REVIEW OF BLACKHEATH IN SOUTH WEST GREENWICH

 

I have just received a copy of a new book, which is sort of by the late Neil Rhind - in that it is an edited work based on notes he left for a proposed book.

So who was Neil and why am I about to go on at length about this book? It has been produced by the Blackheath Society as a memorial. He was a local historian researching and writing about  Blackheath and its numerous residents over the years.  As he gathered more and more information he began to catalogue it and gradually published works based on it.  He described not only the area and its buildings in an enormous amount of detail but also wrote  about the people who had lived in them. He published many books and pamphlets but what stands out are his three encyclopaedic works on Blackheath

The Village and Blackheath Vale 1973

Wricklemarsh and the Cator Estate, Kidbrooke, Westcombe and the Angerstein encroachment. 1983

Blackheath in Lewisham Parish. Blackheath in Lee Parish. 2020

 

He  had done the notes for fourth volume which was to be about the outskirts of Greenwich and Blackheath but died before he’d even begun to put it together.  It is called ‘Blackheath in South West Greenwich’ defined, by Neil, as ‘Blackheath slopes’.  I must admit some reservations about that and I would define it as ’posh Greenwich’ – covering Crooms Hill, Gloucester Circus and the like. Over the past years my own historical research has taken me there often enough, so perhaps its ‘interesting old Greenwich’, and why not.

 

I first met Neil in 1969 when I moved to Greenwich and had a very short term job with Greenwich Theatre in its first few weeks.  Neil was working as a journalist and was in and out of theatre every day – doing write ups of this and that for them. I thought he was funny and a bit different from some other writers in the press.   Apparently 1969, that same year, was when he began his work on the social and architectural development of Blackheath.

 

As well as the research and the books he undertook a great of community activity in Blackheath. He  was president of the Blackheath Society and involved in Blackheath Preservation from the 1970s. He also worked closely with the Greenwich Society and was involved in many campaigns on buildings like Blackheath Concert Halls for instance, and the Blackheath Art Club. All of which I’ve written about and hopefully have given due credit for the work he did.  I understood that he disapproved of people like me, involved with the Council -  I was not really forgiven.  

 

He also achieved some honours when people began to realise how much he’d done and how hard he’d worked. He was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and an Honorary Fellow of Goldsmiths College and most of all a Freeman of the Borough of Greenwich.

 

The new book has been put together from his notes by John Coulter and Julian Watson. Julian was the Greenwich Local ‘History Librarian for many years - and he’s been a great support to me as I am sure he was to Neil. The type set, the layout and artwork and so on has been done by Rob Powell.

I know only too well the years of hard work an encyclopaedic book like this takes.  You start off with the local authority rate books which list out every property and every resident householder. They are only too difficult sometimes to read and only enlivened with small bits of scandal.  Basically they are just lists over and over, year after year of properties and residents.  There are often difficulties with trying to work out the relationship of what is in the rate books with what you find on the map. Half the time they seem to be in random order – I remember my desperation trying to sort out entries on the Peninsula riverside.   At least with the sort of streets which Neil dealt with there is usually some form of house numbering. In early 19^th century Greenwich the rate books must have been looked after by a parish official who I’ve come across several times and mentioned with his picture - John Bicknell.  I'm very grateful to Neil to see in the book the story of Bicknell’s mother, Sabrina; who was a young girl taken over two men who want to train her to become the perfect wife. She married somebody else in the end.

So congratulations for the sheer hard work of going through the rate books and then it’s on to the commercial directories and to correlate them with the rate books , and it might be all a bit boring –but there’s going to be an awful lot of it to do. Of course these days you're going to find big websites full of family history information = far more than you could ever want.

I ought to make a few comments about the contents of the book -which is absolutely fine. I am likely to make fussy and pernickety comments  about issues of no interest to the general reader. One thing is that I’m extremely unsure why this book – which is actually about Greenwich  - claims to be about Blackheath. It goes right the way down to Gloucester Circus which is down the hill and not really on the slopes of anything.  Also the book does not really take on the various caverns and chalk extraction sites which that area is well known for. Although of course other people have taken this on in detail.

There are several entries here which relate to varis people or issues I consulted him  about and  I’m a bit surprised that some of details are not included. For example William Joyce in Diamond Terrace where he’s noted Joyce’s father, Jeremiah, but failed to say that William was a ship builder who built the first iron steam ship in Greenwich. Neil also gave me a lot of information about Joyce’s Diamond Terrace house, his tenure there and other details, none of which is included in the book - which I think is a great pity.

Another strange omission is where he has listed a father and son with just names and no information. Both are in DNB which he has noted and the son well known to most Greenwich historians for achievements also  not noted.  Why not?  I had consulted Neil about this family several times because among other things I thought they had a different earlier address but also issues around  schools, neighbours and so on. I know therefore that he knew a lot about them – so why only single line entries here?

But this is all very trivial stuff and I don’t want anybody to think that I’m criticising the book overall. Nothing’s ever perfect and there is so much more here which really is very very good

It isn’t the sort of book you sit down with and have a good read. It’s more book of reference or at least it will be for many  people.  I mean, nerds like me will read our way through it and criticise it as too short. But for almost everyone will be a very very interesting book to look at  and enjoy.

It makes an important contribution to the history of Greenwich – and note I say Greenwich here. Like everyone involved I want to say good things about Neil and his work and his dedication.  So thank you for this work – and for help and support over the years.

I’m not sure if I’m allowed to advertise in Weekender but the book will be available for purchase in Blackheath at the Bookshop on the Heath, Waterstones, and at future Blackheath Society events.  It costs £25

I have written this review at super fast speed.  I got my first look at the book late yesterday – worked all evening and have woken up after the time I promised to send it to Weekender. I hope this all makes sense and also explains why I think this book is so important and that learning about the historians is almost as important as the history.

Fuel Research East Greenwich

 

I’m becoming increasingly aware that many people have no idea that on
the Greenwich Peninsula, where the Dome and everything is, was previously a huge and very important gas works.  It was actually a collection of all sorts of works - a big gasworks making ‘town’ – coal gas;  a big tar works,a chemical works. and various others. The one I want to write about today was the Fuel Research Station which was round the back of the Pilot pub in what was then a road called Riverway.

