The West Kent Park Estate, in the angle of Stanstead Road and Brockley Rise, was laid out c.1850 by a Farrington Street wine merchant named Arthur Gurney.

He was lucky to buy the fields a few years before the Crystal Palace boom hugely inflated the land prices in the area, but unlucky to have sold it again almost immediately in small plots.

As a result West Kent Park became a rare poor area, almost a slum, in the middle of wealthy Forest Hill.

Malham Road, which was originally called South Road, was demolished with nearly all of West Kent Park in the 1970s and replaced by flats.