Greenwich local government 1890s-2026

 

Last week I did the first episode of what I intended to be a sort of background to the Borough  and who was in charge of it and when – and how the system worked. I said that I would have to look at the various areas separately as  they were all very different and that I would start with Greenwich itself as it was the most complicated of the parishes involved.  But, I would carry on later and do Woolwich and other areas like Plumstead and Kidbrooke.  In fact I have a request from a reader  for me to do Kidbrook soon.

So, as far as I could I covered the background to the institutions involved in the earliest years of  Greenwich as an expanding urban area - albeit one with a large national institution within it.  I also covered the ownership of some of the land and how that affected how it was run.  I finished in the early 17^th century when - like everywhere else – there were changes to the responsibility for various bits of local infrastructure – changes to the poor law and the responsibility of local parishes for those unable to look after themselves.

 Institutions evolved to care for orphans, the sick, the insane, the old, and those unable to support themselves. Over the years ideas and institutions changed and evolved which means that its history is enormously complex. So I think I will describe that part of local administration at another time and concentrated on the basic administration of the area - otherwise I’ll never get finished.

 There are a number of excellent websites about local welfare provision - ‘workhouses’ covers  Greenwich in enormous detail – as does ‘ Lost Hospitals’.  {see https://www.workhouses.org.uk/Greenwich/  and https://www.ezitis.myzen.co.uk/}.  he complexity of all this meant that when the National Health Service was set up in 1947  Greenwich had three big General Hospitals.  It all needed sorting out!                                                                              

However in this article I will concentrate on what was happening with basic administration from the 17^th century. The responsible body was the parish but it didn’t function like a church organisation.  I have written a number of articles about the gas industry in Greenwich in the early 19th century and it very much illustrates the parish authorities at work.  They had identified that gas lighting, which was just coming in, would improve street lighting and help with people’s perceptions about danger in the streets. Contractors were identified  and interviewed and when it emerged that some procedural rules  had been broken one of the parish officers resigned. In due course contracts were drawn up and because of public concerns a town meeting was called which all ratepayers could attend. Following a failure to set a rate a ‘writ of mandamus’ was issued -  a very unusual move and one which only applied to civic malpractice and not to the church.

In my book  on George Livesey I talked a bit about the campaign in the 1840s and 50s to bring the London private gas industry into some form of regulation over pricing, quality and relationships with local authorities.  This was part of a London wide movement which was dominated by South London based politicians.  Long term one result of this was the eventual setting up of the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1855 with a remit to sort out sewage disposal – although it worked on many other issues, including the gas industry.

Local representatives on the Metropolitan Board were delegated from a new network of local area boards of works. For Greenwich, this was St Alfege and St Nicholas  Parishes - as well as St Paul’s Deptford Parish which is now in Lewisham.  I’ve looked vain for some exciting press coverage in the setting up of these bodies in this system but it seems to be largely unremarked apart from a bit of bleating that there were more North London councillors involved in the Metropolitan Board than there were South Londoners and also some objections from Greenwich residents that they were being lumped in with Deptford.

Twenty or so years after it was set up the Greenwich Board built itself a ‘town hall/ office block  with meeting rooms. This is the building which is now known as West Greenwich House which effectively served as a town hall in the years before the Second World War. It very different now from what it looked like when it was built since it was bomb damaged in the Second World War, losing its porch and  dome. It is now an independent  arts and community centre. I’ve no idea what it’s like inside now but at one time the rooms were all named from 1930s  Greenwich councillors - let’s hope they still are.

The Greenwich Board also had a works department on a wharf in the area now housing known as Riverside Gardens; then adjacent to Granite Wharf and later called Badcock’s Wharf.  When the Board of Works were abolished the Depot remained as part of the new Greenwich Council until 1904.  The entrance to the yard was in Chester Street (now Banning Street) and there was a ramp, leading from the centre of the yard to a jetty and wharf – probably for use by dustcarts which had to access the jetty from which rubbish was tipped into barges. The ramp remained until the site was cleared and rebuilt by the current developer

Over the years the Board undertook work on local infrastructure – predominantly on main drainage but also road widening,  particularly at Deptford Bridge. For many years the Board Chairman was Thomas Norfolk who was in charge of the brewery at Deptford Bridge. He came from Bromley in Kent and had been at school in Greenwich where he was a friend of John Penn, the engineer.  He was the manager of Mr. Lambert's Deptford Bridge brewery who in  1829  married Lambert’s daughter becoming owner of the brewery which was thenceforth known as ‘Norfolk Brewery’. When he retired the Board of Works gave a public banquet to celebrate his work as Chair with speeches and toasts about how conscientious he was. At his death in 1887 he was buried in the presence of at least 1,000 people alongside his wife, mother of his ten children`           

The Metropolitan Board of Works was replaced in 1889 by the London County Council a directly elected body to which Greenwich sent elected representative. There are many histories of the London County Council which became a pioneering body running many different services. Many of its works remain in current use in Greenwich today.

In 1900 the Greenwich Board of Works was replaced by the Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich which covered eventually just the parishes of St Alphege and St Nicholas  - Charlton and Kidbrook becoming a separate body. The Metropolitan Borough was really very much like the Borough we understand today although with different powers and services.

The Metropolitan Borough covered a great many services and clearly they had many buildings all around the Borough. For basic services the Board of Works yard next to Granite Wharf was used for a short time but soon replaced by Tunnel Avenue Depot.

There is no detail on maps showing the earliest years of Tunnel Avenue Depot  However, buildings must have existed there since and in 1919 the Borough’s disinfection station was moved here from Banning Street. Disinfection is a means of dealing with ‘verminous persons’ and their possessions and in some Boroughs, cyanide chambers were used for infested property. There also seems to have been  a rubbish destructor at the depot in 1926.  Jetty Road was built to get rubbish to a concrete jetty but the jetty which remains now is more modern although also used for rubbish to be tipped into barges and then carried off to Essex. The only exception was food waste that was sent to a neighbouring Borough – almost certainly Woolwich, to be sold as food for pigs. The depot was bombed several times during the Second World War. The council disposed of it in the early 21^st century but the disinfection/ bath house, the jetty and some wall remain in other use.

