Once again - we continue down the Lewisham bank of Deptford Creek where we have now reached the railway line and the railway bridge. I wrote quite a bit about the railway and its bridge over the Creek when I was writing last July about the other side of the Creek, that is when I was following the Greenwich bank going south,
I need to remind you that this is the oldest railway in London and the first suburban railway in the world and the massive viaduct which brings it here from London Bridge was built by a Royal Engineer, Lt. Col. George Landmann, and it is the first and the biggest in all sorts of ways.
The crossing over Deptford Creek wasn’t finished until well after the line from Deptford to London Bridge was opened. Delay had been caused by legal restrictions on the crossing itself and the need to consult and then to work, with the owners of various wharves who would be affected by a bridge across the Creek. The original bridge required a whole group of men to open and shut it and it took a long time to do that – and the principle of ‘Sail before Steam’ meant they had to open it whenever a boat wanted to come through. Today the crossing has a lifting railway bridge built in the 1960s, although it is apparently welded shut but it is now a notable landmark in the area. There is also a foot crossing built in the 1990s and which is apparently made to look like a crossing – the Ha’penny Hatch - which was here around the time the railway was built - and which probably pre-dated it. It was installed as a result of community requests and regenerators’ efforts. There has been talk of getting the crossing and the bridge listed but this has not happened except for the piers of the old railway bridge on the Lewisham bank– and they are now listed structures. They are however very difficult to see.
In the Middle Ages and later, the area which lay inland on the Lewisham side of the Creek had few buildings and was known as ‘the gravel pits’ and we can assume that gravel extraction took place over many years. It is probable that the Creekside wharves here date from the early 19th Century - although it may be that we just don’t have records of anything which was there earlier.
I ought to say that one complication with researching many of these wharves is that there are other wharves on the Creek, the Thames and indeed the Grand Surrey Canal with the same names. Too often it ends up being guess work about which wharf a report refers to – so I hope I’ve got it all right. There are also changes in the name of the road on the inland side of the wharves here, which doesn’t help - most of this is now ‘Copperas Street’ but for a while it was called ‘Knott Street’ and also ‘Creek Street’. Another complication is that there are ‘Deptford’ areas on riversides in Sunderland and elsewhere with road and wharf names which are often very similar.
Immediately north of the railway on the Lewisham side was ‘Baltic Wharf’ which was very narrow, and quite small. It seems very likely that it was part of the land owned by the railway which they had acquired to build the line and when no longer needed it was put into other use. By the 1890s Baltic Wharf was used by the Johnson family who seemed to have had it some sort of timber business here. It appears from the Goad insurance map that the arches under the railway line were for ‘wood chopping’ and there is a suspicion that what the Johnsons were actually selling was firewood - and in fact they advertised that - but ‘timber’ sounds much grander.
It appeared that Frederick Johnson died in 1889 leaving the business to his three sons and a court case to resolve some issues of debts was ongoing in 1890. There is also a police court report that Frederick Thomas Johnson, described as a ‘wood chopper’ was charged with assaulting his brother, William Edward Johnson. William had gone into the office to see if he could see the company accounts but instead was knocked down by his brother who also kicked him. He went himself to the police because he said that he was frightened of his brother. I am sorry that I was unable to find the report of the subsequent police court hearing. Things must have settled down because they remained in business. Four years later Frederick Johnson, described as a firewood dealer, was prosecuted for allowing a horse which he owned to be taken out an unfit state and both he and his carman were fined for allowing this to happen. Elsewhere there are details of his divorce.
In the 1920s there are reports of a number of vessels at Baltic Wharf. There are no real details since they are in lists of ‘vessels in the port today’ and giving minimum information. I am far from sure this is the correct Baltic Wharf - although it says it is in Deptford. I can find none of these vessels in the exhaustive enthusiasts pages of reference material on sailing barge but some have turned up elsewhere but described as ‘ketches’. They were however sea going vessels which had sailed over the Channel because their ports of origin are all in Europe - one from Antwerp and others from Rumpst and Lobith – which are both small towns on the Rhine. I have no idea what they were bringing - or taking it from – Baltic Wharf. It would be interesting to know. Rumpst apparently had a brick making industry so maybe they brought bricks.
On this stretch of river side there were streets running between the wharves from Copperas Street to the Creek. So before you could get to the next wharf you would have to cross a street. In this case it was Thomas Street and it ran between Baltic Wharf and Normandy Wharf. Thomas Street had apparently been built by the London to Greenwich Railway parallel with the railway line. They had commissioned the houses to be built by a Mr. Pope and then rented out. They had then passed through a number of owners and their agents.