I had always assumed that the Fuel Research organisation had grown from  the gas company’ laboratories.  The South Metropolitan Gas Co which owned the East Greenwich Gas works had done a considerable amount of work during the Great War on poison and explosive gases. I’ve written a very great deal about George Livesey who was the 19^th century gas company chair who set up the gas works on the Peninsula.  I find it difficult to believe that he would have been enthusiastic about the various gases destined for military use as explosive and poison  which the gas works produced on an industrial scale during the Great War. By the time the war started Livesey was dead and the company chair was Dr Charles Carpenter. At the end of the war the company produced a booklet outlining wartime activity which included a chapter by Carpenter outlining with apparent  enthusiasm some of these products and the research which had preceded them. Whatever, it is easy to imagine that he had also been involved in setting up the Fuel Research organisation.

It turns out that I was completely wrong about this. The fuel research body was in during the Great War and it comes as a relief to discover that the Government during the Great War did do things like planning for the future and weren’t only sending thousands of young men to their deaths on the Somme.  The mining of coal, its use and sale, the setting up of the gas industry had all been done, unregulated, by ‘private enterprise’.  Was setting up this research organisation an attempt to evaluate national resources and to regulate their use accordingly?

The organisation was the idea of George Thomas Bielby, a distinguished Scottish chemist with an interest, among many others, of developments in coal based fuels and related subjects. In 1912 he was a member of the Royal Commission on Fuel and Engines for the Navy. During the Great  War  he was the  Director of  the Fuel Research Board and was responsible for setting up the research body.

Initially it had two objectives: one of which was  to research and classify all coal seams in the country. Initially this was referred to staff at Imperial College in South Kensington but eventually a large network was set up to deal with this and to work as a part of the new research body.  This consisted of nine specialist regional Coal Survey laboratories.  By 1945 57 reports had been produced –  but did not include any mention of the Kent coal field

Initially the other main research objective was about the processing of raw coal into different types of fuel -  It is said that this was because of concerns in fuelling naval vessels. It was realised that the research building should be near a gasworks and Bielby approached  Charles Carpenter  to see if the South Metropolitan Works at East Greenwich could help. East Greenwich was then, and was to remain, the most modern gasworks in the whole country,  very large and on the cutting of technology. It was an obvious choice.  A site was soon agreed at a peppercorn rent with access to a number of facilities including the Phoenix chemical works and also the rail  link into the gas works. A building  was constructed for them here  by the South Metropolitan Gas Works. It was claimed that this building was designed and erected by the local of firm of builders, Edge,- who included it in their company history .But please see one of my earlier articles about that Company.

News reports of the setting up of the facility at Greenwich give a number of subjects  on which the research work needed  to be done. I think that it was fundamentally felt that the nation needed to look at its coal reserves to see how they could best be used efficiently.  In particular, what was the best way to use coal to generate electricity and also what will become a huge need for ‘motor spirit’ in the future. How much coal have we got? How can it be used most efficiently?    We have forgotten that there was a time when oil did not come in tankers. Petrol was invented just across the River in Hackney Wick by Carless who also developed aviation spirit there .  Next time you see a film about the Battle of Britain keep in mind  - I was told that the Coalite plant at the local gas works could keep seven squadrons in the air.

It was announced that the new Greenwich facility  ‘will be designed and equipped in such a manner that operations on an industrial scale can be conducted under working conditions.’ Initially seven chemists were employed  - and were provided with their own small gas works  to experiment with.

In addition to coal; the researchers were asked to look at Irish peat - an energy resource which today barely registers. In April 1921  100 tons were delivered to the station in Greenwich so that work on it could start.    A lecture and paper on Peat Resources in Ireland was produced in 1919. 

There were reports that ’oil fuel is beginning to have a serious effect upon the coal industry. ..our greatest scientists and chemists are working at high pressure  ...to save the coal industry, and at Greenwich ...making secret experiments in distilling oil from coal  ... to  make Britain independent of foreign countries for her oil supplies and prevent the closing of pits, and consequent unemployment.’    In May 1925 a deputation of Members of Parliament visited the Greenwich facility panicked by all the reasons for a crisis  and reported favourable work on coal oils. The Prime Minister, Tory Stanley Baldwin, described the problems in the coal industry and said how research in Greenwich would solve it ”it will give this country probably the greatest push forward in  development that it has had since the discovery of steam.”

By 1930 an experimental low carbonisation plant was being run at Richmond Gas Works in what was then still Surrey at works owned by the north London Gas Light and Coke Co and apparently installed at the request of the Government. Soon workers at Greenwich could boast of making ‘super grade petrol’  from ‘worthless tar’.  Petrol costing 3 ½d  a gallon could be made for  2 ½d.

(For  you poor souls -  readers - who can’t convert thruppence  or tuppence ‘apence to today’s money – both of them are nearest to a penny – 2p...... for a gallon?)

In 1934 the site was visited by a party made up of hundreds of industrialists  and eminent scientists. Reporting in The Kentish Independent it was obviously felt necessary to explain to local people what this building on their doorstep was all about.  They reported ‘ the main object of the work is the application of  the better use of the coal resources of the country which still remain Great Britain’s most important material asset and the foundation of her industrial greatness.”

1939 meant the start of the Second World War. Immediately war was declared in 1939 the whole of the knowledge and experience was put at the disposal of the Ministry of Fuel and Power, Service and Supply Departments . Its trained scientists and technicians dealt ably and enthusiastically with the many items of special work which were undertaken. The Fuel Research organisation had accumulated a fund of experience and information on fuels of all kinds.

War work included the development of gas producers, using anthracite and coke to replace petrol for road vehicles.They made hydrogen for barrage  balloons contributing  sufficient to fill completely more than 11,000. The problem of the smoke emitted from ships’ convoys was vigorously attacked, and as a result of intensive research  a smoke eliminating device was designed and developed at Greenwich. Other activitied included the devising and development of incendiary weapons. Some Commonwealth countries  were worried  that their sources of oil were American and asked for support and help in developing their coal industries in a reasonable and economic fashion.

