[3] It is an area rich in Victorian and Edwardian domestic architecture, historic trees and original lanes and mews.

Brockley railway station opened on 6 March 1871 and is currently served by London Overground and Southern in Travelcard Zone 2.

This was later filled in and replaced by the London & Croydon railway which runs through the original canal cutting between Brockley (opened in 1871) and New Cross Gate stations.

Many grand houses in Brockley were occupied by the owners and managers of factories in neighbouring industrial areas such as Deptford and Bermondsey.

The typical inter-war houses on Upper Brockley Gardens and on Harefield Rd are clearly more modest than their Victorian neighbours.

The Grade II listed Rivoli Ballroom (originally a cinema) dates from 1913 but was remodeled as a dance hall in 1951.

Being under the bomber flight path to the London docks, the area suffered significant V-2 rocket and other bomb damage in World War II.

In 1948, five passengers bound for England from Jamaica on the ship Empire Windrush gave Wickham Road as their intended destination on arrival in London.

From the mid-1960s artists (some associated with nearby Goldsmiths College) started to move into the large and at the time neglected houses on Manor Avenue, beginning the process of 'gentrification' which continues today.

Brockley is today one of the best preserved and most coherent Victorian suburbs in Inner London and contains examples of almost every style of mid- to late 19th century-domestic architecture from vast Gothic Revival piles to modest workmen's cottages.

The latter was saved from development by the Commons Preservation Society and local groups in the 1880s and 1890s (including Octavia Hill, one of the founders of the National Trust).

In 1896, after being bought with the proceeds of private donations and funding from the London County Council, the fields were transformed from old brickpits and ditches into a park.

Dating from 1932 to 1935 by Charles Mahoney, Evelyn Dunbar and other students of the Royal College of Art, they are considered some of the best examples in the country of the Neo-Romantic style and illustrate many local scenes.

Close by, a stone circle was erected in 2000 as a millennium project by a group of local artists, which won a Civic Trust Award in 2002.

At 160 ft above sea level, Hilly Fields has wide views from Canary Wharf and Shooters Hill to Crystal Palace and the North Downs in Kent.

This ten acre woodland is home to over 30 species of birds including greater spotted woodpecker and sparrowhawk.

The mid-1960s saw the beginning of a 'bohemian' influx of artists, musicians and alternative types attracted by the neglected and (at the time very cheap) Victorian houses and vast rambling gardens and the close proximity to Goldsmiths College and Camberwell School of Art.

In 2015, the neighbourhood hosted the first annual Brockley Street Art Festival, which saw the creation of more than twenty high quality murals in the area.

He spells it "Brackly" as this is roughly how it sounds in Jamaican patois: The musician Nick Nicely's 1982 cult psychedelic track "Hilly Fields" was inspired by the park of the same name.

In 2003, the BBC1 documentary Worlds Apart showed two contrasting Brockley families living within yards of each other; one in a small council flat, the other in a large house.

The Rivoli Ballroom has featured in numerous films, TV shows and fashion shoots, and was used for the debut album launch for Florence and the Machine,[53] the video for Tina Turner's Private Dancer and a secret gig[54] by The White Stripes.

The Metros' song "Last of the Lookers" from their 2008 album More Money Less Grief mentions meeting a girl who is later found out not to be from their native Brockley.