Lovells Wharf

 

Leaving Ballast Quay to walk along the riverside path we are moving into a different area. At one time there would have been a gate here – a gate into Greenwich Marsh.  The Marsh was set up with special marshland rules in the early 17h century.  It has its own ruling body, the Wallscot Court, which levied is own rates – double for the west side and single for the east.  The court was made up of landowners and tenants.   The largest landowner on the marsh was Morden College and they as we will see, owned a long stretch of the west bank where the path will take us first.

The riverside here was well used by watermen and the like.  Inland was the 'Great Meadow'.  To the south of this was 'Willow Walk' which ran along a dyke. Willow Walk became Pelton Road which ends at the river bank here.

 

In the mid 19^th century Morden College began to develop their stretch of marshland for industry.  They divided the river bank area up into parcels of land and appointed head leaseholders who were expected to sub-let to respectable and well behaved industries.  The first parcel was the first area after Ballast Quay. Until 2012 or so this was called Lovell’s Wharf but now new flats are known as Riverside Gardens. In the 1840s it was called Greenwich Wharf and the head leaseholder was Mr. Coles Child.

 

William Coles Child was a young man who had taken over his family's coal trade business nrar Waterloo, They were 'Coal Merchants, Coke Burners and Wharfingers'.  The coal came from ports on the North East coast and its transport to London was a massive industry.  He owned gravel pits, and a brick works in Bromley and lived in what had been the Bishops Palace.  In Greenwich he worked with Morden College to build the housing estate which stands here along Pelton Road.

 

In 1838 Child signed an 80-year lease with Morden College for six acres of the Great Meadow to 'form wharves and erect manufactories'.  He was to call this Greenwich Wharf. In 1839 he built new road to the river along the line of Willow Walk and called it Pelton Road after a Durham colliery.  By 1840 coke ovens, a limekiln, storehouse and stable and been built and were in operation but a soap boiler who applied for a site was turned down, By 1841 'Grey Stone and other limes'  were beg produced.  Coles Child advertised that he could supply coal and coke 'at a considerable reduction in price' compared to other suppliers.  He boasted of facilities for the discharge of coal from ships 'of any tonnage' at Greenwich Wharf. He also claimed that he was the 'largest manufacturer of Oven Coke in England' - and could service 'Directors of Railways, Maltsters, Ironfounders and Consumers’.   . Local people seem to have been glad to see this development – bring jobs and prosperity to the area.

 

The wharf passed into the hands of two managers and became known as Whiteway's Wharf.  They advertised 'Caradoc's Wallsend' and Jonasshon's Wallsend' coal. They also operated a cement works there and bricks were made on site. Eventually in the 1870s Coles Child died and parts of the wharf were leased to others. One of these was John Waddell, another coal merchant who supplied domestic customers and had a local office in one of the nicer parts of Blackheath

 

For a short time in the 1880s an ice merchant, John Ashby, rented part of the site.  From the 1890s onwards there was an ice well on part of the site. Commercial ice suppliers brought ice from Norway by boat, stored and sold to provide domestic and commercial refrigeration.

 

By 1918 the river along this frontage was silting up rapidly. All round the wharf were houses and shops. Most of the surrounding housing had been built by Coles Child to the direction of Morden College’s surveyor George Smith. Many of the streets and terrace are named after the Durham collieries from which the coal came

 

Until around 2002 people walking on from the Cutty Sark pub were confronted with two giant cranes –'Scotch derricks'. The name 'Lovells' was in large white lettering on the wharf wall, above the path, and on the gable of the buildings.  By the 1920s the coal business on the wharf’ was declining and the nature of the work there changed

 

Shaw Lovell leased the site in the late 1920s.  They were a family business dating from 1869 who came from Bristol. Charles Shaw Lovell had an office in the City of London office se for his work as a 'Shipping and Forwarding Agent' and he was soon in effective charge of the Bristol Navigation Company.    In 1908 the business was incorporated as 'Cashew Lovell & Sons Ltd.'  The company had used the wharf at Greenwich before the Great War and in, 1911 they bought the lease on the wharf

 

Under Lovells the wharf was soon thriving handling of non-ferrous metals. In the 1920s the company played a major part in dealing with scrap metal from First World War battlefields. The odd unexploded shell was, no doubt, only one of the hazards.   There was also a sideline in the export of stone for war grave headstones. Lovell's purchased ships of their own to carry on the metal trade - Innisulva, Innishannan, Tower Bridge and Eiffel Tower.  They also owned a tug and two lighters.  At Greenwich Wharf was a London Metals Exchange approved warehouse for the storage of copper, zinc and lead. 

 

In the 1960s Lovell House was built in Pelton Road as the head office for Lovell's Sea Container Trade. A large computer system was installed there.  In due course Lovell House was taken over by the Greater London Council and used by the local authority for their education social work service. It was demolished along with the rest of the site and sadly a number of commemorative plaques were not kept – nor was an amazing carpet with the words ‘Lovell’s Wharf’woven into it. The site had however been drawn and painted by many artists and  I am aware that there may be collectioms of art works in private houses – many of them homes of people who worked on site.

 

In due course the container revolution diminished the amount of work available for the wharf, retreat to their Bristol base. However In the early 1980s the two 'Butters' canes – actually more properly called ‘Scotch derricks - which had been brought here from Dublin in the 1970s were moved to a central position on the wharf.  In 1982 the wharf handled 118,000 tons of cargo - steel, aluminium, galvanised sheeting and gas pipes as well as timber and some other items. Lovell's were proud of their experience and the techniques developed to handle specialist cargoes.   In all this work the two riverside cranes played a key role.

 

The two cranes were a dramatic local feature - much photographed and the subject of many paintings and drawings. Such equipment was once very common around the Port of London but has now completely disappeared. After Shaw Lovell left the wharf there was a strong local campaign to keep the cranes. It proved surprisingly difficult to find anything very much out about them and even Shaw Lovell's records did not reveal very much.  They probably dated from before 1950.  It emerged that the brass number plates had been removed – and thus their manufacturers, however helpful, could not identity them,

 

In 1999 the wharf had been empty for many years.  Lovells surrendered their lease but the wharf was occasionally used for the storage and transshipment of building materials. In 2000 the two cranes were removed by Morden College very early one morning and with no consultation

 

In due course the site was bought by developers and flats were planned.  The Council said that part of the planning consent meant that the river must be used for removal of waste and deliveries.  The developers said this was not possible.  I was really cheered up at a public meeting when this was said, and Lovell’s ex-site foreman stood up to say that he and his old team would be happy to show them how to do it!  .

 

The site is now all flats and the fight of local residents to keep the height of the blocks down so as not to block out their light is another story – better told by them. It was then briefly called Greenwich Wharf again but this was changed to 'Riverside Gardens' and we were told that the developers' publicity team had insisted.  The riverside has been all tidied up and you can no longer walk by the river but have to go several yards inland competing with the cyclists. There is a children’s playground, which, at least to start with, children were too scared to use.  A hundred and seventy years of industry here has come and gone leaving no trace

 

Sources

Eric Jorden. 'The story of Lovell's Shipping' Eric Jorden 1992

I have Witten a number of articles on Lovell’s Wharf and Coles Child including a booklet in 2016 called ‘Lovell's Wharf’.

The story of the housing on the Morden College estate and the Durham stet names are interesting but not really relevant here.  It is covered in an article in Greenwich and Lewisham, Antiquarian Transactions by Michael Kearney ??