In the new Metropolitan Borough the Board of Works building, now West Greenwich House, was used as a town hall but in 1939 a brave new town hall was opened at the bottom of Royal Hill. This building has been  written about widely and with enthusiasm. It was very, very special. The architect they appointed was Clifford Culpin – whose father was then the Labour Chair of the London County Council.  It was one of a succession of modernist public buildings which he and his partners built in that period. Famously Pevsner described Greenwich Town Hall as “the only town hall of any London borough to represent the style of our time adequately”.   It was part of a movement across Europe to build civic buildings differently. It was art deco, functional, ‘avowedly modernist’, to ”consciously reflect” a progressive left-wing Metropolitan Borough. Or, as contemporary architectural commentator, Owen Hatherley has said, “You gradually realise it is an extraordinary work of art”.  It had a tower from which the people of Greenwich could see the river and it included many interesting decorative features. In brick, it is “moderate modern.. rectilinear but not aggressive’.  It’s easily the most important modern building in the Royal Borough, probably also in South London.

The London County Council and the Metropolitan Boroughs lasted into the mid 1960s when the then Conservative governments wanted to include places like Bexley and Bromley as part of the Greater London Council to replace the London County Council. As part of these changes the Metropolitan Boroughs were twinned with some of their neighbours In order to make larger ‘more efficient’units. This interestingly led to endless disputes because many  boroughs didn’t get on with their nearest neighbour.  Greenwich was merged with Woolwich which was a much bigger borough. This meaning ex-Greenwich councillors were very much in a minority.  In the early 1970s it was decided to sell off half of the revolutionary architecture of the new Greenwich Town Hall.  In the years since all Council offices have been moved to Woolwich. A few weeks before writing this article it was decided to sell off the rest of the town hall and there is no longer a civic presence in Greenwich.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT 1066 to the Poor Law

Every week I write about all sorts of things and I assume you know what I’m talking about if I mention past local government – ‘manor courts’ ....’the wallscot’ .... ‘metropolitan borough’ in regard to the history of Greenwich and Woolwich. But maybe you don’t know as much as I think you do.

I think its quite a story about how our current system of local government evolved – although I’m sure that if I went back to the Roman occupation they had it all sorted out. I will probably only go as far back as the Domesday Book - because it is a change, an attempt to impose order and – crucially - its something we all know about. 

I also think that yet again I’m going to have to do it in instalments. If I only do the background to the Royal Borough it will be long and complex even without any detail.  Greenwich and Woolwich were very different to each other and need to be looked at individually.  This might sound awfully boring but there’s lots of strange bits and pieces, particularly in the history of Greenwich.  In addition there are other local areas with their own administrative histories – Charlton, Plumstead, Kidbrook and Eltham.  I need to do them all separately.  I’ll also look at any relevant buildings.  

The underlying premise is that the parish is the basic body concerned with local administration but - as we will see -even that is not straightforward in our area. 

So I will begin with Greenwich - from Domesday to selling off Greenwich Town Hall.

Until about 120 years ago Greenwich and Woolwich were in the county of Kent - the County of London is quite a recent thing.  If you look at histories of local government in England the division into counties makes them a sort of a basic unit of local government. Kent is unique in its great age and background: it was the Kingdom of Kent and when William the Conqueror came along in 1066 and conquered England he apparently didn’t conquer Kent and its integration with rest of the country under the Normans was done by negotiation.   So we have ‘Invicta’ as the county badge: the little white horse on its hind legs . There used to be anInvicta badge on what had been  Garrett’s department store in Powis Street, Woolwich.  So, first of all, when I’m writing about Greenwich before 1900 and mention ‘Kent’ - that is the context and why.

It’s also worth pointing out that Greenwich is right on the boundary of the counties of Kent and Surrey.  That boundary has changed a lot over the years and I’m not going into all the details -  which are definitely complex.  But - for those of you who want to go and look at things - up at the end of Plough Way in Rotherhithe on the riverfront is a monument to what was once the boundary between Kent and Surrey which was once that far away from Greenwich. Thev boundary has only recently moved to Watergate Street and you need to be aware of how it’s changed If you want to make sense of some things which happened in the past of our area.     

However at the same time within the system of counties were subsections called ‘hundreds’ and there would have been several within the area which we know as Greenwich and Woolwich. The one which covered Greenwich is called Blackheath. Hundreds are said to have been one of the most important bodies in local government of up until the present system was instituted .They are said to have officers – constables, justices and various others. I find this very difficult as I’ve never seen any reference to them in operation.

One of their features was that they each had a place – an outdoor meeting place designated where everybody (men only?) could and take place in some sort of assembly . I’ve known about this for a long time and as a nerdy teenager I went looking for the meeting place of the Toltingtrough Hundred - which is the one which covered Gravesend - and it seemed to be in the middle of a big ploughed field and I didn’t have the nerve to walk across and see if I could find it.  I am curious about all this. Why is it that I have never seen anything about these meetings? Who could go to them?  What did they discuss? There is some reference to appointing  officers but what were the procedures? How did they do it? And why do we never hear anything about it?

And so - back to 1066! Once in occupation, in 1086 the Normans produced the Domesday Book which in many ways sets the scene for local government for the next 1000 or so years. Domesday Book lists the manorial ownership of every site and throughout the Middle Ages local areas were identified through their Manor and its lord. There are several entries for the area now covered by the London Borough of Greenwich.

 I said I would look first at Greenwich but it is the most complicated of the entries for our area and will need some explanation. There are a number of articles in Greenwich local history publications about this which describe how the Greenwich local history staff unravelled what it all meant. Please don’t take this as best version of the problem.  It appears that in the Domesday Book ‘Greenwich’ refers to the area now which we would see as Deptford.  What we think of as ‘Greenwich’ is included in the entry for Lewisham. Most of Lewisham and the area which we would see now as Greenwich was then in the ownership of St. Peter’s Abbey in Ghent.  They had a facility on the Greenwich riverside in the area now known as Ballast Quay. This has all become of interest recently following the discovery of a 12^th century tide mill adjacent to the site which is assumed to have had some connexion with the Abbey and has highlighted ideas about the economy of the area. Sadly it has never been written up by the archaeologists.

