This green and leafy neighbourhood in south east London’s Orpington is a lovely combination of well-kept residential areas and a welcoming town centre. Priory Gardens and Poverest Park are the two biggest expanses of greenery here, and the neighbourhood as a whole is characterised by plush trees, lawns, and hedges. Orpington High Street presents a row of pleasant mock Tudor shop fronts, and the bustling Walnuts Shopping Centre nearby contains over forty businesses. This neighbourhood offers a diverse range of small surprises: A Taekwondo store, a roller disco and a modern art gallery. Hisar Meze Bar, Orpington High Street’s Turkish restaurant, has storming reviews online. Apparently, you can dance there, too.

Stone Age tools have been found in Orpington, as have the remains of an Iron Age farmstead. However, the first record of the name ‘Orpington’ for this settlement does not occur until 1038. At this point, King Cnut’s treasurer Eadsy gave land at ‘Orpedingetune’ to the Monastery of Christchurch, Canterbury. Orpington’s Parish Church has a sparky history all of its own: it stands on pre-Norman foundations and the steeple was damaged by a fire in 1771. It was rebuilt, and then struck again by lightning in 1809.

Young David Bowie moved to this area in 1953 with his family. At junior school, his voice was deemed ‘adequate’ by the school choir and apparently, he had above-average talents playing the recorder. Olympic athlete Dina Asher-Smith is also from Orpington. She holds the British records for 100m and 200m respectively and was 2016 European champion for 200m.

Orpington is particularly known for a chicken bred by William Cook in the 1880s. The Orpington Chicken’s large size and docile nature has made the breed a particularly popular choice for families. Also, Orpington cinema lovers went from rags to riches in just one year. Orpington had been without a cinema since 1982, when the old Commodore cinema closed. However, a seven screen Odeon cinema opened in Orpington on 26th February 2016.

Parts of Orpington town centre, just beyond the high street, are quite run-down. However, two local mothers praised the nearby schools and said that ‘Orpington meets a lot of our needs. Also, the commute is generally quite good to London and we are handy for M25 to airports as well.’ The London Square residential development in Orpington offers a range of spacious family houses around peaceful, landscaped grounds for reasonable prices.

As part of Bromley Council’s ‘Bromley Homes for Bromley People’ initiative, 35 new fully affordable housing units are nearing completion at York Rise in Orpington; the council has already completed three other such schemes elsewhere in the borough. In December 2021, developer Areli submitted an ambitious but highly controversial proposal to Bromley Council involving the demolition of Orpington shopping centre to build 19-storey tower blocks and a new shopping centre, which would have included up to 990 homes, a new town square, mall, leisure complex and day care centre (to actually replace the mall, leisure and day care centres that would have been bulldozed). The proposal was so unpopular with locals that the council received more than 3,000 objections, leading to developer withdrawing their application in Autumn 2022.