This article is going to cover another one of the overarching themes on Deptford Creek. I thought, partly because of the current discussions - and panics - on the use of fossil fuels, that I should do something about how power was generated for Creekside industry,. Clearly the creek was a centre for the receipt and distribution of coal to generate steam, as well as make gas and later to generate electricity. Before that however water was used to generate power.
Watermills are very much what kept the world of industry in production before the development of coal generated steam and to a certain extent windmills. In this area windmills seem to have been nonexistent until the mid 18th century arriving at roughly the same time as the earliest steam. Water power was very much earlier. The Ravensbourne River was clearly important in this respect with mills throughout its length. However if we look at the literature on the two other rivers flowing to the Thames across south London it is clear that very little has been said about the Ravensbourne mills. There are books about the mills on the Darent and a great deal of literature on the mills of the Wandle. For the Ravensbourne, as far as I know, there is only the one book which is on the Silk Mills – and I also very much appreciate the effort which has gone in more recently in putting on guided walks, and so on, about Ravensbourne mills. The lack of books on the subject in constrast to the Wandle and the Darent might be explained by some mills on those rivers having been in operation until relatively recently leaving remains that can be photographed. On the Ravensbourne almost nothing has remained of the traditional water powered Mills – and, dare I say it – Ravensbourne mills were probably rather smaller than those on the other rivers - so nothing has been left to photograph or write about which conforms to the pattern of your romantic watermill which publishers will expect to see.
The Doomsday Book survey of 1086 says there were eleven Mills in Lewisham and four in Greenwich. Exactly what is meant by ‘Lewisham’ and ‘Greenwich’ is not clear – the two place names don’t cover the areas which we understand by them today. However, even if we take the two places together, most of these fifteen mills would have been on the Ravensbourne – if we accept they were all watermills, where else would they be? A possible alternative of course is that they were mills on the banks of the Thames – ‘tide mills’ - worked by the power of the incoming tide. One of them was undoubtedly the mill at Granite Wharf which archaeologists discovered in 2008 and there was probably another at Middle Watergate – and of course there may have been hers as yet unidentified. Even so that leaves a possible 13 mills on the Ravensbourne.
The problem with most of the mills on the Ravensbourne is that we know little or nothing about their earlier history and, only a very few have left any indication of an existence before the late Middle Ages.
The Ravensbourne rises at Keston Ponds, south of Bromley and clearly not in Lewisham. It winds its way down through Bromley Common and Hayes and runs parallel to the west side Bromley High Street in a deep valley. Behind the Churchill Theatre in Bromley High Street the land falls away steeply through open parkland to Glassmill Lane in the valley. Clearly this ‘Glassmill’ too is not in Lewisham but it is the first mill, as far as I am aware, on the Ravensbourne as it flows northwards from its source.
In the Domesday Book Bromley has one mill – is that what became the glass mill? We tend to think of old mills as having Mr. Jolly Miller grinding corn grown by Farmer Giles so that Mr. Bun could bake bread for local people. The mills on the Ravensbourne really don’t conform to that stereotype and the Bromley mill is a good example of what was to come. It may well have originally ground corn at first but in 1449 it was part of a works making paper and in 1811 it was used by a central London business to polish mirrors and lenses – hence its name as ‘glass mill’, Eventually it was used by a commercial optician for making and polishing lenses.
As the river flows down to Shortlands and Bromley Hill there were other mills - one of which seems eventually to have been used to generate electricity. At Southend Peter Pan's Pool by Homebase is a major relic of Ravensbourne mills and a reminder of the extent to which mills depended on water managed into pools and leats. A short way further on was a building, pulled down a few years ago, which was one of the outbuildings of another mill. These mills seems to have ground corn to start with but ended up being worked to make cutlery and similar small metal items. At Catford Bridge was another mill which had once been a cornmill dating at least from the 10th century. In Lewisham itself is Riverdale Mills standing near the river at the back of Lewisham Shopping Centre. Now converted to flats it is a modern building which incorporates an early 19th century industrial building. It is not listed and the English Heritage report on it is – well – a bit sniffy. The site however is probably that of a mill which could well have been pre-conquest and there are a number of references to it in industrial history sources.
This ramble down the Ravensbourne is an attempt is to put the Creekside mills into some sort of context. The Ravensboune had a series of mills– some, if not all, pre-conquest – which may once have ground corn but probably all eventually went into other industrial use. There were all quite close together and must have produced a lot of flour in the Middle Ages if grinding corn was what they were doing. Surely they would have produced far more than would be thought reasonable to feed the local population – so were they in fact commercial millers amd Mr. Jolly Miller is yet another historical myth.