After the war, at the 1948 Olympics., the torch carried eventually to Mount Olympus was designed and., along with the fuel used,  at the Greenwich laboratories. Nearer home in 1949 they were involved in work with the East Malling fruit research organisation to find a method of heating to save fruit from early frosts.

On 20^th March  1952 – only a month after his wife had become Queen – Prince Philip visited.  He was described as a ‘good looking young man who  drove his large Austin through the streets of Greenwich.’  He watched experiments on smoke elimination and combustion of pulverised coal.  In the domestic heating section he looked at currrent research.  He watched work on making oil from coal by synthetic processes. He talked to many workers - like Charles Guest of Charlton, the longest serving blacksmith and with Audrey French who was examining moisture content in fuel.

I could go on anf]d on about all the various inventions and developments which happened here and the subject really needs a proper analysis and an extended essay.  I’ve hardly touched on the work they did here here in Greenwich. The organisation was closed down in the mid 50s and the laboratory and all the experts were moved to Warren Springs site and it has been reorganised more than once since. Their bibliography, published in 1945, lists over 600 published reports and papers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Substations

 

As ever on a Saturday I was sitting wondering what to do next week for my Weekender article. For weeks I’d been thinking rather guiltily that I’d never done the Tramshed in Woolwich. I didn’t know an awful lot about it and it seemed very difficult to find out more – well more than who was doing stand up there in 1980!   

I was also still thinking about what I did last week - the Land’s End power plant.  It was on the Arsenal site, mysterious, and secret. It seems to have begun as a hydraulic power station and ended as an electrical substation. I daresay we’ll find out more about it as time goes on but it got me thinking about substations -  buildings between the power generating works and whatever it is that needs electricity to function. I am very aware here that I’m unfamiliar with the technology and certainly don’t understand the language used about it  - but then, I guess, neither do 99% of my readers, so maybe they we can all try and find out what was going on in using terms we all understand.

Substations –I realise they come in many shapes and sizes, but I what I wanted to look at here were the small urban buildings which stand in every neighbourhood.   There a lots of them and most of them are all the same size, painted dark red and they’re really -  and I probably shouldn’t say this -  pretty boring. There are various web sites which claim to list many of them and perhaps one day I should come back and look at them.  I want to keep this simple so I will just mention the Geograph  web sites – “photograph every grid square” - and note some of their contributors have looked at some local substation examples. https://www.geograph.org.uk/

I checked substations with Greenwich Council’s site on locally listed historic buildings. There are just three substations in the Borough on it. They are: the LESC building in Greenwich High Road, the Tramshed in Woolwich and the railway building in Troughton Road in Charlton.

The LESC building is something which I‘ve written about here several times before noting it as the only last remaining relic of the world’s first power station at Deptford. It is still in use and it’s just an ordinary square building with ‘LESC’ on the front for ‘London Electricity Supply Corporation’. The Council’s listing document notes:  “ Sub-station of 1891 .....which stepped down high voltage power from Deptford Generating Station ..... unusual survivor from the pioneering days of electrification, which enabled the streets of Greenwich to be lit by electric lighting for the first time, powered at a distance from the first modern – and world’s largest - power station .....substantially intact, an evocative example”.

The next one listed is the Woolwich Tramshed, just up the road from Woolwich Station. Woolwich Council bought this building from London Transport in 1960 and it has had a fairly chequered career ever since, mainly being used as a community theatre. Trying to discover its origins is not easy. Searches on the net will find many, many websites of the various entertainers who’ve been there over the years. Describing its history some say it was a power station generating electricity for the trams.... well, sort of! 

In these articles I’ve mentioned a booklet several times;  SELIA -  about the industrial archaeology of South East London and published in 1980.  Yes, it does mention the Tramshed “the former electrical substation of 1900 designed by E. Vincent Harris for the London County Council tramways, misleadingly called ‘the tram shed’.” At least we’ve got the architect’s name even if we haven’t got a clue how they knew what it was. Harris worked for the London County Council at the very start of his career, as a very young man. He went to build many, many civic structures around the country on a monumental scale. Memorably he is reputed, at a dinner for the celebration of his work on his retirement,   to have said that he knew that the architectural establishment of the day didn’t like his work and he didn’t much like their’s either.. Another example of a tram depot building  by him is the rather larger and very much better known one in Rivington Street in Shoreditch. This version is or was  a restaurant, complete with its own Damien Hurst, and  described in 2020 by the Guardian as ‘  so now’.

Looking for sources of information about the Tramshed  –I found something which I had written myself some 20 years ago.  To my embarrassment I haven’t got a clue where I got this piece of information from, but what I said was “electricity substation of 1910 for the London County Council tramways  ... designed to look good in a prominent area. Inside was a ten ton overhead crane, switchgear and motor generators.”I had also discovered that a substation was needed as a result of a plan to extend the tram routes to Abbey Wood. With the demise of the tram system in the early 1950s in favour of buses, another use could not be found for these electrical infrastructure buildings. I have since found a 1910 report in the local papers of Woolwich Council’s support for the construction of this building and it says that the electricity itself would originally have been generated at Greenwich Power Station on the riverside in East Greenwich. Indeed a trench for the cable was being dug along Woolwich Road.

So, what does the Council’s listings page say about it? ..” Large structure with single storey workshop ...dressed up in a handsome Mannerist classical style to diminish bulk ...substations needed to be large well-ventilated sheds located at central transport nodes... rare substation associated with tramways .... survival in such a prominent central location is  highly significant ... has an important place in London’s transport history.”

The third listed substation is perhaps a little bit more problematic. It’s the big railway substation in Troughton Road adjacent to Charlton Station. What does the Council’s listing document say? “Built in 1926 on site of Charlton station’s coal depot following electrification by the Southern Railway; sited at the end of a single track siding of 1873 which unusually extended into the building. Still in use housing transformers, converters and switchgear ... has features designed on a monumental scale, of historic interest recording technological changes to the railway industry”.