What became the Manor of East Greenwich has a very interesting history in relation to its ownership by the Crown and later to charitable bodies. This includes its later use as a legal entity which could be used by those living outside England who needed to be a tenant of a manor in order to complete some legal process. It could almost be said that ’everyone in America is a tenant of the Manor of East Greenwich’. There are books and websites which will explain this manoeuvre clearly and precisely - while anything I say is a gross simplification.

One of the most important functions  of local government is to  look after those people who are unable to care for themselves – what we would describe as social services. Traditionally much of such work was administered by various religious organisations but I don’t know how regularised this was.  Henry VIII’S dissolution of the monastrys must have caused many crises. The City of London was able to purchase Bart’s and Bethlehem Hospitals from the Crown – but not every area could raise money like the City.

What emerged from this situation was the Elizabethan Poor Law and this again is a much more complicated set of legislation than it first appears. It sets up what we now would understand as the system of administrative responsibility for those unable to care for themselves. We go on and on about Queen Elizabeth, Gloriana  and the Armada and all that but this body of legislation set up a solid framework based on the parishes.  Over the past 400 years it has changed as ideas on social care have changed but the basis of local care for those in need remains.  So by the early 17^th century things were looking a lot more like local government today and bodies gradually had to employ officers who could go round and sort out the various problems and very much taking on a role that we would expect local government officers to deal with now.

The parishes then were St Alfege for Greenwich east of the Creek, and St Nicholas west of the Creek to the Surrey border. St Paul’s Deptford,which now takes up a part of what was once St Nicholas, but is now in Surrey, was a new parish formed in 1730.

An administrative area of great importance to us here in Greenwich is the legislation around the management of marshlands . Clearly most local marsh had been embanked and sea walls built at a time when few records were kept.  Throughout the Middle Ages governments appointed bodies of local worthies as Commissioners who would keep an eye on the Marshlands and order work as necessary. There is a formula for management based on that for Romney Marsh - where the great Dymchurch Wall has employed maintenance staff  since the Middle Ages.  In the 1620s a body was set up to manage Greenwich Peninsula consisting of land owners in a sort of committee who met on a regular basis at the Old Green Man pub on Blackheath.

I think this might be a good place to stop and carry on in a future episode as administration begins to take on a form which we would recognise where they’re setting up of various local boards And of course there will be some buildings we can look at. This has just been about Greenwich and as I said Woolwich as a rather different history but rather later and all the local areas the smaller have their own stories which I can come to in due course.

Boundary walk 11 - back to Greenwich

 

I think it’s probably about time I got back to the boundary walk around the Greenwich parish boundary in 1851.  It was weeks ago since I did the last – the 10^{th -} - episode of this and I really need to get on with it. This one will be the last one and it will take the procession back to the start point of their walk.

For those of you who haven’t been following this over the last year - it’s about a procession round the Greenwich parish boundaries in 1851. This was quite a common thing to do towards the end of the 19h century: the vicar and churchwardens would arrange for one of these walks every few years and it was quite a big thing. The procession would be some of the parish officials, various local bigwigs, the choir boys and children from all the  local schools - including the workhouse school. They would start in the morning from Garden Stairs, near Greenwich Pier, and walk right round the boundary -  and have all sorts of adventures on the way - and it took all day. Clearly the area was very different to what it is now – but perhaps not as different as we like to think.  

I’ve been using the 1851 newspaper report of the walk that year. I’ve also used a report from 1980 of a replica walk which was done that year as a sort of memorial and to see what was still there and  what wasn’t. A report of this walk was published only in 2022 by Greenwich Historical Society. In 1851 the boundary was still marked with stones and posts and very few of them have survived and most of the ones that were noted in 1980 have now gone.

So, I left the last episode which I did of the walk somewhere down near Woolwich Road. That episode had been particularly difficult because it  had followed a section of the walk which started at the gates of Rectory Field in Charlton Road and gone downhill through what in 1850 was an area of big houses and fields. Now it is all early 20^th century housing built with little regard for what the area was like in the 1850s.  The walk seemed to follow what may have been a footpath going from what is now the Catholic Church in Charlton Road and ending up in Dupree Road and then into Woolwich Road.  In 1980 the walkers simply gave up trying to work it out and just went down Victoria Way. I suspect they were probably pretty tired by then anyway.

One problem as reported in the local paper Is that it fails to mention that you need to cross the railway. The walk as reported in the local paper took  place in 1851 - Charlton Station is a very short distance from where the  boundary line crosses the railway and dates from 1849 – just two years earlier.  This was the North Kent Line: remember that it was the 1870s before the link through to Greenwich Station to Charlton was put in.  So in 1851 the railway they crossed was the North Kent Line coming from Blackheath through the Blackheath tunnel. It seems very strange that the report in the Kentish Mercury doesn’t mention it.  I wonder if perhaps the reporter had abandoned the walk before they did that stretch -  surely they  would  remember crossing the  new railway.

 If you look at the map you can see the line of the boundary coming down from Charlton Road. It may follow a footpath but, whatever, it’s going through fields and past trees and boundary stones and that’s quite straightforward at first.  But then it begins to get more complicated and it stops being a straight line and curves round onto a bridge to cross the railway. Then on the other side there’s a sawmill and a number of other buildings and eventually we get to a yard and some buildings and on into Woolwich Road.  I’m tempted to think that the building and yard are the now closed pub – originally The Roupell Arms, but more recently The Pickwick.

Today that walk would mean crossing the railway from the back of Bernard Ashley Drive, and then down between  blocks of flats, to reach Dupree Road  and from there to Woolwich Road.  How is it that the report misses this whole quite complicated area? Nor is it mentioned in the report of the 1980 walk which seems to give up completely by that point -just going down Victoria way and looking over the railway bridge .

