Ballast Quay

 

Working along the Greenwich riverside the next area is Ballast Quay. There is an amazing web site for this area – so good and so comprehensive that I am very nervous in case I am just copying what they say and/or upsetting them. Hope the people who set it up don’t mind. It includes interviews with local people and with some expert historians as well as lots of pictures and information pages. http://www.ballastquay.com/

On the web site is a recording of a talk by historian Julian Watson who starts off by talking about the Ghent ownership of this area, which I covered in my article on Anchor Iron Wharf.  Julian makes the important point that this area – Ballast Quay and Anchor Iron Wharf – may be the real old Greenwich. Following on from what he says, that the palace was built on land probably taken from the original bequest to Ghent’, the area we now know as Greenwich, around St.Alfege's church, may have originated in service areas for the palace and an area for fishermen. While the administrative area was here, at the Court House, on Anchor Iron Wharf.

There is so much to say about the history of this site but I can only stick to essentials – look at the web site and listen to Julian. What can we see here – there is the garden, the pub, and the Harbour Master’s House.  Most importantly up on the wall no.10 is a plaque with a ‘lion rampant’.  This is a mark of ownership by Morden College.  They acquired much of what remained of the Ghent lands in the 1690s and they still have most of it, and they will turn up in the future of this riverside story with increased frequency. Morden College is a large almshouse (probably designed by Christopher Wren, no less) over on the other side of Blackheath.  They have a wonderful archive – for which all of us Greenwich historians are very, very grateful. (Thank you Elizabeth).

The name of ‘Ballast Quay’ appears to date from at least the 17th century – although it seems sometimes to refer also to Anchor Iron Wharf.  Ballast was used for the return journeys of the ‘collier’ ships which brought coal to London from Northumberland and Durham.  It is thought to have come from pits on the hillside between riverside Greenwich and Blackheath – one important source of ballast locally being the pit in which Maze Hill Station now stands. Chalk for ballast would have been loaded onto ships here – although some captains were less scrupulous and the City Thames Commissioners' minutes are full of complaints about chunks of river wall being surreptitiously removed for this purpose

A pub had stood on this area from at least the early 18th century. It was called the Green Man and was roughly where the Cutty Sark pub stands now but further back from the riverside.  The current terrace of houses and pub date from the early 19th century and were designed by the Morden College, Surveyor, Mr. Biggs.  In 1829 he had further plans to develop the area and extend the wharf.  It was then called Union Wharf, and the pub was the ‘Union Tavern’ - renamed ‘Cutty Sark’ when the famous ship was installed in Greenwich in the early 1950s.  There is an excellent history of the pub by Neil Rhind at http://www.ballastquay.com/the-cutty-sark-tavern.html. It remained a small local – still called ‘the Union’ by many (I know at least one who still does). It was refitted in the early 1970s with ‘a staircase for Erroll Flynn’, as one regular noted. Always previously owned and leased by Morden College it s now a Young’s Pub and gone all gastro.

Residents have recently ensured that the old street name ‘Union Wharf’ has been painted on one of the houses.  ‘Union’ as a street name usually means ‘near the workhouse’ but here it seems to be something else – maybe the Acts of Union with Ireland in 1801, which would seem to be around the right date.

This was a busy working area and the houses, owned by Morden College, were rented to local workers, fishermen and boatmen. ‘A Fisherman of Greenwich’ by Julie Tadman describes the life of William Bracegirdle who began as a fisherman and rose to live in the only big house on the Wharf– Thames Cottage – and to become a small developer. He was however to end his days living on charity in an almshouse. Also on the Cutty Sark Web site is the story of the boat building Hoskins family by Karen Johnson http://www.ballastquay.com/the-hoskins-family.html. It is from them that Hoskins Street previously Bennett Street – was named. Ballast Quay has rare survivals of 1860s granite setts, street-paving, to withstand heavy industrial traffic, in the area and at the east end of the Quay were gun posts to serve as bollards.

In the mid-1840s the East Greenwich Steamboat Pier was built opposite what is now the Harbour Master’s House. A path leads from the road to what was once the entrance to the office for the pier, which is now used as a building in the Ballast Quay garden. The mid-1840s were an era of intense competition among passenger steam boats companies and several short-lived piers were built. There were also standoffs with licensed watermen. This may have been a ‘floating pier’ but is now no sign of it on the foreshore or river wall.

William Bracegirdle lived in Thames Cottage, the last of the older houses on this part of the riverside. His story is covered in a book by Julie Tadman. In its place was built the Harbour Masters House. I covered this in some detail in a previous Weekender article in May 2016 https://www.weekender.co.uk/digital-edition/2018/05/.  It was built in 1855 as part of the regulatory framework for controlling collier (coal delivery) ships in the river. It belonged to the Thames Conservancy who had leased both it and Union Wharf in 1860. All collier ships had to report there and provide papers. `When the system was abolished around 1900 the house was sold and let into flats.

The Ballast Quay Garden now covers what was Union Wharf . When the Port of London Authority was established in 1908 it had became the Port of London Wharf and had been surrounded by a high wall, although it was later railed and some rails remain around the house and the approach to the wharf.. .Here a steam crane ran on rails along the wharf but it was later sold for scrap but the wharf became less and less used.  In the mid-1960s the it was transformed into the garden on the initiative of Hillary Peters who also worked on Surrey Docks Farm, one of the earliest of the City Farms. The Ballast Quay garden is still with us and very beautiful and for a short time residents ran a tea shop here, but there are now sometimes open days (with cakes!). Art exhibitions are sometimes held in the ‘potting sheds’ which are actually the old ticket office for the short lived pier. In the garden is a sculpture made of waste materials taken from the river by Kevin Herlihy as a memorial to the millions of animals killed during the foot-and-mouth crisis of 2001.  There are other art works and other items around the garden for us all to admore.

This account is only a tiny fraction of what is at what has been at Ballast Quay. Look at the web site http://www.ballastquay.com/history.html and also at a short but very good account on https://www.londongardenstrust.org/features/Ballast.htm which is actually by Hillary Peters. 

Julie Tadman’s book is  ‘A Fisherman of Greenwich’. This was self-published in New Zealand – I'm always happy to pass enquires on to Julie.

And there is much else on many, many web sites and histories of Greenwich