In the 1920s the Southern Railway had converted to a v660V-750V DC third-rail system and relied on a network of substations, often nicknamed "cathedrals" due to their design.   I don’t know how many of these exist in our area - I seem to remember a lot more of them - and I am sufficiently ignorant to not even make a guess. There is certainly another one where the railway crosses White Hart Road in Plumstead and that is not listed.

It was apparently a ‘rotary converter station’ which means that it converted incoming power for the railway’s use.  In  the early 20^th century when our local railway lines were electrified the current was distributed from the generating stations – probably from Deptford Power Station. It went to substations that contained transformers, in order to step-down the voltage, and "rotary converters" -huge motor-generators -to convert from alternating to direct current. In the 1940s the Southern Railway developed and used a standard design which had outdoor high-voltage switchgear and transformers, and a mercury-arc rectifier.  They went out of use by approximately 1954 and following completion of the "change of frequency" scheme in the London Area - the SR traction network was connected to the national grid at 66kV / 33kv and the introduction of 50Hz mercury-arc rectifier equipment in the substations – enabled the abolition of the 11kV radial HV network. The rotary equipment was removed from the substations and the large holes in the upper floors filled in. Charlton was “downgraded to a TPH in the CoF scheme”.  In the rotary subs days these stations were manned 24/7.The equipment would be shut at the end of each day and started up again in the morning. The nights were used for maintenance & cleaning and they were kept spotless.

There is one more old substation which I am surprised is not in the list of listed buildings from the from the Council. I was told about this building some time ago by, much missed, Neil Rhind. I have written already in this series of articles about the Blackwall Point Power Station which was sited at the end of what is now John Harrison Way - and the jetty out in the river now which was its coaling jetty.  They had a contract to power Greenwich trams and they had three substations - one in Crooms Hill, one in Westcombe Hill and one in Blackheath Park. The ones in Crooms and Westcombe Hills are long gone - and I’m not even really sure where exactly they were.  The one in Blackheath Park is still there. It is at the back and in the courtilege of the Concert Halls, in Blackheath Park. It is a very substantial building and quite tall. It is marked on old maps as ‘electricity substation’ and appears in them from the early 20^th century. I am not sure when it stopped being used, and what its current function is. It is however an impressive building, larger than most such sub stations and with a decorative grille over the door.  Why isn’t it listed?

(Thanks to Bob for sourcing technical information used above)

John Day and Lands End

 

Over the past few weeks I’ve done three articles taken from the memories of John Day describing his apprenticeship in the Royal Arsenal in the 1930s.  John was an ‘Engineering Apprentice’ which he had got following good school results and a competitive qualifying examination. This meant that he worked in many different departments in the Arsenal over the course of his time while also studying for a degree in Engineering at Woolwich Polytechnic. The young men on this programme were expected to be the future leaders of the engineering profession and John was to spend his working life in the Patent Office.  These episodes of his memories were sent to me intermittently over four or five years and they don’t always connect up that well - so I’ve done my best but it is sometimes a bit fragmentary.

I finished the last episode with a description of the Arsenal motorcycle club and some very big 1930s machines some of which are worth a small fortune today.  His father was in charge of the main power station in the Arsenal and John wrote about him too. Clearly having a father with a senior job gave John access to information over and above his daily work about this vast works and its ways.

Moving on to when John says he had been working, ‘allocated’ to a ‘spell in the western `D.C’.  This was the oldest part of the Arsenal – where Woolwich Works is today - and it had originally had an electricity supply from a building in Warren Lane’ which was originally a DC (direct current) supply only and which was apparently still in operation when John was there in the 1930s. 

He was next allocated to substation No.4 (Sub 4).  I am told that this was ‘Lands End Power House’ which was to the east of the old main part of the Arsenal. In the last episode I wrote here I described how John visited the Crossness Explosives pier, which was on the riverside at what is now Thames Bank Place’. The Lands End site power plant was to the south and quite a way away – in fact so far away as to be almost at the eastern edge of the Arsenal site. John says it was east of the Sales Ground where ‘unwanted bits and materials were sold off by auction’ and served the Danger Buildings, the F shops ‘where all the woodwork was done’ and Crossness Explosives Pier. The substation was divided into two areas - one of which held the voltage reducing transformers switchgear and the other was the rest room. 

It seems that originally Lands End was primarily a hydraulic power station built in c1905/6 to operate equipment on the, then new, Crossness Explosives Pier. It appears that it was built using money from the Army and Navy. This is possibly to do with land ownership as the Arsenal began to expand into new areas to the east of the main site in order to meet the need for the new high explosives being developed in this period by research staff at Woolwich and Waltham Abbey Royal Gunpowder Mills, originally under Frederick Abel and James Dewar – although Woolwich based Abel died in 1902. Along with the pier and tumps this power plant was designed to minimise the risk posed by these new materials. Woolwich production was to concentrate on the propellant Lyddite, although this had not been developed by chemists in the Royal Ordnance like Abel.

The power plant was eventually transferred to the Royal Ordnance in 1910 following an agreement with the Admiralty and the War Office. It supplied hydraulic power to the cranes on the Pier, and steam for heating and electricity for capstans at some of the tumps - magazines 3- 15 - and for lighting the pier and other structures in the vicinity of No. 2 magazine. It also supplied steam for fire-fighting purposes. On maps an accumulator tower, blacksmiths and fitters shops are marked along with a boiler house with a tank and chimney and a coal bunker between them. It was later converted into an electricity substation probably in the 1950s. Thus in a location far from the central part of the Arsenal, was ‘well out of sight and out of mind of the main part of the Arsenal’. It stood roughly where Crossway crosses a canal between Pointer and Eastgate Closes – a site now in the Borough of Bexley.

When John was there in the 1930s the substation was the responsibility of Andy Clements, with Syd Freeman as electrician’s mate and Bill Nunn as motor cleaner. Work began in the morning when they `made tea and waited for the next phone called to say something had gone wrong’. As ever, John has a story to tell us about a lesson learned:

“One morning while Syd brewed the first cup of the day, Andy pushed the newspapers off the table and produced a bit of chalk and proceeded to introduce the then resident apprentice into the deeper intricacies of electricity distribution of three-phase current. Then the phone rang and Andy told me to take Syd and sort out the trouble. 

