Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society and Greenwich

 

This week I thought that I would try to explain a bit about one of the organisations that I sometimes quote in various articles or suggest a look at their website. This is GLIAS, -the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society - and I thought some information and a bit of their early history might be interesting. They were set up to cover the whole of London but I thought it for us  in Greenwich I  could  look and see what were the Greenwich/Woolwich/Eltham sites  they looked at in their very earliest years.

And while looking at their earliest links with Greenwich I’ve uncovered a bit of a mystery.

Before GLIAS got going in the early 1970s there were some publications covering industrial archaeology in London. One was directory researched by the Thames Basin Archaeology Observers Group, and another was also Aubrey Wilson’s picture book ‘London’s Industrial Heritage’. I described then in Weekender in April 2023 when I wrote about– The Industrial Archaeology of Industry in South East London (SELIA) which was written in 1982 by the Goldsmith’s College Industrial Archaeology Group. 

So, we must take ourselves back to the 1960s when many industries were closing down or altering. Academic historians who wrote about industry usually did so under the headings ‘economic’ or ‘business’ history. There was a growing fashion for ‘industrial’ or ‘labour’ history – all about trade unions and people in the workplace. As an undergraduate - in my 30s – at Thames Polytechnic in the early 1970s I studied that sort of labour history- I was on the third year of their new ‘humanities’ course which had been set up look at (from my failing memory) arts and sciences and the industrial revolution – Our other local university - Goldsmiths -- offered both industrial archaeology and local history studies as modules for a London University External degree.  In central London, of course, Imperial College had a whole department and a professor. And in east London a centre of research was developed at Enfield College of Technology.  .All over universities and polytechnics were setting up courses in all sorts of new histories.

Outside of the academic world people were looking at industrial sites which were no longer being used - things like canals and steam engines and so on. Some of it was getting to be a bit romanticised and those who wrote about it became celebrities... In the 1940s and 50s there had been filmmakers who had recorded closing industries –the great world of documentaries, and there was a major studio locally in Blackheath –. 

 A survey of the Stratford based Lower Lea Valley had led to the Lea Valley Park suggesting an industrial museum for London in some of the Three Mills building .There and  elsewhere earnest students began to appear -  they would go in to a closing factory, measure it all up and work out a floor plan and so on.  They began to call it ‘industrial archaeology;

So, in 1968 the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society as set up to cover what they described as ‘a developing study and assessment of London’s industrial past’.  They should pick up the myriad of ‘amateur’ historians with memories of their workplaces or an interest in a particular subject – including the many, many railway antiquarians.  It was to cover the whole of London. Things moving ahead quite quickly –

 An inaugural meeting was set up in 1968 at the Science Museum – and that it was held there really reflects the prestige with which this future society was viewed. It was chaired by Denis Smith –who was to chair GLIAS itself for many many years.   At this first meeting he outlined the possible aims which the organisation should have, to ensure adequate coverage of all areas and subjects.  Speakers at the meeting included academics and well known individuals who aimed to set up a society which could achieve work beyond what which could be achieved by local societies. A steering committee was appointed

 

So what has all this got to do with Greenwich?  At the start the site which they talked about all the time was not in Greenwich –but it is nearly. So I’m not at all sure whether to count it as one of ours or not. It is what is now called ‘Crossness engines’- the remarkable set of steam engines in the Crossness Sewage works, built by Bazelgette as a major part of London’s sewage system and opened in 1865.  It was, and is, a very remarkable site.  From the 1970s a volunteer group has worked intensively to free up the engines which had been buried in fly ash by the Metropolitan Water Board - and today you can go and see one of them working along with a little museum about sanitary provision in London. If you don’t know it, well you go at once! But the problem for us looking at Greenwich is that technically it’s in the London Borough of Bexley.   It is right on the border and it is impossible to get into the site without using roads from Greenwich - from Abbey Wood or Thamesmead, or you can walk down the sewer from Plumstead Station.  So a great deal of attention was given to Crossness a by the 1^st meetings of GLIAS whether you think it is a Greenwich site or not is probably irrelevant.

