ARE you a shaven headed youth? A middle aged hard man? Or is your family a group of "dodgers planning their dream heist"?

This is how Sydenham residents appeared to a restaurant critic who made the trip across the Thames to sample food at a new restaurant.

He described Sydenham as: "a grim sprawl whose inhabitants tend to rob bullion vans in order to facilitate the move out to classy areas...."

Incensed MP Jim Dowd has demanded an immediate and unqualified apology to the people of Sydenham for the article which appeared in The Times' magazine on August 8.

He accused restaurant critic Jonathan Meades of launching a "totally unwarranted and ill-informed attack on not just the clientele...but the entire population of that part of Sydenham".

He added: "For a free-loading journalist who clearly knows nothing of this part of south east London to wantonly slander the overwhelming majority of perfectly respectable residents is indefensible, especially when it is done simply to pad out such an essentially trivial piece of writing.

"Clearly the writer was put out by having to travel so far from a tube station or the prospect of getting a black cab may have upset his judgement.

"Local people are well aware that Sydenham is not Park Lane, Knightsbridge or Kensington but the people who live here are as generally decent, hard-working and honest as any community in London or anywhere else in the country."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.