In 1870 a business on adjacent Normandy Wharf – Mockford went to court to obtain possession – or even some rent - from these houses which it was said had been taken over by ‘a colony of Irish who refused to pay any rent’. In this period many Irish people were coming to England to look for work and also being blamed for everything possible. Much of the court case was about requests for rent or eviction notices and if they had ever actually been served. The witness for the owners was a man, only referred to as ‘Hippy’, who was supposed to be a rent collector but said he wouldn’t go near the place because they were ‘a rascally lot’. Evidence was given by one of the residents, a Patrick Brown, who when asked who his landlord was, said ‘No Man’ and went on to say that he had never made any agreement with anybody to pay rent but had paid a pound to a Mr. White to get possession of the house. He said that his wife had had notices to quit but didn’t know where she had put them – and that she couldn’t read anyway. He couldn’t read either and there had been so many papers that he took no notice of them. The Judge said that it would need to be established what interest Mr., White had in the property to be able pass it on to Patrick Brown but White was now dead.. It is quite clear from the report that Patrick Brown – despite being illiterate – had the smartest answers and the most telling points. The Judge stressed that Mockfords needed to prove that Brown was living in the property illegally before they could evict him. Brown had never paid rent to anyone but had paid to get possession of the house and the Judge added that he ‘could well assert that the property is his own’. This judgement applied to several other residents in the street. Win to the Irish!
Other newspaper reports about events in Thomas Street give us some idea of the lives of the inhabitants. In 1850 an elderly lady resident, Ellen Walsh, was apprehended in the Centurion Pub at Deptford Bridge while removing a pint pot –presumably a drinking vessel made of some sort of metal. It turned out she had been removing these for some time, taken them home and melted them in a frying pan - and then presumably sold the metal.
In another tragic case a year later a lady died after her voluminous skirts caught fire while she was making toast for tea. This, unfortunately, was not an uncommon occurrence and was one of the cases which led the Kentish Mercury to start a local campaign against the wearing of crinolines. They were of course quite right – and while we might admire all these skirts in costume dramas, they did present a considerable danger in a small crowded room with an open fire and candles.
In 1870 a John Enright who lived in Thomas Street was charged with assaulting a friend with a poker and foul language. He appeared in court with a large bandage around his head and admitted that they had been drinking together that evening.
The next industrial site was Normandy Wharf. There was also a ‘Normandy Wharf’ up on the Surrey Canal and so I hope I have got the right one. On earlier maps, before the Creekside land was divided up into separate wharves, some buildings are shown on the area which appears to be Normandy Wharf, so clearly some earlier activity took place here. In the 1860s it would appear that Normandy Wharf was used as some sort of site office accommodation and depot for the builders of Bazalgette’s pumping station on the opposite side of the Creek. However there may also have been other businesses on the site as shown by a bankruptcy petition for a Benjamin Thompson, who had been a ship broker there,
As we will see this area came to be used by a number of ‘artificial manure’ works and the smells they created became a big problem. As early as 1857 Mr. Hubble, the Deptford Inspector of Nuisances, had said that smells from under the railway arches here came from a store used by a patent manure works. After 1870 Normandy Wharf was in the hands of Mockford & Co. who had come from the City of London where they had been in the 'artificial manure' trade since at least the 1860s. Most of their advertisements also give an address in Cork and it is difficult to know it they were a firm with Irish origins of it was just a major market for them. Other advertisements however are aimed at Caribbean sugar and coconut growers. They had also opened the Mockford Ordnance Manure Works on the Greenwich Peninsula riverside in the area where Dome stands now and covered thus in a Weekender article way back in March 2019 and also in my book on the Greenwich Riverside. Stored on site at Greenwich was about 250 tons of ‘shoddy’ - waste from cloth manufacture. There was also over 5,000 tons of guano - that’s bird droppings collected from sea bird nesting areas. In 1872 the works there had been inspected by Mr. Pink, the Greenwich Inspector of Nuisances, and as a result the firm had been stopped from manufacturing ‘Caro Guano’ because the manufacturing equipment was ‘imperfectly constructed’. Edward Ballard, who reported to the Board of Works in 1870 on smells along the east London riverside, said of them ‘acrid fumes were escaping. a very powerful pungent odour pervaded the works … an empyreumatic odour .... no means whatever are in use to intercept these effluvia’.
Mr.Mockford was himself very respectable and a member of the Royal Society of Arts but there were constant complaints about this Deptford site. In 1871 there were complaints of ‘town dust’ which had been collected and left in heaps on Normandy Wharf. By the 1890s the Wharf was being used by a Mr. Donagen whose use of the wharf is unclear but who advertised that he wanted ‘second hand pantiles’ in 1899. Sadly also in this period a young boy of 13 was sentenced to a number of lashes as a result of pulling out the lynch pin of a cart causing it to collapse.
None of this seems to be very good! And no space here to mention current use of these sites by Cockpit Arts or the terrific mural in Copperas Street.
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