Having reached Woolwich  Road the Boundary line and the walk turns eastward towards Woolwich: goes  a couple of blocks along the road to the corner of what had been Lombard, or Lambard, Wall.   wrote quite about this feature in an article a few years ago about the boundaries of Charlton.   

'Lombard Wall' was an important boundary feature – a bank or an earthwork of some sort which is still the boundary between the Parishes.  It was used as a pathway  – but there is no sign of it now. It was called a ‘wall’ because that is the old name for marshland features like this – a ‘wall’ is a bank designed to keep something – like river water - out. I have seen a recent archaeological ‘desk top’  report for the area which gives no mention of this ‘wall’ and where it is (or was).  It seems most probable that it was built at sometime in the Tudor period and it is sometimes said that it was built  by William Lambarde.   However it is mentioned in a conveyance of a neighbouring estate in 1555.  William had inherited the land only in 1554 and was still a minor so its not very likely it was built by him.  So if it was built before 1555 it could have been built by his father John Lambarde or – well, someone else.

There are other explanations: in the mid-19 Century a civil engineer speaking to the Institution of Civil Engineers called it ”a cross embankment” and“one rather stronger than the others”.  He also said that it was called “Lombard’s Wall” and said he was sure it was built some people from Lombardy.  I am aware that most of the engineers who worked on flood relief schemes in the Thames marshes in the 16th Century were Italians so it’s very possible that one of them was a ‘Lombard’.   Whatever the real name and whatever the reason for it neither the wall nor the road on the wall, now runs from Woolwich Road – only going from Bugsby’s Way to the River.  The space between Woolwich Road and  Bugsby Way is covered by major retail and other developments

The report of the 1980 walk ends abruptly at the corner of Lombard  Wall.  But the 2022 printed report of this includes  a photograph from the 1980s walk which shows historian Michael Egan looking at a large and ‘important’ boundary stone which in 1980 was still on the corner.  There has been massive regeneration in this area and  that stone has completely disappeared . Julian Watson  has commented that this was an extremely important boundary marker. Sadly neither includes details of what the actual inscription on it was. 

I have mentioned two or three times during the course of these articles about the boundary about how the many boundary stones which are on maps and which people remember have vanished They apparently are not recorded as heritage assets by the Council and they are so small that a contractor it's not even going to notice to bring it to the council's attention should this be thrown out or not. I notice that currently the Greenwich Council has a consultation on the future Borough and there is planned seminar and a consultation which includes heritage issues.

The walk then continues down what used to be Lombard Wall until we get to Bugsby’s Way. This area has now been massively developed and this stretch of Lombard Wall has vanished and is now a gap at the back of some of the supermarkets. We then cross Bugsbys Way into a road called Lombard Wall. This is now an exit road from the many Riverside wharves and is infested with some of the nastier  lorries along with a lot of dust and dirt and general dreadfulness. There is no sign of anything which identifies it as an ancient flood barrier and I wonder if anybody has ever looked for it

 

Before we get to the Riverside we would have passed the end of Ayles rope walk down near the River.  I also think it quite likely that we have crossed another railway line in one of lines  coming off the Angerstein line to local industries served by that system.   At the Riverside they met a boat and a waterman  and some of the party went  with him on his boat - once again the boundary line itself is the middle of a waterway and so the boat has to go because to go up the middle of the River Thames in order to exactly on the boundary line on. This is possibly quite dangerous seeing how busy the River would have been at that time.

                                                                                                                    

The rest of the party will have had to carry on going back along the riverfront from Charlton to Garden Stairs where they were to finish. This will have meant initially picking their way across all the railway lines at Angerstein Wharf and I am sure all sorts of other hazards along the riverfront which have long since been removed. It wasn't by any means the reasonably progressive Riverside path we have  now. I wonder how many of them were left at this of the procession at this late stage - everyone must have been very tired and I suspect that a lot of the children will have left some time ago.  Even without stopping and looking at things it's a considerable distance along the riverfront there right round the Peninsula.

Having got back to Garden Stairs they went back to the church where they gave three cheers and everybody went home.  They do say they got there very late –usually they expected to be back  about 5:30 and they don’t say exactly what time they arrived  back this time. They said its all the fault of the Kent Water Company who kept them waiting down at their new reservoir – I wrote  up that months and  months ago.

and off to a nice sit down

 

Windmills

 

I’ve been working on a new book about energy generation in Greenwich - all the power stations and everything.  I realised, rather to my surprise, that  I’ve never done anything about windmills.  There are people out there who start to be interested in industrial history and look first  at windmills - and they never get any further.  There is a whole culture out there of the minutia of windmill construction and use – so, I thought I should look at what there was in Greenwich and Woolwich.

 

I’m afraid the answer is going to be ‘not much’.  Traditional windmills are not particularly efficient energy providers and the local jolly Miller grinding the corn for Mr Baker may not have been that useful in a heavily industrialised area with a large population.  Of course there must have been many, many mills about which we know nothing – and inevitably this article can only be about those we do know about.

 

The one windmill which we do know a bit about was in Woolwich -  and I've written things about it before, some in a great deal of detail. This was the’ shipwright’s mill’ which I've covered in articles about the Royal Dockyard and also about the cooperative movement in Woolwich.

 

Mill Lane in Woolwich is a turning off Woolwich New Road and is on land once known as ‘Mill Hill’ because several windmills were apparently sited there, probably from the 15^th century. In the 17th century the Board of Ordnance owned land there, where they built a conduit and The Shipwrights Society from the Royal Dockyard got permission from them to build a mill and bakehouse there. The mill stood in ‘Conduit Field’ just off Woolwich New Road - then called called ‘Mill Lane’ or ‘Cholic Lane’ and it was slightly south of what is now called ‘Engineers House’.  A drawing from 1845, when it was vacant and derelict, shows an octagonal timber smock mill.  

