Well, I thought it was important this week to get back to something more industrial with another extract from the industrial archaeology south east London. This is a building which once stood on what is now the Wickes site in Blackheath Road. This was once the site of Penn’s world famous and innovative engineering works. I wrote about Penn’s site here for Weekender in October 2021 and I intend to come back to them again.
So what does SELIA say “Pattern-makers shop, Blackheath Road, SE10. On the site of what is now Broomfield’s Bakery alongside the charmingly named Ditch Alley is the site of John Penn and Sons, Pattern Makers Shop. The Shop is the only Penn building left on this site. It is a three-storey yellow stock brick building with grey slate hipped gable roof, the windows have been semi-circular arches now partly bricked up to take smaller modern windows. On the long east face is a large opening, now bricked up, which extends to the full height of the building and betrays its former use”.
A – date unknown -sketch map of the site shows that the pattern makers shop lay at the Blackheath Road end of the site on the uphill portion of what was the works, alongside Ditch Alley. Ditch Alley is still there - although it doesn’t appear to have a road sign – running from Blackheath Road to what is now called John Penn Street. I assume that stretches of wall along Ditch Alley and in John Penn Street date from the days of the Penn Works.
A 19th century description says that it is an exception to the other buildings of the works because it is three stories in height and the side looking into the yard included large range of windows. The building presented a brighter and more attractive aspect and some of the others’ and it was ‘free from clangour’. Its basement was a storeroom where there was quite a store of patterns. There was a turnery on the ground floor and on the first floor was the pattern shop itself. There were more stores ‘up in the roof'. Work there was interesting ‘because it is careful exactitude’. It was noted that it was in easy reach of the brass and iron foundries where the pattern makers work was used. Pattern making the first stage in the making of casting and any errors would cause real problems and be hard to change. Making them was a specialist skill for woodworkers
Other buildings on site include a Smiths’ shop with 60 hearths and a foundry where iron, brass and bronze castings were made and with five cranes, all made in-house, to cover the whole area. The erecting shop and heavy turnery had four bays and the small turnery had special machine tools to make smaller engines.. There were two lines of tram tracks with an overhead crane running above them.
The Pattern Shop was built in 1863 following purchase of the freehold of the estate from the Holwell Charity for £21,500 - more about Holwell, maybe in a future article. That purchase included a big extension to the works by adding in a large site on the other, west, side of Ditch Alley. That iI where, in later years after Penn’s was taken over by Thames Ironworks, the car and lorry works was established. It is now the site of Franklin Place
By 1992 the Pattern Shop was the only Penn building left on the site - I can remember seeing it but I don’t know how it was that it survived when all the other buildings were demolished. For many years the site was used by Broomfield’s bakery which closed in 1992. There was then a campaign to keep that last building but while the Council made moves to get it listed it was demolished.
In the Holwell archive is a sketch map of the site which shows the works and various other buildings of the Penn factory. It is interesting to compare this with a modern day aerial photograph of the site today and you see how close the layout of most of the Wickes buildings compares to the sites of Penn’s various workshops. The entrance to the factory for supplies to Penn’s factory whicb was used by their workmen, throughout their occupation of the site, was in what is now John Penn Street, but was then ‘Coldbath Street’ or ‘Bath Street’. The timekeeper had a lodge there, an it was the principal entrance and exit for raw materials, and finished work. There was a weighing machine and deliveries there included ‘pig iron for the foundry, malleable iron for the smiths' shop, timber for the carpenters'. This old entrance is now the site of a small electricity transmission station which looks remarkably like a gatehouse itself. After the purchase of the Holwell estate there was a second entrance near where John Penn Street adjoins Kent Waterworks property.
Some years ago the GIHS newsletter published a series of articles about the location of the Penn site and some of its history. These came from George Arthur and Richard Cheffins both of whom seem to have spent some time walking around the site with the sketch map trying to work out what was where.
They both mention 10 Lewisham Road. Richard Cheffins pointed out that before the 1863 expansion the Penn family lived in a house on the corner of Blackheath Road opposite The George and Dragon Pub. This house, he says, was separated from the works by the gardens of a number of other properties. These were eventually replaced probably in the early 1860s by the present buildings in Lewisham Road between Blackheath Road and John Penn Street although there have been some more recent infillings and drastic alterations. They are single fronted houses until just one double fronted house on the John Penn Street corner. This is no. 10 , which is more upmarket and belonged to the Penns. What did they use it for?
In the 1880s the visitors entrance to the works was described as an ‘only a few yards wide… with the natural contour of the ground dipping to a steep incline’. Through the door and down a few steps you then reach the hall with offices and a counting house. Above these was a large drawing office ‘lit from the roof’. Here the initial steps were taken in connection with every engine or boiler produced by the firm. Drawings and specifications showed the exact proportions in the minutest details of every rivet and bolt hole. The actual manufacture of the engine could then begin.
Richard Cheffins speculates that there may have been two houses on the John Penn Street corner, No 10 and one other. Looking at the sketch map it appears that there was a passageway either between two houses or down the middle of one house. That passage would have led to the reception area which was in the main factory. Richard could not come to a conclusion about the passage based on the amount of space available and the small area adjacent to No. 10 which is now within the Wickes site and used for storage and car parking. He said that he thinks that number 10 is a surviving partner of an entry to the works. Perhaps it made sense to have posh visitors and customers coming to this nice front door and walking through the passageway over to the works offices. However, another contributor to the old newsletter, says the house was nothing to do with the factory.
Thames Ironworks left the site in the first decade of 20th-century and has had several successors. I’m aware that some of them are quite short lived and it is not seem easy to get a definitive list. I mentioned Broomfield’s bakery above and I assume that this was a central bakery supplying bread and other items to a network of shops throughout south-east London. However, I can find nothing about this except one reference the head office on this site. It’s a good example of how firms can just disappear and its often difficult find out anything about them except sometimes from family history web sites. Another successive user was Francis’ tin box factory on the extension on the other side of Ditch Alley where the car factory was . I will write a future article about them – a piece about them I wrote for the old GIHS newsletter twenty years ago and then put on our old blog, holds the record for the number of comments about the site.
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