I am not aware of any mills on any of the numerous tributary rivers which meet the Ravensbourne although I suspect some existed. Most of these streams probably had insufficient flow to work a mill. Further down the mighty Quaggy probably had a flow which was too unreliable for a mill to be viable and its reputation for flash flooding made it dangerous. Water was important to all these millers and there was a vast body of knowledge and skills about its management. All these mills needed have mill ponds and special artificial water courses. They would have had to be built with the knowledge that other mills up and down river would need water and so the whole river must to some extent have been a vast water management exercise
I had drawn an imaginary line of the limit of the area I was to cover as ‘Deptford Creek’ at Lewisham Bridge. However I need to mention here Lewisham Bridge Mill which dated from at least 1700 but may well have been older. It was in the area now covered by the Glassmill Centre – and I assume that that is because of its use by a glass cutter to make chandeliers ‘for a short time in the 18th century’. This mill was the earliest bought by the Robinsons family when they came to South London. It was a water powered mill when they took it over and I rather assume it remained us such, although a conversion to coal fired steam would not be surprising.
So – at last we have reached the Creek and the three – or maybe four or five – sites before the Ravensbourne reaches the Thames. The stretch of river between Lewisham Bridge and Deptford Bridge has clearly been altered and turned into a canal. And this was done some hundreds of years before the recent changes when the Docklands Light Railway got hold of it. On most maps until the 1920s the old course of the river is shown meandering away to the east of the straight canal-type section. The earliest map which I’m aware of is the Travers plan from the 1690s which shows quite clearly both the straight stretch and the curving line of the old river. Some later maps show one thing and some another but the age of the Travers map shows that the straight stretch is at least 17th century and probably earlier. Did this relate to the rights of various millers?
The first mill coming downstream from Lewisham is the Armoury Mill and it might be a very good candidate for major work on the river. As a site making at first fancy armour and then government funded weapons I assume they had royal patronage and thus limitless funds,. Did they need to get barges up to the Armoury Mill and hence the need for a better water course – I assume they would need to be quite small and without a mast to be able to pass under Deptford Bridge. This leads to consider the sheer importance of the Armoury mill. It was probably built on the site of another mediaeval mill and then taken over I the 16th century for the rough work of metal manufacture that the posh Greenwich armour makers didn’t want their upmarket customers to see. Its gradual changes under various political regimes led to it being seriously considered in the early 19th century as a major producer of small arms for the government. Only the amount of land available led to the move to Enfield. Then in commercial use it remained upmarket with the manufacture of silk followed by gold and silver thread. It remained water powered.
Further down river the Brook Mill was another medieval mill site eventually taken into other use. Although apparently continuing to mill corn it was essentially part of the vast water works from the 18th century
Finally below Deptford Bridge is the Olde Floode Mill which I wrote about in some detail last December and picked up again a week later with an account of its last years as a dog biscuit factory before being taken over by the Robinsons. I have no reason to believe that it was ever run by anything other than water power, although I don’t know what the Robinsons may have installed there in the 20th century..
Ah ha you are going to say – but you have missed the complex of big mill buildings at Deptford Bridge – Mumford’s and Robinsons. Mumford’s itself was built on the site of an earlier water powered mill.
So in the late 19th century two big milling complexes were built at Deptford Bridge; no longer water powered but run by fossil fuels – initially coal. As far as the actual milling was concerned it was part of a revolution in the machinery and technology of the flour industry – which I outlined in the previous articles on the individual sites. One by one the water powered mils closed and within fifty years it would have been unthinkable to have any sort of power running any industry which was not fossil fuel generated. This also applies too the super efficient Thames tide driven mills which just closed down. . Just the other side of the Thames at Three Mills, a tide mill on the Lea, a very successful mill was working until the 1940s but following bomb damage was never reopened or replaced. We talk today about ‘harnessing the power of the tide’ with no apparent reference to how recently it was done successfully. Have we completely lost the expertise of the old millwrights?
There now appears to be no milling at all on Deptford Creek and lot of water has flowed down it which could have cheaply powered some of the smaller scale industries. Coal had been delivered to wharves on the Creek for many centuries and so it proved possible to use coal fired boilers to raise steam and steam powered equipment became seen as the only way of doing things. Soon I want to write about the gas industry on the Creek which certainly didn’t use water power, but used coal not as a power source but in a chemical process which turned it into a different sort of fuel. The later generation of electricity just used coal as a fuel.
I hope the mills on the Creek and the Ravensbourne demonstrate the process clearly – the change from cheap, clean, water power to the use of fossil fuels to which no alternative seems ever to have been considered. What is also clear is that these water mills were not traditional in the sense that they ground local corn into flour for local people. Many of them were eventually in use for small scale industrial applications. With the use of fossil fuels the size of each operation escalated – as with the vast Robinson mill complex – until it too became dwarfed by others and was closed down. There is no more milling on Deptford Creek – and all that water is running down from the Keston unhindered and into the Thames.
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