“I forget what the trouble was but I do know that I hadn’t a clue how to solve the problem. Syd, who after all was three or four times my age, suggested a solution and all went well.

“When I returned to the substation Andy asked me what I had done and I told him that Syd had suggested a solution. Oh dear! Andy really went for me!  The gist of his tirade was if you’re in charge of a job you do not follow the instructions of a subordinate and you take responsibility. A lesson learned – but would it have been better to have the problem unrepaired? There seems to be no concept of teamwork?  I guess that this strict respect for skills embedded in a hierarchy was, and probably still is, all part of this world of apprenticeships and the handing on of knowledge to a selected successor – with many class issues included. The world we seem to have lost.  The point about responsibility is significant – but, like so much else, must be subject to past legal decisions in the real world.

One sort of skill being passed on was the art of scrounging and how to improve your life in the workplace by unofficial initiatives.  The vast size of the Arsenal must have made it ideal for such activities.  

John says Andy had ‘acquired’ a garage on the other side of the road which could be used for the benefit of engineering apprentices who, John said, ‘wanted to work on their cars or motorcycles particularly on Saturday mornings.’  I suggested a lathe might be useful so Andy took me on a ‘scrounging trip on the dilly’.  (I must say that the phrase ‘on the dilly’ is unfamiliar to me - or at least in this context.  I can guess, but if anybody wants to enlighten us on this - please feel free

Returning from the scrounging trip they had ‘a ½ inch centre lathe from a ‘mothballed’ shop’.  This was set up in the substation driven by a motor, acquired by more scrounging. Then ‘news of the lathe reached the shop steward of the main shop and he began to raise great concerns. John comments that ‘he would, he was the shop turner’. Then ‘he was soon told to be quiet - the lathe would only be used by an apprentice and was only for ‘foreigners’.

John’s time at Lands End was in the 1930s and it seems it was converted into an electricity substation in perhaps the 1930s - it was substation No. 11.  Maps from the early 1950s no longer show the accumulator tower and by then the cranes on Crossness Pier were electric. At that time the Arsenal was responsible for the navigation/warning lights on the large pylons which used to carry power across the river. The lights on it were on a rope and pulley system so that they could be wound down to ground level for maintenance. They were built in 1933 and carried 132Kv over a distance of 3,060 feet, they were dismantled in 1987.

Many of the tumps remain, some in other use and some abandoned.  They were magazines  used to store explosives – described as ‘mainly cordite’ although very little of that was made in Woolwich. They date from the late 1880s and were usually circular and surrounded by a wall and a moat, designed to minimise and contain blast. They provided only part of the storage needed for an eventual 40,000 tons of explosives . Some tumps have since been used for a variety of recreational and other purposes – but others are derelict. Most remain hidden behind houses and away from roads and invisible – needing to be sought out.

Some of the jobs John described required entry to the Danger Buildings. These were a series of wooden huts of relatively light construction surrounded by high earth banks and joined by wooden walkways a couple of feet from the ground. These walkways were known as a “clean” area whereas off the walkways was the “dirty” area. Access could only be attained through the dirty/clean building where all smoking, snuff taking and metal articles had to be left and one had to put on special nail less overshoes as one stepped one foot at a time over the  barrier from dirty to clean. One step off the “clean” walkway, one became “dirty” and was not allowed back.

More about all of this in future articles. For more information about all of this please look at the huge and very complex Royal Arsenal history website https://www.royal-arsenal-history.com/and also thank you very much to both Ian Bull and Steve Peterson for help and information

Penns, Upper Watergate and Facebook

 

A couple of years ago I wrote here about local industrial sites which were listed in a booklet published in 1982  - The Industrial Archaeology of Southeast London.  Obviously, what it says about many of the sites is a bit out of date now but hopefully I found something interesting to say about all of them. I thought, perhaps I should go back to that booklet because there are of things in it that I’d never looked at. The earliest Greenwich site in it is listed under ‘Deptford’ – but it is actually in Greenwich, right on the border with Lewisham and it’s described as ‘Boilermaker’s Shop. Borthwick St. SE.’. The description of the site is quite long compared to most others – but what it says is:

“The only evidence of John Penn’s occupation on the land side of building is a cast iron bollard inscribed J Penn and Son, Deptford. A more impressive view of the River side could only be obtained when the tide is out by walking along the deteriorating ferry hard, the access to which is along the alley at the west end of the building. The six bay facade has semicircular arches with stucco mouldings and keystones. Above is a central parapet with scrolls and the painted inscription “J Palmer Limited, Payne’s Wharf”.  At the present time the site is occupied by Londegg Limited, manufacturers of egg products.”

Now that was written in 1982 when things are very different to today and obviously they’ve changed since and I’ll go into that in a moment. I wrote up this site for a Weekender article a very long time ago - one of the earliest ones I ever did. I also incorporated a piece about it into my Deptford Creek  book. Both of those pieces were part of articles about Upper Watergate – and I explained with both that new information about the site had been published by a local researcher.  I am aware that the people who wrote the original SELIA in 1982 entry very rightly thought the link with Penns was the most interesting thing there. Perhaps I should explain that the SELIA booklet originated in evening class at Goldsmiths College which studied industrial archaeology including an element on the history of engineering in which, locally, Penns had a major role.

Penn’s main factory was on the Wickes site on Blackheath Road. They are most famous for their marine steam engines used in many prestigious ships. I am not aware of any major study of them -  and would be very grateful if someone could recommend one.  There is a biography of John Penn -John Penn and Sons of Greenwich by Richard Hartree in 2008.

 

When I did the research for the previous Weekender article and the Riverside book I very quickly realised this site was much more interesting than just the Payne’s building and now I honestly think it is even more interesting than I thought then.  In the early 17^th century it was called Stone Wharf and it was quite clear that there quite a bit of activity on the site before that and there is a very interesting archaeological report which found the remains of all sorts of structures.  Obviously now things have changed and the wharf has been rebuilt as flats and offices and it’s become a residential area.

