Worcester Park, on the edge of Kingston, is also part of the Surrey borough of Epsom and Ewell. This charming area of south-west London may not sound very interesting, but its everyday English-ness part is of its appeal.
Start your journey outside the Plough (bus 231 stops here), where there is a lovely green, which proudly hosts a branch of Miller & Carter steakhouse. On the other side, the parade of shops next to the bus stop has a traditional bakery – Plough Bakery – that should be the first place to stop at.
There are always people in here, and you can find bakery items for as little as a pound. Don’t expect flat whites and sourdough, instead, feast on one of the pastries that they will heat up until they are bursting out at the sides. Service is definitely old school, a little a rough even, but all things considered. the quality and choice is ten times better than Greggs (there’s one of these here as well). There are metal chairs outside, should you wish to enjoy your coffee next to the traffic, which is not all that noisy, and the pavements are wide enough anyway.
Osaka (358 Old Malden Road) is an interesting restaurant: the name is Japanese, but the owners are Korean, part of the large diaspora of residents from that country making up the 4.8 percentage of Asians living in the area. At one point, the parade looked like it was becoming run-down, but the shops are now well-looked after, and the steady flow of traffic keeps business ticking over. We’re still technically in Old Malden, as the road name indicates.
Two more stops on the 231, or ten-minute walk past the spacious houses of the main road, we come to Worcester Park Station. Trains for London Waterloo depart every twenty minutes. The road by the station was lowered, and as you leave the station under the bridge, you find yourself in Worcester Park proper.
The main pub, The Brook is more a bar and dining restaurant, and is very busy over the summer. It’s now the only pub in the street after the Worcester Park closed and then mysteriously burned down in a fire. The area has little left to mark the pub, just some fencing with some sedate graffiti to match the area’s quietness.
Central Road is a typical English high street that probably hasn’t changed much since the seventies. There’s a butcher’s, shoe shop, a really good independent fruit shop. Because its a through road connecting to New Malden and Cheam, there’s no ugly shopping center. The main Waitrose store shows the affluence of the area in nearby Cheam and Stoneleigh.
Signs that you are still in London come with the proliferation of kebab and vape shops, but once you reach the hill, things change. There’s a lovely camera shop where you can research the best digital cameras to buy (CAMERA CONTINENTAL), watch shop (Hendy’s ) and some of the best value nail salons anywhere (Amy’s Nails).
That’s more than enough to make it worth your while to come here, and if you want to stop for a bite, there are cafes at every other shop (Costa, Starbucks, all the usual suspects). On the other hand, most of the restaurants are local Chinese and Indians. At The Chef, you can get cracking takeaway for not much more than £7 a main of ribs or egg-fried rice.
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