I am thinking of moving to Honor Oak Park area, hopefully somewhere around Canonbie Road. However, I am a north londoner and am worried about the plane noise over south east london. East Dulwich seems to get it quite badly. I would be really interested to hear how bad people think it is around Canonbie Road.

Thanks
W.

Hi Will

I have lived off Netherby Road near the junction with Canonbie for nearly 25 years. Although there are planes for both City Airport and Heathrow depending on the wind direction I have to say I have never found it a major issue. Maybe a slight irritation if sitting outside on a sunny summers day and planes are approaching both airports. In general the planes are somewhat north of Canonbie/Netherby and still reasonably high, though Concorde for some reason used to pass pretty much directly overhead when it was around. There have been some threads on plane noise with people who know more about it than me which you may find if you run a search. I found this one for example:

http://www.se23.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=494&page=1

The aircraft noise in Forest Hill is very slight when compared to Inner London boroughs such as Hammersmith, Fulham and Chelsea because the altitude of the planes is much higher here. Sometimes aircraft heading for London City airport seem to be quite low. However they tend to be smaller and quieter than the big ones flying towards Heathrow. Cars and White vans taking short cuts through the local streets are much noisier as are the Police cars and Ambulances when the sirens are on. Forest Hill is a good area of London in which to live.

I think there is a radar beacon in Deptford which planes use but most aircraft ususlly fly south of Canonbie if Herathrow bound

You can see exactly where planes inbound to Heathrow go using this link: here. You may have to download some software before it works, and it only seems to work in Internet Explorer. By the time planes for Heathrow get to us they are receiving directions from a radar controller to line them up at suitable intervals onto the Instrument Landing Systems for Heathrow (or City) and are not using radio beacons to find their way. A lot of flights to both Heathrow (if landing to the west) and City (if landing to the East) do come directly over Forest Hill - but, as has previously been stated, they are not nearly as low, or noisy, as when they are closer to their landing points.

Thanks everyone for the responses. Food for thought!

Thanks again

W.