Carriage Store Royal Arsenal

 “One of the largest planned groups of engineering workshops of its period in the world, also illustrative of the scale of cannon making in the Napoleonic Wars.” So says the entry on the Grade II listing on the site which I will be looking at this week taken from the Industrial Archaeology of South East London. This is the ‘Carriage Store’ in the Royal Arsenal.  The entry in SELIA says: “This long two-storey building c1728 but fire damaged in 1802, originally housed the gun carriages.

Now, happily, that SELIA entry makes clear one thing which I thought I ought to explain.  It is often described as a “carriage store”.  Now that could mean a sort of garage for horse-drawn conveyances for posh people, but no, it means 'gun carriages' - the framework that guns were mounted on in order to move them about and then to use them. By ‘guns’ of course they mean 'cannon; – “a large, heavy piece of artillery, typically mounted on wheels, formerly used in warfare”.  I don’t know why it is called 'store' because it was clearly a factory, not a warehouse, a place the carriages to hold the cannon were made.  

In my mind there are a whole lot of questions about how this manufacture was organised – was each carriage made for its own particular gun, or were they all the same? I have a feeling though that I’m never going to get an answer.  The little we know about the Arsenal is mainly about those buildings we can see a there now and their architecture - not about how the Arsenal was organised as a workplace.  

About gun carriages I should perhaps also note that Royal funerals and the like, in any procession use a gun carriage to carry the important person’s coffin. I understand that the current Royal Gun Carriage was not made in the Arsenal, but by Vickers. It is in store - so somewhere there is such thing as a ‘Carriage Store’ where it is not alone, because I understand it is Number 146.

Now the other thing is that I think that is very unlikely that any of the people that wrote SELIA in 1982 had ever been on the Arsenal site or seen the buildings they were describing. Back then no one ever got onto the Arsenal site just to see things was allowed – there was the Official Secrets Act sign for a start.  

Somebody who wrote about Arsenal Buildings was Darrel Spurgeon whose book   ‘Discover Woolwich and its Environs’ described buildings in the Arsenal, including the Royal Carriage Store.  Darrel published this in 1989, seven years after SELIA, and said that the Arsenal site was not accessible. He told his readers about a place where you could peer through the fence from the road and see some of the buildings.  

So what does Darrel say about the gun carriage store? “Royal Carriage Factory where gun carriages were manufactured.  This massive building with its great shed like roof was originally built in 1728 but it has been very extensively altered and enlarged, particularly since 1850.  The impressive symmetrical North Front with his arches and cupola was added by James Wyatt after a fire in 1802”

Thirteen years later, in 2002, it was possible to get onto the site.  I arranged a meeting there for the Gunpowder Mills Study Group and I remember it was all very difficult and there were no facilities whatsoever on site, not even any toilets. But we did get to see inside.  Around the same time I arranged a visit for GLIAS members and two women who went to the wrong gatehouse were marched across the site with a military escort/

In order make sure that I had got everything right I contacted our Arsenal historical expert, Ian Bull, and asked which building exactly he thought SELIA was referring to.  Here is what he said:”That’s a difficult question because four buildings were called ’The Carriage Store’. The first was built in 1683, one of the earliest of Arsenal buildings, and is long gone. The second was constructed in 1728 and had gone by the mid 19C. The third, and the one I suspect you’re interested in, of 1802/05, is better known as the Royal Carriage Department and in part it survives as the present 'Building 10’. 

He recommends that I look at the Survey of Woolwich.  It seems amazing with so little access that something as erudite as the Survey of Woolwich was published only 10 years after my gunpowder study mills visit.  

The Survey tells us that the carriage sheds had been built in the late 17thC on a site which was later used as an orchard.  In the 1720s a New Carriage yard was built as a single-storey brick building with overhead travelling cranes. This was expanded in 1770s with smiths and carpenters shops. This was destroyed by fire in 1802 and the site was cleared.   