 

In 1760 ‘the mill built by the Shipwrights ...... was consumed by fire’. It was thought ‘other local bakers’ were guilty of fire raising and there was some sort of presentation to the Lord Mayor to protest their innocence.  Presumably these locals were the operators of other mills in the area which we don't know anything about although they are described as ‘bakers’ not ‘millers’. So were ‘bakers’ operating mills and are the terms just interchangeable?  It should also be noted that every windmill I am aware of in Greenwich Borough area seems to have been milling corn to make flour, despite that there were numerous industries around with a need to grind other things.

 

The only windmill in the Borough of which there are any physical remains is that at the rear of The Old Mill pub in Old Mill Lane on Plumstead Common.  It was built in 1764 and so is possibly the earliest tower mill in this part of Kent.  It stopped working in the 1840’s, and in 1853 the Old Mill Public House was built adjacent to it and fronting the road.  It is now listed Grade II.

 

It is a four-storey brick tower which stands close behind the pub and which once had four sails and a domed cap.  Although it is very close to the pub building it seems completely independent and I wonder what it's used for now. It looks to be in good condition but I've never met anybody who's been inside it and would be very interested to know.

 

Moving to Greenwich and Deptford there seem to have been very few windmills. There are pictures of windmills in the Deptford area but they are most well in what is now Lewisham.

 

There is just one windmill on the Greenwich bank of Deptford Creek.  A tall white smock mill is shown alongside Deptford Creek in the background of a painting of Deptford Theatre dating from  1840 on land now covered by outbuildings of the pumping station. It is marked as a windmill on some later maps and as adjacent to a long building described as a tannery. The tannery was there  1792 - 1876 and the mill may have been a wind pump or maybe used for bark grinding.

 

There are a scattering of other windmills in the Greenwich Borough area.  One is marked on a map  in Mottingham Lane; there is a single reference to ‘a stump windmill’ at Horn Park Farm in 1833. There is a bit more information about a windmill in Harrow Fields –later covered by the Ferrier Estate - which was  blown over in a storm and was relocated in 1836 to Meadowcourt Road in Lee. Nearer to Greenwich it is thought that a windmill may once have stood on the Greenwich side of Blackheath at the north end of West Grove where the southwest corner was once called ‘Windmill Field’.

 

There are many pictures – some by famous artists – of windmills on Blackheath. These were all in what is now the Borough of Lewisham, but very close to the boundary. They were the subject of a very, very detailed article by Leslie Monson in the 1977 Transactions of the Greenwich and Lewisham Antiquarian Society.  They were included by Neil Rhind in two volumes of his work on Blackheath and its Environs and more recently by Rob Cummings in his book on windmills in north west Kent and Kentish London.

 

One  - probably the earliest - of the Blackheath windmills stood adjacent to Hollyhedge House in the late 17^th century.  Hollyhedge is the site of the current Territorial Army buildings, on a side road to the east of Wat Tyler road.  It is described as an open post mill and is mentioned in a document of 1689.   It is thought that the mill was built on an encroachment on the Heath and that the house was built later- the mill site being a mound used for a water tank site.  The mill remained there until 1769 when it was moved to a site near Blackheath Vale.

                                                                     

Another early mill was in Morden Hill - which is said to originally been a footpath leading to it.

It was present in 1745 and had been built after 1706 as another open trestle post mill. It was removed around 1777 to be used elsewhere but the miller’s house survived Into the 1830s. It should be noted that there is modern housing in a ‘Windmill Close’ on the south side of Morden Hill.

                                                                                                                                              

So, there were two early windmills, both of which were moved from their original site. Later two mills stood near what is now Talbot Place. They were known as the East Mill and the West Mill and were on encroachments on the Heath, near a site where sand and gravel extraction was active. This was the area now called Blackheath Vale.  Goffers Road on Blackheath was once called Windmill Road and must have run past the two Talbot Place mills. Both mills were the subject of many paintings of the Heath and thus their eventual states of dereliction can be noted. They also seem to have provided focus points for festivities and events on the Heath.

                                                                                

West Mill was on the site of the current ‘Mill House’, which was built in 1836 on the corner of Talbot Place and Goffers Road.  This may have been the Hollyhedge Mill, dragged across the Heath around 1770. It appears to have been demolished in 1835.

 

East Mill stood behind the houses in Duke Humphrey Road, to be built on the edge of what became later the Vicarage garden. It may still have been standing in 1842 but had been was demolished by 1850. It may well have been the mill which previously stood near Morden Hill.

 

Blackheath Vale is now the site of workplaces, housing and a school in what was in the 19^th century a very considerable chalk pit. Both mills stood nearby and as Neil Rhind pointed out there would have been a sheer drop at the back of the West Mill.

 

 

 

Over the past centuries, as the area covered by the Borough of Greenwich was heavily industrialising wind power does not seem to have been used for anything more than a few corn mills.

 

However we should not be looking at the use of wind to raise energy as something old fashioned  and although there seems to be little to do with its infrastructure in Greenwich today we are certainly using energy created by the wind.  Out in the Channel the London Array is said to raise enough energy to fuel 500,000 homes.

 

Some 20 years ago I saw and photographed a very bizarre vessel on the River which I since understand was the Mayflower Resolution which is used for installing wind turbines at sea.  So that image will have to do for Greenwich and modern wind power.

 

John Day part 2

 In my last article, a couple of weeks ago, I introduced you to John Day who was an important engineer at the Patent Office. In his retirement he wrote a long series of articles for the Greenwich Industrial History Newsletter about his apprenticeship at the Royal Arsenal in the 1930s.

 I’ve always been quite keen to extend what John had to say to a wider audience but he only ever gave us permission to use his material in the newsletter and if we wanted to reproduce it somewhere else we would need to get permission from his descendents. I have no idea if John had children or how we could contact them if he did.  So I am using quotations from his material as part of these articles which seems to be the only option we have of getting what he had to say better known. I hope it’s interesting, anyway.

 

I should perhaps confess that all of what he says about different types of guns and other weaponry is like a foreign language to me. I am doing my best to record what he said but I am well aware that I may be making some really silly mistakes. If you spot any, or just want to comment, please let me know. I think it would be very interesting to learn a lot more about what was actually done in the Arsenal as it’s an important part of Woolwich’s local history.

