I am continuing to write about sites on Deptford creek – going down the Greenwich bank towards Lewisham. Currently my articles are about just down river of Deptford Bridge – although there are many, many works in this area to look at. Last week I looked at a tramway depot which was on the site which is now Merryweather Place. So – I am now going to the next site which is where the Brooker Cash and Carry used to be, with Cowan House, on Greenwich High Road
The site we are looking at is called Hope Wharf – I think some of the new flats there are called Hope House. I don’t know why it was called that but the name certainly goes back to the 1830s and probably a long time before that. In the early middle ages there were lime kilns on the site but they had gone by the 16th
The earliest businesses using the wharf that I have found on the wharf are the almost inevitable coal merchants. We have a bankruptcy notice for a William Ritchie in 1832 and in 1855 a Joseph Goddard was fined for creating a smoke nuisance (he said he would do what he could to stop it).
More intriguingly there is an advertisement from 1856 for an auction sale of ‘machinery for the grinding and reduction of mineral colours’. Whatever is this? Mineral colours are be dyes made from non-natural sources – most dyes were made from vegetable sources – and these mineral ones were often pretty poisonous. The advertisement is ‘to proprietors of potteries, mineral and colour grinders, mining companies and others’. Even more intriguingly the advertisement is from a London art auction house. So what is this – the remains of a failed business, a cargo that came by ship and never used? I have no idea.
By 1870 the wharf was clearly back to coal deliveries and a collier ship, Matchless, was sold there.
However from the late 1870s it was home to a very different sort of business - a maltings. Now we all should know what malt is – it is used in vinegar, and things like malted milk, malt bread and I guess it’s supposed to be good for you. Most of all though it is used in the production of beer. It is basically barley seeds which have germinated and sprouted and then roasted to get ‘fermentable sugars’ – all the nutrients concentrated in that little shoot so that it could grow into a plant.
I visited a maltings once in Bury St. Edmonds. Basically it was a huge floor covered in all these thousands of sprouting grains. We were told that it had to be kept turning over and that people had to go up and do this – and that it was seen as a way of relieving stress. Workers in other departments were encouraged to go up and rake a bit of the malt over if they were angry or upset about something. It certainly was a very pleasant and calming place to be.
Our Deptford Creek Greenwich maltings was owned by a Fredrick John Corder ad Alfred Conyers Haycraft. I know nothing about their backgrounds or how they came to be in the maltings business. One family history site describes Mr Haycraft as being a carpenter from Lancashire. However his marriage record says he came from Greenwich. He had married the sister of Mr. Corder which is presumably how he got into maltings. Corder was said to be an ‘old established maltster from London’. Indeed there had been a Robert Corder with a maltings business n Greenwich in 1818 with an address in the 1830s at Deptford Bridge – and at Long Melford in Suffolk.
When Corder and Haycraft took over Hope Wharf they also took over the maltings site which lies between Nevada and Stockwell Streets. This site is quite well known and was the subject of a recent archaeological dig. The archaeologists say that this maltings too had been established in the late 1870s and I don’t know what was on the site before that. There must have been a maltings somewhere in the area.
The dig at Stockwell Street found the remains of three malt kilns as well as other buildings and wells. They don’t give much detail but there are drawings of the kilns and the buildings and one building is apparently still there. I am sure lots of people will remember them. The dig was done by Pre-Construct Archaeology and you can find a report of it through the Archaeology Data Service web site. There is a lot more there than the archaeologists found at the Hope Wharf site where they reported only about peat and silt.
So – the Hope Wharf site was a maltings for many years – and would have had lots of smells which some people will have found positive – which was more than you could say for many of the other industries in the area. There was a whole complex of buildings there although I am not sure they had kilns there with the distinctive cowls at the top of the vents. I wonder how they worked the two sites - if one did one part of the process and the other one did the rest; or did they both do the same process?
Messrs Corder and Haycraft were very much into doing good works for local people. The Hope Wharf maltings was right opposite the Miller Hospital – I don’t know if people remember the Miller. I certainly remember it from when I first moved to Greenwich, and when I went to Casualty there with a burn. There is one old building on the site called 'the Miller' which is the original hospital building and it was a big general hospital. . Corder and Haycraft planted a garden on piece of land at the front of their works so patients at the hospital would have somewhere nice to sit and convalesce. They were also involved on the committees of various local agencies as well as being on the committee of the Miller Hospital itself and raising money for good causes like the lifeboats. They were also involved in the local freemasons.
Readers last week will have seen that the tramway stables next door to the maltings specialised in food for the horses –and Corder and Haycraft also sold horse food – oats, peas and linseed.
Corder died in 1905 and Haycraft in 1910. Haycraft sold the maltings business to the Scottish maltsters Hugh Baird and Sons – their first production site in England. He continued to work for them until his death. Baird’s were to make the Greenwich site their head office and over the next fifty years bought up other malting companies to become the biggest maltsters in Britain. In the early 1960s they closed both Greenwich sites down and moved to a large site at Witham in Essex which, I am told, is still the most modern such facility in the country,
Plans of the site after the Second World War show a small block on the Greenwich High Road frontage and I wonder if this is the office block which used to house the probation service and if it dates from when the maltings was still operational. It may already have been demolished by the time I write this. The rear of the site became Brookers Cash and Carry and I think that at some stage the buildings on Hope Wharf must have been replaced because Bookers buildings look very different in shape and size to those of the maltings. Today the Creekside area of Hope Wharf is more identikit flats – and no doubt the Greenwich High Road frontage will soon join them if it hasn’t already.
Bairds continue at Witham to remember their Greenwich sites - their ‘premium crystal malt’ is made from ‘the finest winter barley’…. It is ‘bursting with flavour and colour that will produce a complex range of sweet caramel, toffee flavours and enhanced mouth feel/linger in the finest ales produced using this malt” (blimey!)
It is of course their top brand ‘Greenwich Crystal Malt’.
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