CHARLTON WATER WORKS

 

CHARLTON  WATER WORKS

Confusingly Samuel. Homersham and  Lewis Davis also seem to  have been behind the Plumstead , Woolwich , and Charlton Consumers Pure  Water Company and also sometimes gave that as the name of the Company involved in the Plumstead Water Works. Homersham had been involved in many local waterworks schemes and was very much involved in geological and chemical experiments on water. He appears to have been a promoter of Clark’s soft water process. It also seems that the company was responsible for setting up a waterworks in North Charlton. .

Charlton Water Works is usually described as belonging to the Kent Water Company and they certainly owned it when eventually it succumbed to cholera outbreak so I assume they took it over along with the Plumstead Works in 1860.

Lower Charlton seems the most unlikely place to have a water works. Charlton House and the Village are up on the hill. Down the hill is the industrial area on what was once marsh land. .  You would expect Charlton to get its water from long established works in Greenwich or Woolwich or even Plumstead. You would expect to find any water works up on the chalk hillside, maybe on the spring line or on an underground water course – but no. In 1857 a deep well was dug at North Charlton alongside the Woolwich Road.  This was not a good idea.

The works was built slightly to the west of what was then called West Street – now Westmoor Street. There they built a pumping station and installed a ‘Cornish Engine’ -  a steam engine from Harvey & Co. of Hayle in Cornwall.. It was soon  pumping its daily supply of water from the chalk well on the margin of the marsh’.

So, what was the area near this new works like?  West Street, on the Woolwich borders, had houses ‘built it appears by speculating builders on land entirely unfit’. .. ‘on the marsh and the water soaking from the tidal ditch is seen through the floors .. market gardens covered with the foulest manure ..... deep wide cesspools’. There are vivid descriptions of houses where the water supply had been cut off.

In 1866 cholera struck.“A middle aged man from one of the cottages ... his wife is ill and a young lodger has just died of cholera ...............a West street six or seven deaths ......... a man and woman are quarrelling ......... a dead child has just been carried from the house’..a ‘few doors on is a decent woman in a clean house whose son, a young gardener, was attacked by cholera in the morning at six o clock and died before noon his two boys were running about and the mother was from home’.

In West Street and Harden's Manorway  ‘men were ill in great numbers, and several died within a few days. Men were sick at home’ and sudden deaths by cholera caused “inconceivable consternation among the women”.

Nearly every house in this district used water from the Kent Company . This came from a stand pipe which functioned for a short time every day; and people collect the water in ‘vessels of various kinds, dirty or clean’. There was no water supply to outdoor toilets and in many cases the water had been cut off ‘because the landlords or the tenants have at some time or other neglected pay the rate’.

It was said that this would not do because Woolwich ‘is one of the principal military stations of England. There is large force of artillery, amounting to more than 5,006 men. The dockyard employs many men; the great arsenal of the empire full of artisans in Government employ.’ Thus ‘the health of the place in time of war is of vital importance.

So  the almost new pumping station  was taken out of use because the well was ‘becoming   contaminated with river water’ 

The Cornish engine was sent to the Cold Bath well at the Deptford Brookmill site and is said to have been scrapped in 1933. However it is also said that the engine ended up at the Crayford Water Works, and that it was embellished wit two statues of Sir Walter Scott.  I will return to the both the ‘Coldbath Well and to the Crayford Works in due course.

The waterworks pump house was not demolished until the 1950s. Photographs show a tall ‘Gothic ‘ building looking very much like a waterworks, with a tall chimney. It was leased to a builder’s merchant’s and subsequently to other industries. By the 1950s when it was demolished it had been  in use by the Grafton Engineering Co. There seem to be a number of companies in Greenwich then called ‘Grafton Engineering’ and this is one is described as being 'a general engineers and cabinet makers'. Today the site is covered with modern industrial units.