 

In my first article – using material taken from his account – he was at the start of his apprenticeship in the Arsenal.  He was given an introductory job in the New Fuse Factory where women workers put together components.  He had also been set some easyish tasks and made various items and at the same time helped staff with maintenance work on the shop floor.   

His next move was to spend only a month in the Mechanical Test House – a building just across the road from the Power Station. This was an important part of work in the Arsenal with a long history in state military manufacturing establishments. But there was little for an apprentice to do here apart from watching ‘slinging ropes and chains being tested for load bearing’ and ‘odd samples of metal being broken and tested for hardness on a Vickers diamond machine -a machine, so called, because it left a diamond shaped imprint, had been developed locally at Vickers Crayford works in the 1920s – and has gone on to become standard equipment for the test. However, John said, they were only allowed to watch and not to be involved. I wonder if there were legal limitations which meant testing could only be undertaken by those qualified to do so.

Back in the office there was homework to do from the classes at the Polytechnic and when they were finished ‘there was a drawer full of western magazines’.

Facilities were not wonderful and a toilet was situated in the middle of the wide roadway outside of the Power Station. It was built from corrugated iron and flushed, continually, by a stream running underneath into a sewer emptying into the river. Nevertheless first thing every morning it was full of ‘newspaper readers’. One morning one of the apprentices made a paper boat, and floated it down the stream having put some paraffin soaked cotton waste in it – with resulting ‘Irate men and a good illustration of pandemonium’.

At the end of the next month John was moved to the erecting bay of the Main Machine Shop, this was in ‘Laboratory Square’ - the oldest part of the Arsenal. There they were building Mk.1 Dragons, which he describes as “gun towing tractors that held a gun crew of six ‘and which had been developed by Vickers at Crayford. John says they were powered by a ‘4 ½ litre Meadows engine’ - Henry Meadows was a Wolverhampton based engine and gearbox specialist. John said It had a ‘Wilson preselector gearbox to the front axle, having two steering clutches’ and that they were ‘full track vehicles’ with a top speed, unloaded, of about 30 m.p.h.

John was soon involved in testing these vehicles. To do this apprentices went out with the ganger. acting as his mate– in John’s case the ganger was Owen Stott, ‘a large Welshman’. They used a tank testing area which was between the Danger Buildings and Plumstead Road. It had ‘built-up single figure gradients’ and was crossed by a railway line. It was also home to some rabbits – we rarely hear of any wildlife on the Arsenal site, but here it was, just off Plumstead High Street. Owen was always overjoyed to spot a rabbit and chase it at full speed over the testing ground and John comments ‘ one soon learnt to hang on tight when this happened’.

 

Owen taught John a lesson which he said he had never forgotten. The Meadows engine used on the Dragons had a radiator at the rear that included an oil cooler. When one leaked John was given the job of replacing it. After he had installed the new cooler he ran the engine to see that it wasn’t leaking and while concentrating on this he leaned very near to the unguarded fan. Owen saw the danger and ‘tossed a crumpled sheet of newspaper into the fan ... which produced a white explosive blur’. John says ‘I shot out over the three foot high side of the vehicle in one bound ... you won’t find me near an unguarded fan again’.

Another job John was given in the erecting bay of the Main Machine Shop was using a hammer and chisel to cut flat surfaces on the sides of cast iron mountings of 6 inch coast defence guns so that ‘the  new - fangled predictor gear’ could be added to them. Guns of this type were closely identified with the Royal Arsenal and the ‘new fangled’ gear would enable their use with changing needs and conditions. He also worked on the scraping of the flat surfaces on the saddles of 2 pounder anti - tank guns. These are said to have been Britain’s main anti-tank weapon and John comments ‘a nice little gun that was too weak for its intended work’.

He also notes a lightweight tank as ‘interesting in having two A.E.C. bus engines on their sides under the floor’. AEC were of course the west London based bus and lorry manufacturers who were to make enormous numbers of military vehicles in the Second World War and it is interesting that their engines were also being used in tanks. In the mid 1930s – at around the time which John was describing - they switched production away from petrol driven engines to diesels, but he doesn’t make clear which fuel was used here. He also comments about these tanks that as much of the interior as possible was made in light alloy.

There was also much to be learnt in watching established staff at work. He describes watching three men ‘securing armour plate to magnesium alloy framework with red - hot rivets’. One man ‘held the rivet gun, another held the rivet snap and another had with a lump of sacking to put out the fire!’. He explains that all the joints had to have at least two right angles, ‘since a lead bullet would squirt through one right angle joint ..  that’s why tank armour is all one piece, or welded together without joints.’

He then moved on to pattern making ‘which made a change from dealing with metal’. ‘’He describes Tom Hammet, who was the next tradesman he was placed with. Tom was ‘a craftsman of the old school’ and nearing retirement. He made string musical instruments, including a homemade double bass which he played in a local orchestra. He was also a Methodist lay preacher. John said ‘To Tom, Picture Post was utter pornography.’

He described how Tom ‘ once he made a small mistake in 2 inch diameter core box, some eight inches long, cutting too deep less than a sixteenth of an inch, over an area of about a square inch. So meticulous was he that although he was on piecework, he neatly cut out the offending area and inserted a new piece - even matching the grain, though it would have several coats of paint and varnish over it.

It was all part of his education.

John Day Arsenal apprentice

 

I was thinking about something to write this week – and I’ve had no net access for nearly a week – and so I have been looking at what I had on my system from the past. We had the first Greenwich Industrial History meetings in the late 1990s and we also had a bi-monthly newsletter. I used to get a lot of stuff sent for publication - much of it from elderly men who had worked in various local industries and wanted to tell people about their experiences. So, I thought, nobody’s ever going to read these old newsletters and perhaps I should dig them out andre-publish them somewhere.

One of the most constant and prolific of the contributors to these early issues of the GIHS newsletter was John Day. He didn’t live locally – I think he lived in one of those Surrey towns near the London border .... Woking?   Leatherhead? He had however undertaken the massive task of listing 30,000 engineering drawings for the Royal Artillery Library which was then based in the Royal Military Academy – now flats - in Red Lion Lane and he had beenbworking in the Rotunda.

