Deptford Creek - why Deptford industry is so early and so diverse

 

Well, I have been working away doing a site by site history of the Deptford Creek wharves and the last two have been about the Sun Wharves site, adjacent to what is now the Bird’s Nest Pub.  I send the articles off to the Greenwich Weekender Editor on a Wednesday but last week – on the Friday– I see a great big article by blogger, Mr. 853, about the development plans for Sun Wharves.  I wish I had seen it before I sent the article off to Weekender!  I have started each of the last two weeks articles with apologies about how I am a bit of an interloper in Deptford history – and I am probably about to do that again! 

But, as ever, thanks to the Creekside Education Trust for help and this week in particular for letting me use material from their excellent publication Surviving Regeneration.

 

After Sun Wharves, going down the Lewisham bank of the Creek, things begin to open up a bit with some important sites – I have always said that the chemical works which we will soon be at are some of the most interesting bits of industrial history in the area.  Before that is Evelyn Wharf – which I will get to in the next week or so. I am waiting to be sent a report on it by a Kent Archaelogy organisation am stuck writing about that. After that comes Harold Wharf – which is the site of the Royal Slaughterhouse.  Now that site – the old slaughterhouse  - means, I think, that we need to go back a bit and look at the area as it developed through the Middle Ages and the Tudors – and I’ll come back to that in a moment.

Much of what we know about the pre-industrial history of Deptford Creek was work done by ane archaeologist, the late Christopher Philpotts, and his terrific study which was commissioned back (I think) in the 1990s by what is now the Creekside Discovery Centre but which has never been published.  In the 1990s I was leaked a copy by one of the past developers.   Now I have a request for help. The Archaeology Data Service is a terrific web site which helps researchers, like me, to find the reports on the sites we are looking at.  Their data base tells me that Christopher Philpotts undertook a study of Harold Wharf but when I ask how I can see it - it says “The ADS have no files for download, and unfortunately cannot advise further on where to access hard copy or digital versions.”  Oh No!  So – help – if you know where I can see a copy of Christopher Philpotts’ study of Harold Wharf, please let me know.

So Harold Wharf was the site of the Royal Slaughterhouse which is where all the meat eaten in Greenwich Palace was processed.  I’ll come to that later.  First I want to spend some time in this article speculating about that site, and others – and maybe the whole area around the Creek and beyond and its background.  What went on before the industries came onto the wharves?

Let’s look at Greenwich and Deptford and its evolution in terms of workplaces like the Royal Slaughter House.  Many years ago – in 1959 – the academic study of local history was founded by the late great W.G.Hoskins.  One of the things he published was the ranking by size of provincial England towns based on local tax returns.   Now I know that this list has now been discredited by a host of modern population historians but I guess we can still take it as a rough guide. So 1662 – largest provincial town is Norwich, then York, Bristol… and 12^th on the list, between Worcester and Shrewsbury is Deptford ……….. Deptford!?  Next after are Salisbury .. Colchester… and then.. .. East Greenwich. What? 

Now – and I have never seen this mentioned and I guess neither Prof. Hoskins or all the population historians have never stopped to think about it–  but if we are looking at an urban area aren’t Deptford and Greenwich the same place??   The cities listed – York, Shrewsbury and so on are all discreet areas with a centre surrounded  by countryside with roads going to them from other places.   I know that Greenwich and Deptford have a county boundary between them, as well as the river Ravensbourne which makes them different - and the local taxation figures are based on parishes.  But – come on – they are the same place, aren’t they, really.   So if we add together Hoskins figures for Deptford and Greenwich we are suddenly living in the third biggest urban area in restoration England (apart from London itself of course) – the list should go York, Norwich, Deptford/Greenwich, Bristol – that’s right, we were bigger than Bristol.

So – how did this come about.  In the 1660s this was the Greenwich and Deptford  of Pepys and Evelyn, with expansion of the Royal Dockyard, and formation of new industries like Copperas.  England had had our revolution with the Civil War – and that had given people a lot of ideas and meanwhile trade was expanding round the world.  We might learn a whole lot more when the Deptford Museum of Slavery and Museum is opening, and I see they have a big event this week.

In RestorationGreenwich the Royal Palace was still functioning.  Now I get very tired of people going on about ‘Royal Greenwich’ all the time but I think we need to think about the implications of having the Palace and Court in town..

In 1902 Walter Besant published his history of Westminster – and it includes a really interesting section on the staff of the Palace of Westminster under Richard II. Now, alright, that’s 250 years earlier – but I guess these things don’t change that much.  Besant says ‘the people attached to a Court number not hundreds, but many thousands’. He reckons Westminster under Richard II had about 20,000 people with a connection to the Court all of whom were able to claim food and lodging there … ‘a crowded city.. It produced nothing and carried on no trade’.  The Royal Court was a daily gathering in the presence of the Monarch where the business of the state could be undertaken – thus what was, in effect, the civil services needed to be where the King/Queen was, and where the ambassadors and advisors with their entourage and servants came.   They needed so much – all of those guards and clerks needed feeding, twice a day. They needed somewhere to sleep, their waste removed, their clothes and themselves washed, somewhere to spend their leisure. The logistics of all this must have needed an army of clerks– it’s all very well to say Henry VIII ate a swan at a banquet – but just think, where did the swan come from, who caught it, brought it to Greenwich, plucked it, stored it, programmed it into the days food production, dressed it, served it.  And all the people who did that needed feeding and housing too. Alongside them are all the people producing and trying to sell luxury goods as well as necessities.

 

The Court is also where all those men came who had got their ideas and advancement with the Commonwealth and then the Restoration  - Evelyn and Pepys, of course, as well as some who might feature in my articles soon - Sir Nicholas Crispe, Sir John Winter … and a host of others.

So – can we understand why Greenwich/Deptford were so big then?  I might add that it is also the start of Greenwich/Deptford as a real centre of industrial innovation and ideas which was to last through until very, very, very recently.   Royal Greenwich is so much, much more than Henry VIII cutting off people’s heads.

And so to Deptford and the Royal Slaughterhouse - which will discuss in more detail soon. I am aware that I have already missed the King’s Dog Kennel in Brookmill Lane and I wrote about the Royal Armoury, further up the Ravensbourne, some weeks ago.  These institutions were here because of the Palace – and to my mind they are all industrial. We talk now about large enterprises being on an ‘industrial scale’ and there must have been so much more here then. The area round Deptford Creek must have been a site for other bodies which serviced the Palace and the Royal Court.

This is why our area was the third largest urban area outside London in the mid-17^th century.  Unlike our great provincial cities Greenwich/Deptford had no  great cathedral, no corn or wool exchange,  no great civic structures, no centre for a focus – just a riverside area on the Kent/Surrey border, now Sarf East London, and generally to be ignored. 

I said earlier that the Royal Court in Greenwich in the mid 17^th century was a magnet for innovation and ideas, some of which were worked out alongside Deptford Creek. In the succeeding centuries it was part of a complex of new industries, with a skilled workforce, which did much to create the modern world. We can argue now that this was not a good thing at all – slavery, urban degredation, pollution and the whole of the carbon cycle which may yet kill us all. But like it or not it’s an achievement.