With a growing demand for gun carriages the Royal Carriage Department was formed and Carriage Square was rebuilt with 22 workshops in 1805. This manufacturing complex was very large and well-ordered – it is said to have had a layout like a model farm.   It included a foundry – probably the world’s largest in the early 19th century - but the majority of the work there was done with wood.

The central elevation had a turret with a clock made by Thwaites of Clerkenwell and bells by Mears of Whitechapel.  The clock was driven by weights which fell into a waterlogged well.  The clock is still up there but electric.  It is said that the ‘well’ remains and so do the, now disconnected, bells.

It was here in the Carriage Factory that steam power was first used for manufacturing in the Arsenal and a Joseph Bramah engine and planing machine were installed in 1805. Bramah was a prolific inventor, best known for his locks, and with a manufacturing works in Pimlico. The young Woolwich born Henry Maudslay was recruited by Bramah from the Arsenal, where he worked as a boy.  Later he was Bramah’s manager there before leaving to set up independently for his brilliant career as leading and innovative engineer.  

A sawmill was installed for the Carriage Works at a site at Frog Island on the Arsenal Canal.  The mill had been designed by Marc Brunel in 1808 – Marc was, of course, the father of the better known Isambard Kingdom Brunel. A French immigrant, he had installed his revolutionary machinery, most notably, at Plymouth Dockyard. His installation at the Arsenal was designed to deal with large timbers and he claimed that no other sawmill could handle what had been done here - it was said to save £10,000 a year in labour. 

By the 1850s there were single-storey workshops for wheelwrights and carpenters and in the yard there were three large smitheries each with 12 forges flanked with anvils. In the carriage factory a scrap forge installed in 1848 had the Arsenal’s first steam hammers. Another steam engine was installed in the 1850s and there were new workshops for fitters and metalworkers and more carpenters shops. Two reverberatory furnaces and a large compass saw for circulatory cutting were added in 1871. There were eventually steam engines in all four corners of the main quadrangle plus a big octagonal chimney.  

Some of the walls of these buildings survived into 21st century and some of Wyatt’s designs of 1803 remain but most was drastically altered as it was continually rebuilt as new equipment was installed.  Gradually the avenues were covered over and new buildings erected. The smitheries area became a very large machine room with a very large lathe with a turning circle of 27 feet diameter. In the 1920s the heavy machine shop worked on guns up to a 12 inch calibre. A special roof structure was designed which covered the former central courtyard protected the area and its machinery.  

After the Second World War steam turbine sets were made here for Metropolitan Vickers – some of which are preserved, apparently in the Canary Islands.  To make the beds for these a very large planing machine was installed which necessitated structural changes to some walls - I am told it ‘commanded respect.

So what has happened to this complex site? It is now called 'The Armouries’ and it was rebuilt again by Berkeley Homes in 2007.  There are modern blocks of flats called ‘Building 10’ which rise above the older building and seem almost to grow out of them.  A route through the site is called ‘Royal Carriage Mews’ and is lined with ‘townhouses’. The complex includes a supermarket, gym and medical centre and there is an energy centre with a gas-fired plant.  Despite these changes the frontage of the old buildings onto Major Draper Road looks remarkably impressive and contains the concierge’s office. Round the corner another entrance, also impressive. takes us into Tesco.

So now the ‘Carriage Store’  ‘nestles neatly in the vibrant south east corner of Royal Arsenal Riverside’ – ‘a bustling new neighbourhood’. I’m very impressed that the advertised monthly cost of leasing one of the units in this complex is not much less than we paid for a three bed terraced house in the 1960s.  I could quote the sales literature for these Woolwich flats at length. ‘old carriage works used to store heavy artillery during World War 1’ ….; a wonderful expression of modern architecture as a design-led centrepiece’. 

But I think I am running out of space here.

Thanks Steve Peterson , Ian Bull (who says he owes what he knows to the late Ray Fordham), also – belated thanks to (now retired) Greenwich Council Project Officer, Mike Neill, for his help with my 2002 on-site seminar.