Professionally he had been a                mechanical engineer following an apprenticeship in the Arsenal. He had worked for the Patent Office  where he prepared instruction books on Rolls Royce aero engines and much else, eventually actually retiring as Principal Examiner.  He was also a keen historian of artillery practice. He was particularly helpful to me when I researched the Blakeley Ordnance factory on Greenwich Peninsula and introduced me to experts on Blakeley and helped me to write an article which would otherwise have been an extremely innocent and inadequate description of this Greenwich works.

In contributing to Greenwich Industrial History newsletters he was very concerned to tell us about his apprenticeship in the Arsenal, writing a series of articles which will be far too long and detailed to put here individually which I might run as a series.  There were other people who wrote about Arsenal apprenticeships but John’s work was particularly detailed. He began with when ge went there in 1934 but said that the site was already well known to him then.

John explained that in the mid 1930s his father had been appointed as a craft engineer in the Arsenal’s Central Power Station and on Sundays John took him in a hot lunch in a basket. Then since everything was shut he had the ‘freedom to wander where I liked within the building’.  I must admit that I find this surprising - my impression of the Arsenal was that anyone not employed there would be very quickly surrounded by military should they do anything but go where they were told! Perhaps things were different in the 1930s.

 

He explained that at that time there were three grades of apprentices in the Royal Arsenal:

Trade apprentices who, as the name suggests were training in their chosen trade such as fitter, turner, pattern maker, etc. After six months they had one option to change their choice.

Student apprentices who spent a couple of years of practical work after college degrees.

Engineering apprentices who spent five years working at a number of trades while  studying for a degree.  Entry was by examinations and interview at the age of 16.  The average intake in the 1930s was about 12 chosen from some 100 to 150 applicants. For the first two years there was compulsory attendance for two days and two evening a week at what was then the Woolwich Polytechnic, The remaining three years were spent during term time at the Poly. At the end of the five years most of the apprentices had a degree in engineering and the necessary 36 months of practical training needed for membership of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

 

So he describes his application for an engineering apprenticship by saying ‘I have no recollection of any examination .... perhaps I was exempted by having matriculated with distinction in technical subjects.’ He described how he had also made a model of a ‘two cylinder boiler fitted pump’ which is apparently described in the London and Brighton and South Coast Railway’s magazine ‘Shop, Shed and Road’. He produced this model at the interview when they asked him if he knew anything about metal work. He says there was a pause ‘while the interview board thought of something else to ask me’.

 

He got his place as an Arsenal Engineering Apprentice and when list of successful candidates was published he was at the top.  He listed others who passed with him –Norman Lindsey – a future Lieut. Colonel with REME;  Robert Walker who became a civil engineer with the Port of London Authority; Sydney Bacon who retired with a knighthood as Director General of Ordnance Factories; Malcolm Starkey,

manager of a war time ordnance factory in Fazakerley, which made Sten guns. He later had a senior position with  Farnborough based motor valve manufacturers, Tranco.

 

On his first day he reported to the Apprentice Supervisor in the Central Office and was taken to the Gauge Shop for the New Fuse Factory. I understand that today it is not possible to identify one exact building which could be called the ‘New fuse factory’ -  although I stand to be corrected by people from the Royal Arsenal historical group.  As far as I am aware the fuse factories in the Arsenal during the Second World War employed many thousands of women but had no specific location and that any information about them would be top secret.

 

John commented that where he was first taken was the ‘Fuse pool room’ -  and I assume ‘pool’ does not mean snooker!  He says ‘the Gauge shop’ was the high accuracy part of the tool room. This whole complex of buildings was near the Plumstead Gate.

 

He was then handed over to Jim Hands to work as his apprentice. Jim made the jigs and tools for a specific product -  the Mechanical Time Fuse No 207 which he describes as ‘a short-term watch mechanism using a swing arm in place of the usual balance wheel’. This was made and assembled by women on the first floor of the adjacent building, which was called ‘The New Fuse Factory’. I am sorry to say that John said that it was always Jim who fixed the belts and bolts underneath the benches while he did all the work on top – and ‘it was a long time before I cottoned on as to why’.  An additional hazard for women workers in this very male environment which I have never seen mentioned in any article about the problems faced there. Stiletto heels have their advantages but I bet they weren’t allowed!

 

The first job John had was to ‘scrape the faces of depth gauges true and square  ... they had to be frosted and be accurate to a couple of thousands of an inch’. Made of a light alloy they were used in the Danger Buildings for measuring the depths of explosives in shells.

 

Jim next suggested John made himself some tools. He began by making an engineer’s square -  a precision L-shaped device  used for accurate checking of 90-degree angles and straight lines. He had to hack saw the shapes; grind the parts; rivet them and it all had to be acceptable to the View Room – accurate to less than one ten thousanth of an inch. John comments ‘I still have the square because I never dared use it.’

 

By then John had a motor bike - a 1920 Sunbeam ‘the Rolls Royce of singles which had cost £2 and which he had restored. Of course he was riding it in to the Arsenal everyday.  One morning, part of the handlebars caught in a man’s pocket, tearing it and his lunch fell out on the road.  That evening he came to see John’s father. He left with ‘a ten shilling note and an old jacket’.

Back at the Arsenal John’s father used his status as foreman of the Electrical Shop to get No.4. electricity substation specially opened morning and evening so John could ‘garage my bike safely in the dry’.

 

 

Riverside path

 

I think I would like to start this week by congratulating Greenwich Council on their new review of the Riverside path: Rethinking the Riverside - A Review of the Thames Path.pdf , .  It’s a great document which reports on the path, following a great deal of public consultation as well as looking at the views of various organisations with an interest - people from Greenwich University and others. I would very much like to congratulate Councillor Maisie Richards Cottell on having managed to get such a detailed work researched and published as part of her role as Chair of the Transport and Place Scrutiny Panel.  I probably shouldn’t say this - but when I was Chairing the predecessor Scrutiny Panel, fifteen years ago, producing such a document would have been beyond unthinkable! But there you go!

