: Janet Nix had flown back from Antigua when police were waiting for her
Andrea Bernard was forced into the bath as a punishment by Nix and suffered severe burns to half her body. She died in hospital five weeks later, on July 13, 1978. The jury at Nix’s trial heard Andrea’s death had been treated as an accident until her older brother, Desmond Bernard, came forward at Croydon Police Station in 2022.
Nix, now 67, of Rodenhurst Road, Clapham, was also convicted of cruelty to Desmond Bernard between 1975 and 1978, when he was between seven and nine years old.
Nix denied all the charges. Continue reading
Many office managers notice that their meeting spaces suffer from poor sound quality during calls, but they can’t always name the exact issue. People struggle to hear speakers clearly on video calls, and conversations bounce off the walls. We’ll walk you through it so you can spot these subtle sound problems in your own workspace.
The simple handclap test for flutter echo
You don’t need expensive equipment to find out if your office has a sound issue. The easiest diagnostic method is a basic handclap test that anyone can perform. Stand in the middle of the empty room and clap your hands sharply once. Continue reading
Probing the inner workings: the Shirley Windmill is a wonder of mid-19th Century, pre-steam power technology, and mostly wooden teeth
Making a strong pitch for a promotion to becoming Inside Croydon’s tea and cakes correspondent, KEN TOWL pictured left, makes a visit to the Shirley Windmill and adds it to your summer ‘To do’ list
We started on the dust floor and descended to the bin store, and thence to the millstone floor, and we still had two floors to go.
It was the first Sunday of June and so it was Shirley Windmill Day. If you go down to Postmill Close this year on July 5, August 2, September 6, October 4, or September 20 for “London Open House Day”, you are sure of a big surprise, for that’s the day the Friends of Shirley Windmill receive visitors. And they don’t even charge for it. Continue reading
All-change on Altyre Road: plans for the Croydon Park Hotel site have altered drastically, from 447 flats to a 246-room ‘apart-hotel’
A year later than promised, with little more than half the homes proposed in the planning application, and with no sign of the 39- and 36-storey towers that council planners had insisted upon, there are plans for the Croydon Park Hotel to re-open next year, but not as private rental flats, as originally proposed by owners Amro Partners.
Instead, it will be called “The Canopy”, what the owners describe as a “premier” “apart hotel”, and representing a massive U-turn from the previous, multi-million-pound proposals.
Amro have binned their ambitious redevelopment plans to demolish the 1960s-built hotel and replace it with “The Botanical”, and 447 one-, two- and three-bedroom flats for private rent, and have instead opted for repurposing the building into 246 “studios and apartments”. Continue reading
CROYDON COMMENTARY: Are you a ‘Mr’, a ‘Ms’, or a ‘Mx’? You’re unlikely to be a ‘Mix’, unless you’re a member of the Labour Party in its troubled Croydon East CLP. KEN TOWL, pictured right, explains
A couple of days ago, I read Sherlock Holmes And The Mystery of the 24 Unaffordable Flats. It is not a long-lost but recently-discovered addition to the Conan Doyle canon, but rather a news story on Inside Croydon about claims by a councillor that they had managed to persuade the planning committee to protect an “important building…an important part of our local history and character”.
‘Saved’: Or is it? Conan-Doyle’s blue-plaqued former home in South Norwood has no planning protections from development
This apparent victory of the people over property developers is a phantom, however.
Inside Croydon explains: “The first planning application at the first meeting of the LabCon stitched-up planning committee at the start of a new council administration is almost certain to be appealed to the government’s Planning Inspector, potentially at huge public cost, after the new committee managed to refuse permission for a scheme to build 24 flats in South Norwood in the middle of a housing crisis.”
Appealed, and Inside Croydon predicts, overturned. Continue reading
Three Croydon Labour Party activists – Joel Bodmer, his wife Shila Bodmer and former Fieldway councillor Carole Bonner – are to be tried on conspiracy and computer misuse charges, but will be forced to wait almost three years to make their case.
Long wait: Joel Bodmer has to wait until 2029 for trial
At Southwark Crown Court today, the three pleaded not guilty to a range of charges in connection with events surrounding the selection of a parliamentary candidate for Croydon East in 2023-2024.
A fourth Labour Party figure facing charges, Gabriel Leroy, 24, entered a guilty plea to conspiracy to commit an offence under the Criminal Law Act and the Computer Misuse Act .
Joel Bodmer, 40, Shila Bodmer, 41, and Carole Bonner, 69, all pleaded not guilty to the same charges.
Joel Bodmer also pleaded not guilty to the additional charge of perverting the course of justice in relation to allegedly altering phone records. Continue reading
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