Now one of the reasons why I’m writing about this now is that the Greenwich Industrial History Society Facebook page, which I administer, has had a lot of posts about that site - or what people think is that site  - over the last couple of weeks.  Some quite interesting things have come up which should take us all sorts of new information and ideas. This is partly because Facebook is open to everyone and comments are made by people who may know nothing about research on the site but have information and comment on all sorts of issues, leading all of us to re-evaluate and move on.  

Now, when the SELIA entry was made It was assumed that the most interesting thing at the wharf was that it had been used by Penn’s Engineering as a boiler shop and that’s the arcaded building on the riverfront there now had something to do with them or perhaps for a later occupant. However its since been established that it was actually built for a railway company who were there before Penns and this was described in a local blog htp someone was speculating ps://shipwrightspalace.blogspot.com/2010/03/john-penn-marine-engineers-deptford-and.html.  The Shipwright’s Palace is the Master Shipwright Building – a vast 18^th century house and offices originally part of Deptford Royal Dockyard - and it’s just the other side of the wall which runs along the Upper Watergate passageway.

Clearly for SELIA one of the important things is a bollard in the road outside which links it to Penns. One of the people who has commented on the Facebook page has produced a picture which shows that the Penn’s inscription is right at the bottom of it and also suggests that this is not about Penns owning the site but that they manufactured the bollard which is also a boundary marker. Personally I am far from sure that an elite engineering firm like Penns would make street bollards – that sort of work usually thing goes to small local ironworks. Someone was speculating on the Facebook page that the bollard was a captured  French cannon altered to provide street furniture. I’m not at all sure about that but I do recall on the one occasion I went onto Dockyard site when it was operated by Convoys that there were some cannon on the riverside converted  into bollards - and I wonder what happened to them?

Most interestingly about the bollard and the corner of Borthwick  Street with Upper Watergate is the comment by Krz which is worth quoting in full “Observe carefully the pillar the bollard is up against. There is one on the other side. These pillars have a moulded base that once supported an arch commensurate with those on the river. A bomb hit this spot, also taking out a section of the listed wall.”

On Facebook there is obviously a whole varied mix of people making  comments and most of the things they say are very interesting. I had heard people speculate before that the stone paved Upper Watergate passageway was the oldest street surface in London.  And I think that’s something very much up for discussion although Krz from Master Shipwright’s posted that some of the stones which people are talking about were relaid in the 1990s for Deptford City Cahallenge. Someone else says  that their father-in-law was told that it was laid by French prisoners of war while another says it is “a bugger to cycle down”.

One person mentions that it is a right of way and I added that the waterman’s stairs at the end must have been licenced and that very likely there is a Parliamentary Act covering them which ensures the right of licenced waterman to pick people up there and take them wherever they wanted to go. They were quite strictly regulated and their rules were apparently copied when the London taxi service was set up. It was also some discussion about existence of a ferry at the end of the stairs but while it was agreed there must have been one, nobody has come up with any definite information.

Some people have mentioned the adjacent Royal Dockyard – as one person said “the birthplace of the greatest Navy the world has ever known”.

There have been a number of very interesting Facebook comments from people who I think are actually talking about a different site but one which is only a hundred yards or so down river.  They say that they have documents and all sorts of information about a slipway and also inland sites connected to it. This very much sounds like the slip at what was Lower Watergate which is now owned and operated by the Ahoy Centre and which has a very complicated history which I am not sure if anybody has really managed to disentangle.

Someone has mentioned Gordon Shipyard which was there. Greenwich Industrial History Society has had a speaker on Gordon’s - Chris Ellmers - although most of what he said and what is written is about Gordon’s main site which was a bit more up river towards Rotherhithe. I am not sure about what he has published on this, and will ask him.

Some other people have mentioned a ‘Rodney foundry’ which I think must have been as 20^th century works because information comes very largely from family history sources and it’s just the sort of thing we lose out on in our book and archive led research. I hope we hear more about them soon and that someone is able to publish information about them.

It really is an interesting site.

 

THE UPPER KIDBROOKE 1

 

Last week I did what was an introductory article in response to a request for some information about Kidbrooke Village. I hope that article last week wasn’t too boring but I felt I ought to give a bit of background and also explain why it’s quite a difficult area to write about. I have a lot of information but was a bit perplexed as to how I could put it in a sensible order. 

Perhaps I should start with why it’s called ‘Kidbrook’. It seems that it means’ kite brook’. Michael Egan, who wrote a booklet ‘Kidbrook’, gives a list of 40 variants on the name of this bird going back to 1115.  Most writers have assumed that it means the bird we now know as a ‘red kite’, which may have frequented what was then marshy land.  Kidbrook fundamentally consisted of land around a network of streams running on the western slopes of Shooters Hill. Three main streams have been identified and writers on the area have described their various routes flowing west and south until they reach the river Quaggy, which then joins the river Ravensbourne near Lewisham Station – and flows on to become Deptford Creek.

I thought it might be interesting if I also followed the courses of these three rivers and see what lay along their routes; how they impacted on the area and how it has grown sand changed. Although stretches of the most southerly of these streams, the Lower Kidbrook, is still open in the fields alongside Kidbrook Park Road, most of the streams are now buried underground. We can’t see them but it doesn’t mean they’re not still there.  Road names often refer to them and also the marshy nature of the area.

I thought I should start with the Upper Kidbrook which was the most northerly of these streams and ran through the farmland south of the Dover Road, the A2. It appears that most of this stream is buried and there is virtually nothing to see of it so I hope that what I have written is comprehensible as  there is virtually nothing to see above ground and the about information is patchy, to put it mildly. I have been reliant on an article and notes by Michael Egan made in the 1970s before the motorway was built,  by information in Neil Rhind’s encyclopaedic works on Blackheath and a similar attempt  to  follow the stream by the current blogger, Running Past.  I’ve been working away on it and it’s going to be much longer than I thought so there will be lots of episodes and I might end up venturing extensively into Lewisham.

