Deptford Creek and Creekmouth

 

These articles have covered the Greenwich riverside from Upper Watergate to Angerstein Wharf – which has been over fifty articles. Angerstein Railway and Wharf really mark the end of Greenwich and the riverside path moves on to Charlton.  I thought however that before going to Charlton and on to Woolwich and Thamesmead, that I needed to backtrack a bit. When I covered Deptford and went on into Greenwich I crossed Deptford Creek.   I did consider going down the Creek on the Lewisham side and coming back up on the Greenwich side – but, no, I carried onto along the River and into Tourist Greenwich.  So – I am going to interrupt our journey to Thamesmead and the Bexley border and go down the Creek.  I think, however, I am going to start by going down on the Greenwich side – it seems to make more sense.

 

Deptford Creek is of course really the River Ravensbourne. There is another River Ravensbourne on the other side of the River but that is somewhere up in the wilds north of Romford and we don’t need to think about it here.  Our River Ravensbourne originates in some ponds in Keston – and a very nice place to go for a picnic and see a lot of very interesting ducks.  It flows north down through the Bromley borders, keeping to the west of the town in a deep valley with parkland running up the slope to the Churchill Theatre in the High Street.  It’s joined by a whole host of little rivers coming from Beckenham and beyond - the Pool River, the Chaffinch, the Beck and many nameless trickles. It runs through Shortlands and on in a valley parallel with Bromley Road to Bellingham and Catford.  It runs through all that meadow and parkland at the back of Lewisham Hospital and then, almost underneath Lewisham Station it is joined by the Quaggy.  All the way down its length were many mills and there are all sorts of remains – like Peter Pan’s Pool in front of Homebase at Southend at Bellingham; that’s an old mill pond.

 

So – that’s the Ravensbourne which we know as Deptford Creek and with any luck we can go all the way down to Lewisham Station – and see, shipbuilders soap works, chemicals, mills, waterworks, engineers, railways as well as one of the most successful of British computer manufacturers. I know that local people at Creekside want to make a proper walk way and are making plans for signboards and information – so let’s do what we can to help.

 

 

Today if we walk along the Greenwich riverside past the Cutty Sark and along a very modern walkway called Dreadnought Walk which takes us to the point at which Deptford Creek joins the Thames. Here in its wide mouth is where the big ships moor in a deep when they come to Greenwich.  Perhaps our imaginary walk should envisage an aircraft carrier or a big cable layer before we leave the major River.

 

The new ‘development’ here is called Greenwich Reach East and it’s all very clean, respectable and boring and you are so removed from the two rivers themselves that the whole experience is remarkably sterile  From here we can turn south and start to work out way up the Creek to Lewisham.   

 

The walk way is called Dreadnought Walk presumably because there was a Dreadnought Wharf nearby and because ‘The Dreadnought’ ship was moored in the river here.  And anyway it sounds good. ‘Dreadnought’ was the name of a series of ships moored here and used as hospital accommodation by the Seamen’s' Hospital Society. In 1870 the Society came ashore and took over the old Infirmary of Greenwich Hospital and it was renamed the Dreadnought Hospital. The building is now the University Library and the Hospital is a wing of St.Thomas’s. To be fair to Dreadnought- the second ship hulked here by the Society – this was a warship with a most distinguished history.  She was a 98 gun second rate ship launched in Portsmouth in 1801. She saw action on many occasions and was a ship of the line at Trafalgar. She was at Greenwich as a hospital ship from 1841.

 

In the past the Kentish bank of the confluence of the Thames and Ravensbourne wasn’t always like this. Up until the 1820s the inland area it was called Brooks Marsh and contemporary maps show that it was nothing like it is now. It was used as a market gardens, osier beds and recreation.  Old maps do show a rather nice looking tree lined path following the riverside but beyond this was an area of mudflats and muddy islands projecting into the Thames on and off covered by the tide and where osiers grew. I’m fascinated to see that the 18^th century map marks the river bank as ‘sea wall’ I have had such arguments with my non-local proof readers who tut tut and change  it to ‘river wall’.  No, no, I’ve lived near the River all my life and it’s always ‘sea wall’. ‘River walls’ might do for the Ravensbourne but London River is something else entirely.

 

The whole marshy area was stabilised and turned into the solid land we see now by a contractor, Hugh – or David - Mackintosh. This contractor was very busy working on all the new roads, railways and docks in East London.  At around the same time they were working on Navy Board contracts in the Royal Dockyards using Roman cement, developed by James Parker in the 1790s, with brick reinforcements. It is of course perfectly possible that the same technique was used here – and remains as part of the promenade which exists today.

 

Mackintosh had been commissioned to do the work to stabilise the site by the Phoenix Gas Company who had bought it for a new gas works.    I wrote a whole article about what became West Greenwich Gas Works for Weekender in January 2020 and I had better not do it again. Before the works was built there had been a whole long saga and scandal around the building of the first gas works in Greenwich – and I wrote it all up for the 2019 Journal of the Greenwich Historical Society.

 

West Greenwich gas works stood on the site for nearly 100 years. Although this was an important works in use for nearly 100 years very little seems to be known about it. We must assume that the works continued with little need for comments. Both Phoenix and later South Met were efficient and respectable gas companies.   In a few weeks time I will write something about its holder station – the gas holders that once stood next to Greenwich Station.  In the mid 1880s once the huge East Greenwich works was built it was decided to run West Greenwich down. In the Great War the company was asked by the Government to use its retorts to make charcoal for gas masks and similar equipment.  Gas making finally ended in 1926.

 

Until the 1940s site was the base for the South Met Gas Company’s lighterage department looking after the Company tugs and barges. After that closed the site was sold.  It became a roadstone depot and remained so until taken over for ‘regeneration’ in the 1990s.

 

As we walk along the Creek southwards down what used to the sea wall and which is now ‘Dreadnought Walk’ we pass Admiral Tower – another block of flats named generically for a romantic seafaring past but with little connection to the reality of the area’s past. Eventually Dreadnought Walk turns into Dowells Street – ‘Dowells’ as a name at least has some connection to the area here, as we will see.  This is an area where the ships bringing coal from Durham and Newcastle berthed – and every day the local papers listed their names and where they had come from.

 

Around the point where the road name changes there were pre-1800 a set of steps into the Creek marked as ‘crossing place’ and this is conjecturally where the cross Creek ferry ran from.   

 

As we turn eastwards along Dowells Street the Creek frontage was called Dowells Wharf, or, by an older name, Creek Bridge Wharf.  We are essentially on the north side of a small dock running eastwards up to Norway Street.  The Creek turns here creating a bend in its length. Pre-1800 maps show an island in this bend, apparently used for growing osiers.  This island roughly equates to the area of the dock and presumably was removed and the space used for the inlet. The ‘Road to Greenwich’ is then shown on maps as on land to the east of the Creek starting from a gate at a point where the island nears the ‘Sea Wall’.  

 

Then we can start going south down the Creek.