Turnpike Drive

n.b. This is not today's intended post, but I didn't manage to get to the seaside yesterday. Yesterday I found myself in Pratt's Bottom, the most hilarious of Bromley's outlying villages. It has a pub called The Bull's Head, a church called All Souls, a short parade of shops including World of Sewing and a bus every hour and a quarter. It's also unusual in that part of the village is in London and part isn't, thanks to suburban development whose boundaries didn't matter so much when all this was Kent. Specifically I found myself in Turnpike Drive, a postwar cul-de-sac set back parallel to the main Sevenoaks Road. And what's really unusual about Turnpike Drive is that some of its residents live in London and some live in Kent. There are hardly any cul-de-sacs with London and non-London residents, even though the Greater London boundary is over 250 miles long. The entrance to the cul-de-sac is in Kent. The road it bears off is called Stonehouse Road, which beyond this point is private…