Harbour Masters House

 

The Harbour Master’s house in Greenwich sits at the end of Ballast Quay on the corner with Pelton Road. It can be seen by people having a drink in the Cutty Sark Pub or attempting to walk along the riverside path.  It’s a big house and prominent but very few people will have any idea what it was for and was for and who the Harbour Master was.

It was all about coal. 

Until the 1970s the River was busy with ships from all over the world. We think of the River in the past as full of great sailing ships with earinged sailors carrying ‘the spices of the east’ into London but the truth is that the majority of ships coming up London River brought coal from Durham and Northumberland to power London’s industry.  ‘Seacoal’ had been coming into London for at least a thousand years - for instance in the 17^th century 200 collier ships supplied London and by the end of the 18^th century about a million tons of ‘sea coal’ a year was coming in. It was a tough, unromantic, trade and grossly undervalued.

Coal coming into London was taxed.  Here industrial archaeology is found on country lanes - right round London on roads and waterways is a circle of little white posts.  Look up ‘coal posts’ on the web and you will find lists of them.  Any coal which came into London which was taken past these posts had to pay tax on it to the City of London.  Some of the money raised went to build churches in the 18^th century –one of these was the Greenwich parish church, St.Alfege.  The old church had collapsed in 1710 and £6,000 was given to rebuild it. It paid for all the great Hawksmoor churches – St George Wapping, St.Ann Limehouse, and Christ Church Spitalfields.

As time went on the coal trade grew and more and more ships arrived in the River and created an unregulated jam and chaos.  In the early 18^th century there might be 90 colliers in the Pool of London at any one time, most of them unloading into a dozen or so barges. By the end of the century colliers made up three-fifths of the ships and by 1850 3-6 million tons were being brought in by sailing vessels. In 1852 the purpose built steamer, John Bowes, arrived in London from the Tyne, to great acclaim. She could take 650 tons of coal and do the round trip in seven days. She was the first of many,

Remind me some time to write about Atlas, which was moored in Charlton and was an attempt to dodge the regulations and the fees.

The job of regulating collier ships in the Thames is long and complex story but what was eventually done was to appoint Harbour Masters for stretches of river between Gravesend and the Tower and their job was to allow vessels to proceed up stream in rotation. These Harbour Masters were appointed under the Port Act of 1799 following which a series of by-laws determined specified moorings where not more than 15 ships at a time must wait.  There was a complicated system of paper work and flags which were raised to allow boats to proceed to a wharf for unloading or tell them to stay where they were.

The original Greenwich Harbour Masters Office was in High Bridge Place – probably adjacent to the Drawdock which is still at the end of Eastney Street.  Later, when the present Harbour Masters House was built this old Harbour Office became the Three Crowns pub which was demolished in the 1930s.

In the 1850s the current Harbour Master’s House on Ballast Quay was built. It was designed by architect George Smith – who had locally had already designed and commissioned the surrounding housing, in his role as Surveyor to the Blackheath charity and landowner, Morden College.  It closed, along with the system of regulation, in the 1890s and has been a private house ever since –and I hope I don’t need to say that the privacy of the residents needs to respected.

Across on the other side of Ballast Quay on the riverfront at the start of the Riverside walk is a line of railings which match the design of the railings round the Harbour Masters House.  They lead to the site of a long vanished steam boat pier.

There still are Harbour Masters on the river – if you look at the Port of London Authority web site you will see that Greenwich is now included in the Upper Thames area which lies between Teddington and Crossness. James Stride, is Chief Harbour Master and he has ‘overall responsibility for navigational safety on the tidal Thames. But he no longer controls the coal ships coming up the river – they finished in the 1970s when the power stations and gas works closed.  The river may look empty now but the Harbour Masters still have work to do –but they no longer use the house on Ballast Quay.