As you walk up Peham Road you pass the main entrance to West House and perhaps get a better impression of its age. You also pass the attractive similarly attractive Smugglers Cottage and Wey Cottage; all of these are Grade II listed and date from the early to middle 19th Century.

The tall building, further up on the right, used to be the south wall of the Bay Hotel. The image alongside shows, from the right: West House, Smugglers Cottage, Ivy Cottage and the Bay Hotel. The Hotel occupied both the first building, which has with verandas on each floor (but didn’t then have the distinctive top floor), and the second building which has bay windows to its upper storeys. After that West Street runs east to west, crossing Pelham Road (as it still does), and what remains of the 4-story parade of dwellings which still exist as flats. The top of the road was bombed in WWII, which explains the current 1960’s apartments block.

Also in the picture it’s interesting to see that the station building is in full sight. The present row of shops with flats above has yet to be built. When it was, it followed the line of the railway sidings and the locomotive turntable at the end of them. The turntable’s existence explains why the row of shops sweeps away round the junction with Church Road and the main road in an elegant curve.

The Bay Hotel has reduced in size to become a pub, has twice changed its name; once to the Bay Tree and now the King’s Head.

Continue up Pelham Road, turning right at the first junction with Dane Road, then follow the row of shops on the opposite side of the round to the front of the station.