The Upper Kid Brook is said to originate in a marshy area near the corner junction of Hervey and Begbie Roads. Although the 19th century Ordnance map evidence doesn’t really bear this out but shows a stream running south from the main road. However I will stick with what the various writers on the stream have said and go to this corner junction which is also the corner of a large stretch of open land which is used by Blackheath Rugby Club.

This field has an interesting recent history. Throughout much of the 20^th century it was the sports field for the Harvey factory which was then in Woolwich Road on the East Greenwich and Charlton border. Charlton Athletic are also said to have trained there. The Rugby Club manages this old playing field as a community resource and for its own purposes.

I have always thought that factory playing fields are interesting creating a huge social infrastructure which we have now lost - their demise as factories have closed has added to our increasing social isolation. Harvey’s field is only of many playing we will encounter as I look at the various streams in the Kidbrook area.

I wrote quite a bit about Harvey works here in Weekender a couple of years ago. They were a metal fabricating company originally specialising in ‘holes’ - perforated  metal - had a copy of a thick catalogue full of hundreds of holes they could produce in metal. They also some very large metal objects like the huge dishes at the Goonhilly radio communications centre. There is a film showing one of their fractionating towers being taken to Scotland by road which I would very much recommend – is on YouTube.

Their Greenwich factory closed in 1977 and the sports field was sold to the Inner London Education Authority who wanted to build a school for children who were physically unable to access normal education. This school was never built and the old playing fields remained unused except by locals for dog walking and local children to run about. I very much remember debates at Greenwich Council in the 2000s when use of the site was considered and locals campaigned for it to remain a community resource – leading to its current management by Blackheath Rugby Charitable Trust. I remember making a speech about it at a Council meeting - but what I had to say is of no relevance here.

Whatever! The Upper Kid Brook seems to have risen and from the playing field area. The most recent writer that I’m aware on the Kidbrooke streams is the blogger ‘Running past’. They have actually managed to identify a spot which looks as though it’s the place a watercourse could run. But there is a remarkable lack of information about the next section of the Upper Kidbrook and we must assume that it is somewhere underground in a pipe or whatever and invisible from the mid 19th century. There has been almost nothing on any map that I have seen which shows or even hints at its course. Michael Egan said that he worked out the route of the brook from maps in the sewer records at Greenwich Council. He was researching pre-1980 and such records may not be available now

It seems Hervey Road followed the line of the stream when it was developed in the mid 19th century. The sewers were laid in 1870 but development seems to have been confined to the north side of the road. Following it leads us next to Eastbrook Road – one of many ‘brook’ names in the area as we will see. Running Past blogger points out there is a dip in Eastbrook Avenue which must indicate the path of the brook.  The late Neil Rhind pointed out that ‘Eastbrook’ is not the original name of the road and that it was changed in 1870. That change of name must indicate an awareness of the stream in this area.

In Volume III of his great work on Blackheath Neil Rhind gave a lot of detail about the farmland which through which the Kidbrook streams ran before development in the late 19^th century.  There were a number of farms in the area but very little information about which farm covered which particular piece of land.  Neil makes it clear that several of them were under one management and he also discusses some of the crops grown there. This was not in any way subsistence farming but businesses growing for sales in the adjacent urban areas or in central London.  I think it very likely that they were selling to, or under contract to Greenwich Palace and later to the Royal Hospital.

Working westwards the next road we come to after Eastbrook is, or was, Woodville Road. Neil Rhind says that some houses were built here in the 19^th century, when no.2b was occupied by a Thomas Clack who was chief electrician on cable ships for TELCOM.  The road was apparently renamed Rochester Way in the 1930s but was later removed for the A 2 motorway. A small relic of Woodville Road can be found in Woodville Close which can be reached via a brick lined corridor alongside the motorway from Hervey Road to a small enclave of housing. No mention is made of the brook here.

The next feature today on the presumed route of the brook is a major obstruction - the A2 motorway heading for Dover. It emerges into Kidbrook from the beneath the roundabout which it entered as the Blackwall Tunnel Approach road. It dates from the early 1980s and was constructed` after Michael Egan’s booklet was written.  I suppose a future researcher into the line of the Upper Kid Brook would find much information in the records of the construction of this section of the motorway since it must pass underneath it. The motorway itself runs below ground level in a cut  - as I recall this was to cut traffic noise following a campaign undertaken by lady members of Greenwich Communist Party. Unlike now, there were no yoga classes in the 1980s to distract them.

Before the motorway was built we could continue to follow the line of Hervey Road . Once across the motorway Hervey Road has been renamed ‘Annesley Road’ and it takes us to Kidbrook Park Road. Neil Rhind gives some interesting information on occupants of the road given the RAF’s use of land to the south and in the Second World War. At no.10 was the Colquhoun family – Cecil Colquhoun was Director General of Aircraft Production from 1941. Earlier 10 had been the home of Sir Ernest Swinton  ‘responsible more than anyone else for the development of the tank in modern warfare’.. At no.11 was Lt. Col. Charles Phipps, Director of Factory Safety during the Great War. At no.15 William Mosses, a leading trade unionist in federating craft unions in the Great War period.

To be continued ............................. 

 

KIDBROOKE - AN INTRODUCTION

 

A friend of mine keeps telling me that I ought to write one of these articles on the history of Kidbrooke Village  -he says It would he says be a big great big best seller - well – OK!

I gather that ‘Kidbrook Village’ is the name used for the new centre and the replacement housing for the much hated Ferrier Estate.  Perhaps people think that some time in the past there was an old fashioned type village here and they ‘d like to know about it. To a certain extent that is true but it was a very long time ago and not in the area where the new housing is being built now.  I will do my best to explain all that  - but there are a lot of different subjects in the past of Kidbrooke and I think it will take me several articles to work through them – so, yet another series!