Having said all those congratulations I also think that they’ve missed some important issues about the path and some very, very major problems - which is not to detract from what they’ve done so far. They’ve done a wonderful job consulting with the public but there are others out there who will have to be dealt with. Sorry.

So – I guess you will wonder why I should put myself forward beyond my role as a member of the public. I will give a little bit of my own biographical details on this and my work on the path as a historian – I’m afraid the University will say ‘amateur historian’ - and the background to the use of path with some of the legal issues and public participation over the previous centuries. 

In the 1980s and 1990s I worked for an organisation which monitored development in London Docklands. Some of our staff managed to get questions asked in the House of Commons about the terrible mess which Tower Hamlets was making of their riverside path. Part of my job was going to meetings with what was then the London Rivers Authority – (later after the GLC was closed down it was ‘Association’). I particularly remember a report they did comparing various riverside walks in foreign capitals and I wonder what happened to that research -but they did much else. I wrote and self published a riverside walk around the Peninsula about this time. I was first elected to the Council in 2000 and there was then a full time officer working on the Riverside path. Inevitably the funding for his salary ran out.

 

When I came off the council 10 years ago I tried to set up a Friends of the Riverside Walk group and we had a couple of meetings but some hostility was quite clear and I abandoned it - which I’m sorry about now.

 

I guess it was originally just a walk along the river wall  - and we have no idea how old that is . In 1867 the Court of Queen’s Bench heard that it was there at the time of Norman Conquest and for all they knew it was Roman.  The public have walked it ever since but now they no longer walk on the river edge because of need for a cycle path and ‘health and safety’.

The oldest pictures which I know of which show people on the path are two of the 17^th century gunpowder works (then on the site of Enderbys).  In them people are taking the dog for a walk, sketching, chatting .. or just, well, walking.  A few years ago the Enderby Group did a footfall survey on the path – and things haven’t really changed, except for the bicycles.

Ian Nairn, was  a 1960s troublemaking architectural commentator with a short lived TV show.  He describes the path starting at the Blackwall Tunnel’s ‘pretty art nouveau gatehouse’ then says the walk goes down a passage alongside the Delta Metal Company “which zigs and it zags and it doesn’t give up and eventually comes out at the river”. I remember that passage well . When I worked at Delta Metal in 1970 the path there was modernised and paved, but totally isolated from the rest.  That is now the site of the golf course.

Nairn talks about the path taking “exciting forms...between walls ... under cranes ...nipping round the back of a boatyard’.  Much of that stretch was straightened out in the 1980s.  “A continuous flirtation with the slow moving river choked with working boats”. (if only!) 

The right of way on this whole stretch was taken to the Court of Queens Bench by Greenwich Vestry in 1867 in a case against the shipbuilders, Maudslay Son and Field who had blocked the path. They were on the site we now call Bay Wharf where they built Cutty Sark’s two sisters, Hallowe'en and Blackadder. The case had huge public support with the gallery crowded with local people shouting and clapping.    Mr. Soames whose soap works was on the site of the later sugar refinery said that companies would go out of business if the public could walk along the riverside past them.  The Court and Lord Chief Justice Cockburn didn’t agree and declared in favour of the right of way.  It is the same stretch which Greenwich Council went to court with in the 1990s when the then occupants blocked it  and the right of way was declared again.

North of this in 1868 Lewis and Stockwell Shipbuilders built a large a dry dock (where the hotel is now) and this interrupted the river path. I don't know how this was resolved by the Vestry who thought it was ‘not a good idea to give up these old rights in a hurry’ but thought new employment opportunities were important. (Nothing changes, it really doesn’t).

When the Gas Works was built in the 1890s on what is now the site of the Dome, the riverside path was closed right round its site.  Following an enquiry in the House of Lords Ordinance Draw Dock was built by the gas company as compensation for the closure.  I hope Greenwich residents visit the draw dock - which is still a right of way despite scary notices from the people in the Dome and the hotel.

As for Nairn he got to the “final exciting stretch past Greenwich Power station and another good Riverside pub , The Yacht”.   Then he says “God preserve it from the prettifiers” and, in a footnote “’They’ are trying to close it. Walk it as you would a country path, till they are sick to the guts”.

The council have intermittently taken an interest in the path - very much because of individual councillors. In the 1970s there was a councillors’ walk along the path set up by the late Derek Penfold. There are photographs but most of the participants are now sadly no longer with us – a young Jim Gilman .... librarian Barbara Ludlow.

It is only recently that’s the path has been seen as going right through the Borough on the riverside. The walk which Derek organised just went round the peninsula. You could get to Cutty Sark but what was then the  Royal Naval College was locked and barred and bolted.  I think the stretch through Charlton to the Barrier was probably in existence but I have a feeling that it wasn’t really possible to walk it but I’m not sure why. There was no way of walking into Woolwich and there was a long term blockage which was only resolved a few years ago.  You couldn’t walk through what is now the Dockyard estate and nor could walk at all along the riverfront in Woolwich and you certainly couldn’t put your nose in the Arsenal or you would have been removed with a military escort.

So where does this all leave us ? What can this new report add? For one thing I’m very glad to see  there is quite a bit of criticism of cyclists – for far too long many cyclists have claimed that they are so green in their method of transport  it’s perfectly OK for them to run you over if they feel like it. And I write that as someone who cycled up to London every morning in the 1980s. 

So what should happen next – I think they do need to look at river users. There are a number of sports clubs – the rowers, the yacht club, the kayakers and others. But more than them they must talk to the people who use the river as a workplace.  It’s very easy to think that the working river has gone – and it’s a minute fraction of what it many of us will remember - but the river remains our biggest asset and we need to be careful what we do and remember that it will be here will be all gone and it will serve other communities.  In the short term now we need to consider very carefully what is built on the Riverside and we need to preserve all of the traditional access points many of which are covered by specialist legislation. We need to be quite clear that the sea wall is not a proper place for willow trees – this is not a babbling brook! We need to make sure that the public understands that this is one of the major commercial rivers of the world.

Liquid history and all that.