Enderby Wharf - preserved equipment

 

Over the last couple of weeks Greenwich Industrial History Society members have been busy  writing an application to Historic England for listing the cable loading equipment at Enderby Wharf.

Do you  know about this relic equipment ?  It’s on a jetty at Enderby Wharf on the Greenwich Peninsula riverside.  If you are at the Cutty Sark Pub on Ballast Quay you can walk down the Riverside path past all the new flats called Riverside Gardens.– or you can follow it on Google Street View.  Just before you get to Enderby House Pub, there is all this old machinery  on a jetty, you can’t miss it.  It’s been there for many, many years and it’s a unique example of equipment which was used to load cable from the factory where it was made onto the ships which were going to lay it in the ocean – and that cable  takes your information and messages all round the world. 

The old equipment left there now is obviously relatively modern – but it represents over 150 years of cable for communications being loaded here on to the big cable laying ships to be laid at the bottom of the oceans.  Always remember that until the 1920s almost all the world’s subsea cable was made here in Greenwich.  So that cable gear represents a lot in the history of the world wide communication we take for granted these days.

I am reminded of a similar attempt to get a different lot of machinery listed on a nearby wharf. It was only 22 years ago but then things were very different.  In 2001 we tried to get listing status for two cranes at Lovell’s Wharf.

Lovell’s was on the first bit of the Riverside Path from Ballast Quay – on what is now Riverside Gardens flats. Its the bit of riverside you will have walked on to get to the machinery at Enderby Wharf.

The wharf had been operated for the past 80 or so years by Bristol based wharfingers, Shaw Lovell.  Anyone who was around there before the 1990s will remember how it was always very busy with ships alongside  the wharf and there was also a large 1960s office block.   In 1982 the wharf was handling 118,000 tons of cargo a year - steel, aluminium, galvanised sheeting and gas pipes as well as timber.  Later it was used for short term storage of building materials. But we all knew it would be up for ‘development’ sooner rather than later, although ships were calling there right to the end.

Two cranes remained on site after work there ended..Cranes like them were once very common around the Port of London but they have now completely disappeared. Its strange to think that many people these days will have no idea what the busy riverside used to be like – everywhere all movement and activity with big crane jibs swinging out to vessels alongside and the River itself full of ships.  It’s the noise of the River you miss the most – when it all closed down the silence was deafening.

The two tall ‘Scotch derricks’ at Lovells were a dramatic part of the Riverside. We did a bit of research to find out more about them to try and get them recorded and maybe preserved.

Shaw Lovell's records did not reveal when they had  first acquired them;  both had been used elsewhere. We understood that their lattice-framed style probably dated them to before 1950 and both were electrically powered. The down river crane was the 'Butters' crane brought here from Dublin Custom House in the mid-1970s and which could handle 20 tons.  Butters were Glasgow based crane manufacturers who had been taken over by Morris Cranes. Morris were very helpful but investigations to locate any archive information proved impossible. A brass licence plate with vital information on it had been removed from the crane by persons unknown some years previously.

 The upriver crane had been manufactured by Anderson Grice but very little was known about it. Information from Bristol suggested that it was capable of handling 5 tons only but men who worked on site say that it could handle 10 tons.  It seems amazing that there should be so little information available about two such relatively modern pieces of equipment.

 In the course of getting information together one young bloke climbed up the crane. I’m sorry I can’t remember his name, but he came from Deptford and always wore a cap on back to front.  He took a lot of photographs of what would have been the crane driver’s view.

We tried to put in an application to get them listed but it wasn’t acceptable and  we were told that English Heritage did not list machinery.  Now I knew through my national contacts in the world of industrial history that a number of consultancies had been commissioned about doing just that.  I remember sending copies of some of the documents to the then chief Greenwich planner – someone who generally kept abreast of new developments but he knew nothing about any of this.

Greenwich Planners were however very supportive of keeping the cranes and were working with some potential developers who had ideas about ways in which they could be used.

It was all useless. One Saturday morning at 6 am a demolition crew arrived and demolished both of the cranes on behalf of the site’s freehold owners.  I always suspected that it was because film makers who wanted to use Ballast Quay for historical location shots were complaining about them being in the way. Ironically the one witness to this demolition was apparently a former crane driver, living on the top floor of the Harbour Master’s House – and by the time he managed to contact anybody that morning  the cranes were gone

Things are different now.  English Heritage was been divided up some years ago and the part of it dealing with listings is now ‘Historic England’.   There are  many new members of staff and most of the ‘traditional  old-school conservationists’ have retired.  New staff are graduates of a range of disciplines and, I am told, much more aware of what they don't know. There is ‘an appreciation of all the varied aspects of the past’ ... ‘learning the lessons of what has been lost’.

So,  things look a lot brighter for getting listing status on the machinery at Enderby Wharf which is just a short distance on from where the cranes were.   

But there are some other issues at Enderbys.  Next to the jetty where  the machinery is are some steps going down into the river. These went to a small  ferry where a man would pick people from the wharf and take y them out to the cable ships moored in the river. They also covered Bendish sluice – part of the medieval system for draining the marsh.   In around 2003 a lot of work was done on the Greenwich Riverside by the Groundwork charity.  One of the things they commissioned was a project to replace the steps with a special hardwood on which was carved a history of the cable industry.  This was overseen by a member of the local community who has looked after them ever since.  She tells us now that she has recently had more work done on them.  There are now gates to prevent them being damaged by vandals.

There were other things at Enderbys which have been lost. That  included a set of penstocks for the sluice which were demolished by the Council some years ago.  Before all the flats were built  if  you stood on Enderby wharf with your back to the River and looked towards Blackwall Lane through some gates - you were looking down the length of what had been an 18^th century rope walk. What was the point of getting rid of that?  Next to it was a large office block decorated with a frieze of gutta percha leaves. Gutta percha was the important insulator for all those cables lying on the bottom of the world’s oceans.  That building was demolised with never a by-your-leave or thank-you.

However there is something new here. There is a new(ish) art work consisting of seats and a table which are designed as replicas of various important cables made on the site. The artist was Bobby Lloyd  and it was built because the Council  put it into the planning consent for all those flats when the site  was developed.  Unfortunately there was no arrangements made for looking after it and keeping it clean and tidy.  I hope this has been sorted out now – and if so, thank you to the Council Officer concerned.

Anyway- ‘good luck’ with the listing of the Enderby equipment. It’s very boring if after  all this development everything all  looks the same. Variety in the environment can be achieved in leaving behind something of its past.

And with Enderby’s surely we need to tell people about the heritage here.  All those tourists fiddling with their i-phones might like to know that Greenwich people played a big part in the technology which allows us to talk to each other all round the world.

Pity that walking down to Enderby’s  they won’t  get much idea of what this riverside was like, when the River was The River. (sigh)

Thanks – Alan Burkitt Gray, and many, many researchers on Enderbys including Stewart Ash and Richard Buchanan. With the cranes – many who had worked on the site, and the Shaw Lovell director.  LBG Planners and the then Riverside Officer, and, of course, the man with the backwards cap.