And can I remind people that these articles are supposed to be about industry in Greenwich – there was industry in Kidbrook but it needs digging out from all the other stuff and the really big industrial sites there are all tangled up with the Royal Air Force. But, after all, industry with a close relationship to the military is nothing new in Greenwich - so I’m sure I can cope with that.  These future articles are going to be by way of an introduction to Kidbrooke and partly an explanation as to why it’s so difficult to write about it in way you do most towns and villages

There is already a very interesting history  booklet entitled ‘Kidbrooke. Eight Hundred Years of a Farming Community’ by the late Michael Egan. But it is a collection of subjects rather than a straightforward description of the area.

The booklet has a good chapter on the boundaries of Kidbrook with all the boundary stones and marks which fit very well with the series of articles I’ve done here recently about the procession around the Greenwich Parish boundary - some of which, of course, are shared with Kidbrooke. Michael was a bit of an expert on these boundary stones and in addition to the booklet wrote a number of articles about them.  One of the last articles I did about the Greenwich procession featured a photograph of Michael, kneeling on the ground and looking intently at a boundary stone on the Greenwich - Charlton border. I’ll certainly pick up on what he says about the boundaries of Kidbrooke and it will do very well as a sequel to the articles on the Greenwich Parish boundaries.

 I  think boundary stones are a subject which will, hopefully, encourage you to go out into streets and look for various features, which have been there for centuries -  and I’m always very happy when I can do that.

I also think we should take on the long northern border of Kidbrooke featuring the A2 – the ancient and crucially important Dover Road.  That also must make a contribution to the area and some of the things alongside it. Pubs are one thing, and we could note water works sites, and hospitals.  I said in an article a couple a couple of weeks ago that at the start of the National Health Service in 1947 Greenwich Parish had at three big general hospitals. I have to admit now that one of them was on the Kidbrook side of the street.

Another subject which might get you out into the streets looking at stuff are the three Kidbrook streams. These streams are crucially important to Kidbrooke’s history and I will talk a bit about that, and, like the boundary stones. Michael took them as a separate chapter and had another separate article about them published elsewhere.

A number of other people have written some quite diverting articles and blogs about the three Kidbrooke streams and what you can see of the remains of them - where they went and where they still go hidden away. If you follow their route you come across a number of interesting buildings which were built on land which was available here. I think it might be very worthwhile  to talk a bit about some of those institutions as we come to them.

Michael does go on for the short chapter about the earlier village of Kidbrooke. This seems to be centred on the northern part of Kidbrooke which is around the current church and a long way from the new village which is south of the railway station. In fact today the railway station stands between the two bits of Kidbrook which is like a figure of 8. The southern section has
 the new housing and interesting features like Sutcliffe Park while the north has the more historic areas and some older housing.  Michael describes in as much detail as he could the village which grew up with its church but those details are very, very sparse and depend strongly on the little we know about that original parish church in that area - concluding that where there is a functioning church there is likely to be a functioning community.

The only trouble is that by about 1400  the village had disappeared and remained disappeared for the next five hundred or so years.  Was caused by the Black Death? That certainly wiped some villages out in Kent as elsewhere. Personally I find that a bit difficult = Kidbrooke no distance at all from Greenwich, Woolwich and Charlton. It certainly isn’t isolated in the way that some of these plague struck villages were, and surely if somewhere so close to these urban centres had been decimated by infectious illness wouldn’t we know about it in the histories of those towns.

This huge gap in the history of Kidbrooke is strange – what was happening there?  I’ve written a bit in the last couple of weeks about the histories of local government administration in Greenwich but kept quiet about Kidbrook.  It is described as a ‘liberty’ and that’s a very very unusual and special definition of an area and I think we should find out why it is called that.

Michael continues with a long section on what happened in Kidbrooke over the next five hundred or so years - and I guess he had very little documents and archives to go on. What he used were property transactions  about large tracts of land in the Kidbrook area which were being passed down  in aristocratic and wealthy families.   To find something a bit different I’ve been looking at the British Library newspaper database which isn’t something Michael would have had access to.  I wanted to see if I could find any of those little stories about various  people working locally and the things that happen in their lives. No-  all I got was a long series of newspaper notices of births and deaths of various doings and property dealings of the same aristocratic and wealthy owners of the estates locally.  None of this has actually very much to do with what was going on in Kidbrook itself!  I’m perfectly willing to believe that all these large tracts of land had  farms on them and had professional management = and this was not subsistence farming but growing for sale in the City of London and the inner urban areas.

 I’ve seen articles about how on Mile End Road coming into the city it was jammed every morning with carts full of vegetables and fresh bread. Every day coming down from the Lea Valley were vast amount of vegetables - all specially grown Tesco as a supermarket chain grew from the Lea Valley Growers.  I’ve also read about the boats which came down the Thames every morning from up river fruit farms bringing often quite exotic produce into the City.  I do wonder however if Kidbrook farms might have had contracts to supply Greenwich palace complex.

 The Greenwich peninsula was not good for arable farming.  Fields were let to butchers  who had bought ‘beef on the hoof’ and allowed the animals to rest and recover from what would often been a long and possibly traumatic walk into London so that they were in best condition when they were slaughtered. Other fields were led to cab hire and other bodies which used horses and to give them  much needed rests and breaks from the streets.  Kidbrook may have been the same.

But my best guess for the use of Kidbrook farm is grazing for commercial milk production.  Apparently in the early 20^th century three of these farms were owned by Express Dairies  to supply milk to their shops and so on.  My case rests!

We could move on quite quickly from this to the current situation. From the mid-nineteenth century suburban housing was moving into the northern section of Kidbrooke with a new church and community buildings and the large sites which had been big farms we’re easily sold off to the County Council and developers for housing –  big facilities like the first comprehensive school. In the 1930s there was a big industrial site in the area - the rather mysterious RAF base. It included things like the barrage balloon headquarters, a language school and various other things, all of which we can happily look at.

A big site is taken over by the County Counsel and the Ferrier Estate  very much against the wishes of Greenwich Council and turns out to be a total disaster.

So I will write this as best I can sand with all my good wishes the new developments and the hope that we’ll be successful with new facilities better than the  hapless Ferrier.  Meanwhile I think we should all relax and go along to our local yoga club.