 

To be perfectly honest apart from Crossness there isn’t an awful lot about Greenwich in these early years.  In the September 1969 GLIAS Newsletter is an item about ‘The Reliant’ said to be ‘the last operational side-lever engined paddle-tug’ anywhere in the world.  But the item t is really about the Maritime Museum rather than Greenwich industry.  They report that the Reliant will be ‘one of the exhibits in the new Neptune Hall, due to be opened in 1971’.  I am very aware that there is now some very bitter criticism of what the Maritime Museum did with Reliant. So perhaps we should skip over that one quickly

 

There is nothing more mentioned about Greenwich until May 1972 and that is just a very brief mention that the ‘London Transport Generating Station received its last load of sea coal during December for steam generation. Electricity is now produced by gas turbines. The jetty will be used by oil tankers delivering fuel’.  There is no more explanation than that and we are left to work out for ourselves s what they mean by the ‘London Transport generating station ‘.  It’s all very well for me - I know that it is what we refer to most of the time as Greenwich Power Station but it’s not a wildly helpful item.

BUT Woolwich does get mentioned from June 1972. This is because the old Woolwich Dockyard site had been acquired by the London Borough of Greenwich for housing and offices. GLIAS explained that this had been a naval dockyard active for over 300 years, but failed to mention that it had been closed some 100 years previously and that the site had been in use by various other Government bodies and the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society.  They say that The Borough Architect is arranging for ‘a dig’ to take place, but apparently there is little enthusiasm amongst archaeologists. A group of Denis Smith’s Goldsmiths College students recorded some of the buildings there. This was the’ Goldsmith’s group’ which really ran GLIAS from the mid 70s onwards. At Woolwich they were joined by people described as ‘the first organised GLIAS recording group’.  I understand that the notes of this dig have sat underneath the beds of members of the group ever since and although some reference has been made to some of the recording done there’s never been an entire report.  Which is a pity as it was an important piece of research early work on industrial archaeology in London - and particularly in Greenwich.

GLIAS itself was by the early 1970s doing very well.  The newsletter reports a great many people doing research on all sorts of subjects and was appealing for other enthusiasts.  There were regular meetings regular lectures and talks often by prestigious people and this has continued to the present day. In 1971 GLIAS won a national prize offered by television programme called ‘Chronicle. This was a cash prize and very prestigious.

What else in Greenwich featured in the early newsletter?  Believe it or not yet it was another five years for there is another mention of a site in Greenwich.  This was when GLIAS members visited the Deptford Sewage Pumping Station, in Greenwich High Road where Mr Bourner and his staff showed them round. Opened in 1864, it lifts sewage from much of South London into the Southern Outfall Sewer. All the plant they saw dated from 1934.  Afterwards George Arthur led a walk following the remains of the Nunhead -Greenwich Park railway line, opened in 1871 and abandoned in 1929. They also went into Greenwich Park with its Coalbrookdale bandstand and then along the river front back to the pumping station.

So, that how it all happened - but can I come back to our Greenwich based GLIAS mystery...  As I said earlier Denis Smith chaIred the inaugural meeting but he was not elected as Chair until the 4^th  AGM. The 1^st and 2^nd AGM s were chaired by Alan Thomas who was elected as the first chair.  He didn’t turn up to the 3^rd AGM which Denis chaired as a stand in.  There was no explanation for his absence and he seems  never to be mentioned again.

Now I wouldn’t have thought anything about Alan Thomas but I see that he lived in Langton Way - just up the road from me in Blackheath.  From internal evidence he had been involved in the Lower Lee Valley Research group and had led a number of GLIAS walks to places like   St. Katharine‘s dock.  So who was he?

 

There are not that many people around now who were active in the early 1970s but there are one or two. I've asked them but I can get absolutely nothing of any importance.  They all say they vaguely remember him..One person said  ‘He was I think a journalist on the weekly trade newspaper Construction News   He drove a rather nice Black Riley coupe in which I once had a lift’.   Also ‘I have only a dim memory of hearing that he had subsequently died, quite young I guess although he was older than me, then in my late twenties’.

 

So who was he –the first, Greenwich based,  Chair of  GLIAS

 

 Come on people out there do any of us know anything about this man who was the first chair of GLIAS- is there somebody out there who remembers him?

 

Thanks Dan Hayton (current Chair of GLIAS) Michael Bussell, Bob Carr, David Thomas, Malcolm Tucker