Anchor Iron Wharf is a small area of riverside between the power station and Lassell Street. –It consists of a block of new flats with a restaurant, some concrete, an anchor and a plaque on the riverside. Until about 2002 it was a scrap yard with a corrugated iron lined pathway through the centre. It might look boring but its history is amazing.
First of all, there was that Saxon
princess. This was ‘Ælfthryth, a member of the royal kingdred, whom Count Baldwin, the
Bald, of Flanders took from England as his wife”. She was actually Alfred the Great’s younger
daughter and in the 10th century she left to “the abbey of Saint-Pierre au Mont-Blandin of Ghent” ... East Greenwich,
Woolwich, Mottingham and Coombe, Kent”
as well as areas in Cowden and Edenbridge, also then in Kent . To administer the estate the Abbey needed
staff on site and in addition to a centre in Lewisham there were riverside
buildings probably here at Anchor Iron
wharf– and some industrial buildings further to the east (more on that when we
get to Granite Wharf).
On the riverside St.Peter’s Abbey built a tithe
barn and a Court House which doubled as a guest house grand enough to have its
own water supply. We can imagine that all sorts of produce was handled through
this wharf and shipped off to Ghent.
Some of this must have come from Cowden, deep in the countryside. Find
Cowden on the map – see how the road north runs up through Edenbridge and Biggin
Hill, to Blackheath – and down Vanbrugh Hill to the river (or am I seeing
things!). Cowden was also an important
centre of the Kent medieval iron industry, but I assume that is an unrelated
subject.
The lands belonging to Ghent were confiscated
by the English Crown in 1414. The Abbey buildings included a tithe barn and
‘Old Court, the court house which was used for the manor court. Thus ‘The Manor
of Old Court’ was the estate which eventually was acquired by Blackheath based
Morden College in 1699, and with whom it still remains. The Court House seem to have been converted
by Henry VIII as a residence for Anne Boleyn and has been described as ‘the
most important and probably the biggest house in Greenwich before the building
of the palace’. It was eventually
demolished in 1695.
Now – what about the industry? My first introduction to industrial history
was a weekend school on the industries of the Black Country – the cluster of
small towns that lie between Wolverhampton and Birmingham, - small masters, nail
makers, and semi-domestic iron working. Sometimes described as ‘the cradle of
the industrial revolution’. Quaker
Ambrose Crowley was born in 1599, and followed by his son, also Ambrose, put
together deals with the iron masters and the small masters, supplying the iron
and selling on the nails, hinges, rivets and locks. The Navy Board and the Royal Dockyards were
insatiable customers. The younger Ambrose experimented with steel manufacture
at Stourbridge, and then moved the works to Durham as ‘the largest iron
manufactory in Europe’. His son, yet another
Ambrose, came to London opened warehouses and became a City Gent.
By the early 18th century the
Crowley’s City wharf was too small and they were looking to expand. They came
to Greenwich, bought and moved into, the palatial house which stood on what is
now the site of the power station. From
then on it was called Crowley House, and it stood on Crowley Wharf together
with Anchor Iron Wharf next door. On the
corner was the Golden Anchor pub and Golden Anchor Stairs (which are still
there, incidentally). Adjacent on the riverside were warehouses which could
hold enough items to supply all four of the Royal Dockyards –Deptford,
Woolwich, Portsmouth and Chatham. They
also supplied commercial shipping – and, sorry to say, the slave trade.
Anchor Iron Wharf today extends in an ‘apron’
beyond the line of the river wall on both sides and juts out into the river. A
brick wharf replaced a timber wharf here and in 1739 the extension into the river
is first shown. This is thought to have been done using timber to brace the
base of a new river wall and then the new area was then backfilled with silt. Recent
archaeology uncovered an anvil on the riverside here. It stood on slag
described as ‘smithing hearth bottom: ...
black, shiny and granular. Pieces of broken machinery lay discarded immediately
south of the anvil .... conspicuous ... were a set of smooth rollers”. A
map of 1739 mentions ‘Anchor Wharf & Forge’. Anchor Iron Wharf was thus not just a sales
outlet – but a repair base and possibly a manufacturing one too
Ambrose’s son, John took over the business at
the age of 24. The family was by now extremely wealthy and mixing with the
aristocracy. John began to buy up land
and to trade with the countries of the emerging British Empire. He died at the
age of only thirty eight and the business passed to his wife Theodosia. By then the iron business was said to be the
largest in Europe employing 900 men. Although Theodosia managed the business
she and her children no longer used Crowley House as their home and it became
essentially an office block but she continued to expand the business taking on
more mills and furnaces. Her sons died
and in her 60s she was still in charge.
In 1755 she died and it passed to her daughter, Elizabeth, who then
married the Earl of Ashburnham – himself the inheritor of the Ashburnham
furnaces in Surrey.
Isaac Millington we installed at Greenwich as
Manager, and gradually the business passed to him and his family. He bought
shares and the company became Crowley Millington and Co. The firm kept going
but gradually slowed up. In 1849 it was inherited by a Millington great
granddaughter and the great warehouses were sold and magnificent Crowley House
was demolished.
Today the wharf under the power station is
called Crowley Wharf – a name which has recent been revived. I regret to say
that I was told that when the flats were built on the site in 2002, the
developer refused to name them after the Crowleys. Apparently they said that
the name was ‘too much like creepy crawly’.
Initially Anchor Iron wharf was taken over by
James Fennings from the end of 1863. He
was probably a member of the underwriting family who also owned Fennings Warf
in Southwark. By 1895 it was being used for trading iron and other metals by C.A.
Robinson and Co. The commemorative plague on the wharf says that Charles
Robinson moved his scrap business here in 1953 – although there are directory
entries for Robinsons here from at least 1909.
They remained there until 1985 and will be remembered by many local
people as ‘Robbos’.. The wharf was for a
long time in two halves with the footpath, the right of way, going between
walls of corrugated iron – to emerge at Ballast Quay. There is a page about Robinsons and a slide
show of pictures at http://www.ballastquay.com/c-a-robinson--co.html
In 2002/3 flats were built on the landward side
of the wharf, covering a large area which including the demolished British
Sailor pub in Hoskins Street. The area
in front of the flats was cleared giving a wide river frontage with seating on
concrete benches although some of the area is fenced off and some of it is
still the responsibility of Morden College.
A restaurant has recently opened in the ground floor of the flats – the
space having been empty for several years leading to local speculation about
what was stored there – was it work of some artist? Nearer the riverside is an artwork by Wendy
Taylor which consists of the sculpture of an anchor, with a plaque giving some
of the history of the wharf?
Sources
Two
archaeology paper s– they were actually looking for the Tudor hobby stables,
which were away from the riverside and which I haven’t covered:
Excavations
at Anchor Iron Wharf parts 1 & 2 London Archaeol 13 (7) 175–80 and
(13) 8, 217–221
Julian Watson. St.Peter’s Abbey Ghent. Jnrl Greenwich Historical Society Vol.3.No.6
Barbara Ludlow. Royalists, a Regicide and Iron Masters.
Bygone Kent November 2003
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