THE comedian Sue Perkins: “Croydon — less of a place, more of a punchline.” I have lived my entire life in a punchline.

Will Noble’s delightful and extremely funny book is a love letter to the southernmost borough of London — a town that throughout its history has repeatedly aimed high, dazzled, crashed, and burned. Sometimes, literally. For those living in the town in its present parlous state — bankrupt both financially and culturally — it is an encouragement not to despair, but to rejoice in its rollercoaster history.

Noble begins his story with the 16th-century Archbishop John Whitgift, who was in effect the town’s founding father. His name still adorns schools, shopping centres, care homes, and even car-hire firms. He is one of six archbishops buried in Croydon, which, conveniently located between Canterbury and Lambeth, became their summer home.

Whitgift invested lavishly in Croydon, but his legacy is typical of the town’s yo-yoing fortunes. His beautiful Old Palace subsequently became a laundry, then blossomed as a school, but is now readying itself for closure.

The other heyday on which the book dwells is the 1920s, during which Croydon became a focus of the world’s attention because of its cutting-edge aerodrome. The list of celebrities whose first experience of the UK was stepping on to Croydon’s grass is dazzling. Noble lauds trailblazing female aviators, and then explains that pilots navigated their open-topped planes home by the smell from Beddington sewage works.

AlamyWhitgift, in the portrait used in the book

This undercutting of triumph with deprecatory humour is typical of the book’s style. Noble relentlessly seeks out the most entertaining angle to illuminate each event. He describes the opening of the first Woolworths store in southern England to show Croydon’s dominance in retail, but, rather than analyse its financial impact, he tells us what its first shoplifter stole.

For 20 uplifting chapters, Noble describes near-misses, brilliant starts that were unsustainable, high hopes, and bad luck. But then he inevitably turns his attention to the decline of the town during the past 12 years. The blows of riot, financial mismanagement, business collapse, and a succession of tragedies change the tone of the book. Ruthlessly described, they pummel down on an undeserving town like senators stabbing a defenceless Caesar. Other London boroughs rise to take advantage of the void in which Croydon once flourished. Et tu, Bromley.

For a Croydonian such as I am, every page contains another nostalgic pleasure. Will it have the same appeal for someone who has never visited? I hope so, because on these pages we meet the aviator Amy Johnson, the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and the movie-loving bishop who was so determined about his campaign for cinemas to open on a Sunday that he made what a contemporary magazine called “one of the most tedious films ever earmarked for preservation”. Their stories are told with such aplomb that they have a universal appeal.

But, for anyone who is living in Croydon during one of its periodic straitened times, this book is a tonic.

Peter Graystone is a Reader at the Church of the Good Shepherd, Carshalton Beeches. His latest book is All’s Well That Ends Well: From dust to resurrection — 40 Days with Shakespeare (Canterbury Press, 2021).

Croydonopolis: A journey to the greatest city that never was
Will Noble
Safe Haven Books £18.99
(978-1-8384051-9-9)
Church Times Bookshop £17.09