SUNDAY SUPPLEMENT: On a stroll through the town centre, take a look up – or you won’t realise what you’re missing of the local heritage. That’s the message a local historian shared with DAVID MORGAN
Taking a walk through history: Phil Swallow guides his audience with the help of old maps and new videos
“Croydon is a goldmine of history,” Phil Swallow tells me.
“I try to help people see some of the nuggets and encourage them to look further and discover more for themselves.”
Swallow is a local historian for the digital age of the 21st Century, who has become a podcaster and YouTuber to add to his skills as a photographer. He is passionate about Croydon’s history and is determined to further his knowledge about the people and buildings in the borough.
Swallow’s interest in history began within his family while he was still a youngster. His father was a member of the Bourne Society, a long-established body based around the Croydon and Surrey borders that has done much to cherish and promote the area’s heritage. As a boy, Swallow used to read through their publications when they arrived.
Croydon town centre: it is not all skyscrapers and flats, as Swallow’s walks show (this is the splendid Grade II-listed, 17th Century Wrencote House, on Croydon High Street)
He also recalled a walk with his nan who told him, “There used to be an airfield over there.” Looking in the direction of where she was pointing, he saw what was Barnfield’s Stables, which had originally been airfield buildings, until they were burnt down in the 1970s.
One of Swallow’s more recent research pieces was to discover the history of Hamsey Green airfield and its owners, the Gardner family, the people who owned the Yardley cosmetics business.
This was one of his early YouTube videos and has become the subject of a very popular talk he now gives to various local groups.
Through his videos, Swallow gets people to look at something in a different way. Their eyes are opened to see something high up in a building which they had never noticed before, or in seeing a difference in the way an older building has been converted but still leaving traces of its previous history.
For other folk, though, his work is more of a prompt or a reminder of years gone by. He gets emails from former Croydon residents who now live in far flung places around the globe saying how much they appreciate being reminded of the Croydon they experienced as a child.
Nostalgia was a word which was never far from our discussion, although neither of us ever uttered it. In a time of seemingly constant change and upheaval, Swallow’s work reminds his viewers and listeners about a locality which held a real resonance with their own family and upbringing.
Shopping for views: even on North End, the shop fronts can often be impressive
With a YouTube subscriber count at 2,200 and the number of views currently in excess of 360,000, Swallow has found a niche. People might not admit to liking history as a subject, but they are more interested in it when it is to do with their home town and what exists around them.
In one of his recent YouTube videos, Swallow walked the streets of West Wickham. His skillful use of maps and old photos creates a fascinating scenario for viewers to follow.
As in all successful ventures, preparation is key. A 15 or 20-minute walk and talk video might take at least five hours of preparation and a similar time to edit. It is not the easiest task in the world to walk and talk into a camera which you are operating yourself.
Lockdown and retirement from a 40 year career in banking and IT gave Swallow the opportunity to do something new. Family tree research started it off, spending time looking up ancestors and learning their stories.
His lifelong hobby of photography came into use as he used his lockdown walks to venture out and use his camera to record local sites.
Add in the local historical societies to which he joined when life returned to something of normality and you can understand how Swallow’s local history enterprises took shape.
Much of his research is carried out online via subscription sites such as The Genealogist, Ancestry, British Newspaper Archive and Forces War Records. But others such as The Gazette are free and a highly useful resource.
Additional sources are The National Archives, Surrey History Centre, Croydon Archives in Katherine Street, old postcard images and books, particularly those on the second-hand market.
Swallow is a huge fan of maps and have served him well in his research.
A more recent development in Swallow’s historical quest has been the introduction of a monthly live podcast. Here, the viewer can interact with him, and with the feedback and additional material revealed being useful to him, he has been able to plan future videos to add to an ever-growing list.
In 2020, Swallow did his first walk through video of Croydon. He’s done a video’d amble through the town each year since, most recently in November 2024.
“The first one I did was pretty depressing because (a) it was lockdown and (b) I hadn’t really spent much time there in recent years and it was a real eye-opener,” Swallow says.
Historian, photographer, podcaster: Phil Swallow’s been extending the reach of his work for the past five years
“The Whitgift Centre has slowly decayed since then. A positive would be the development at London Square, West Croydon. In 2020, I showed the old shops and it was terrible. There is now a feeling of some regeneration there.”
With so much attention being paid to the regeneration of the town centre – perhaps since the 1960s, in that first splurge of modernisation – a lot of Croydon’s build heritage is over overshadowed and overlooked.
“The gems of Croydon are too hidden,” Swallow says. “The interior of St Michael and All Angels Church, a tour of the Almshouses, the stunningly decorative architecture on so many buildings at first floor level and above and, of course, Historic Croydon Airport.”
You can see Swallow’s latest walk through Croydon on YouTube here.
Swallow is always thinking of his audience. “I can lose myself in an afternoon of research, only to then wonder whether anybody except me is going to be interested in the results!”
As Croydon churns through a seemingly endless number of changes, Swallow’s role in shining a light on its recent history is an increasingly important one.
Phil Swallow’s YouTube channel of Croydon history can be found by clicking here, while his website is https://bio.site/philswallow
David Morgan, pictured right, is a former Croydon headteacher, now the volunteer education officer at Croydon Minster who offers tours or illustrated talks on the history around the Minster for local community groups
If you would like a group tour of Croydon Minster or want to book a school visit, then ring the Minster Office on 020 688 8104 or go to the website on www.croydonminster.org and use the contact page
Some previous articles by David Morgan:
- Champion Ivy Russell’s weighty influence on women’s sport
- Witherby’s life’s work gave migrations of birds a ring of proof
- Croydon cricketer who helped establish game in Melbourne
- The church fire that consumed a thousand years of history
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