The Bowie Bandstand

Now a grade 2 listed building, all true bowie lovers know about this place, once a year there is the beckenham bowie oddity festival to raise money for this bandstand.

Pleasant park, made famous by a former pop star..

Lovely peaceful place, just sat on a bench and imagined Bowie was on the bandstand again.

The bandstand was built in 1905 and is in need of repair. There has been a fund raising programme in place and the bandstand is in fact scheduled for repair/refurbishment soon.
It is used on occasions for events in the park.
It has connections to Bowie as the park where the 1969 "free festival" took place which Bowie's "Memory of a Free Festival" song refers to.
It is also the bandstand that Bowie is said to have written "Life On Mars".
So if you are a Bowie fan this will be an important landmark for you to visit.
However, if you have no interest in Bowie and you visit when there are no events on you may just see it as a "Small grubby uninteresting wood structure that looks abandoned" :)

Iconic location only marred by the lack of maintenance by the local council who appear to be letting the place slowly rot away. A piece of musical history that needs to be cherished.

Great to see this historical building but shame on Bromley council for letting it fall into such a state. Typical of a council that spent years closing down live music venues and putting obstacles in the way to anyone that wanted live music in the borough. Bromley Boy Bpwie should be celebrated in the whole borough where he lived, grew up and created some of his beat known work. Well done to the people that are trying to raise funds to repair this shame on Bromley!!

This is an amazingly beautiful Victorian piece of architecture and it's absolutely wonderful the friends of Croydon recreation ground and a certain Wendy Woo are doing everything in their powers to preserve/conserve/restore this piece of Bowie history from when he performed at the growth festival 16 08 69 💕

I feel a bit bad rating this ⭐⭐⭐ as it's visited for its history, but I feel that for the sake of a small investment the local authority could have a bit of a tourist attraction on its hands, but it's been allowed to decay and left to local Friends to try and raise money for it. The park signpost doesn't even reference it, which seems like absolute madness to me. A missed opportunity.