Well I’m sorry but this week I think I ought to get back to my history of the Kent Waterworks and the water industry in our Borough. But this isn’t going to be about the Kent Waterworks, as such. It’s going to be about a water company which they took over.
If you know a bit about the infrastructure in Woolwich and Plumstead and you’ve read my earlier articles you will know that there are some reservoirs in the Shooters Hill and Plumstead areas which I haven’t included with the Kent ones. That’s because they weren’t built by the Kent Water Company but by the Woolwich, Plumstead and Charlton Pure Water Company
Before we get to the story of the water company I want to introduce you to a Woolwich shopkeeper and politician called Lewis Davis. I first came across him in a newspaper report of 1839 when he had a jewellers shop in Green’s End. His address is also given as 2 Powis Street so Davis’s shop was probably on the corner of what is now Beresford Street and Powis Street.. I see that 4 Powis Street is now a pawnbroker – and that is exactly how Davis described himself in the1841 census.
The first newspaper report I found about Davis was from 1839 about a robbery at his shop –in it they describe him as ‘the Jew’ rather than ‘the shopkeeper’. Later newspaper reports are very different when he became an important man in Woolwich, then he is ‘Mr. Davis’. .The shop was a jeweller’s and he is described as a ‘silversmith’, a ‘clothes dealer’ and a ‘glass warehouse’ and of course ‘a pawnbroker. So I guess he just did the best he could and it turns out he was very successful.
In 1844 he was responsible for setting up the Woolwich Consumers Gas Company. No, I’m not going to go into any detail -in fact I may write it up separately one day (along with all the other things I’ve said I’m going to write up separately). The fact that it was a ‘consumers company’ means that it was intended that it should be owned by the people that used the gas. This was an idea around then for a better model for public utility company ownership. There were other ‘consumer companies’ locally - in particular the gas works in Rotherhithe. The Woolwich ‘consumer’s ‘gas works was very successful and Davis began to make his name locally as a leading citizen.
By the early 1850s Davis had been elected on the local Board of Health and was later to be elected to the Metropolitan Board of Works for Woolwich. In the 1851 census he describes himself as a ‘landed proprietor and brick maker’. He had probably bought an estate called ‘The Park’ in Plumstead which I think is associated with Park Farm. It was a very big area which bordered on what is now Glyndon Road and that is where his brick works was.
He also opened a brewery there which was called ‘The Park Brewery'. It’s the brewery which later in the late 19th century became the Beasley Brewery which closed only in 1965 – so I guess there will be people still around who can remember it.
Davis knew that there was water on his brickworks site and that a stream once ran down from Shooters Hill through what is now the Brewery Road area. He uses some of this water for his brickworks and then thought why not let other people have the use of it too and so he set up a waterworks- with a borehole 600 feet in depth and a pumping station. This water works was on the corner of Waverley Road - which was then called Rose Street or Park Road -- and what became Brewery Road. The site has some fairly new housing on it and I can well remember the wall which used to be on that corner and which was the wall of Davis’ waterworks. I’m sure lots of other people out there will remember it too – it was apparently ‘operational’ until at least 2010. Sadly there appears to be no historical assessment of the site in the planning papers for the new development. Or perhaps have just missed them.
So the works for the new Plumstead Woolwich and Charlton Consumers Pure Water Company was built on Davis’s private land. The company’s Engineer was Samuel Collett Homersham, Snr who designed the site. There was a cottage there for the man in charge. There was a well 136 feet deep , which was lined with brick for the first 78 feet I wonder if it’s still there somewhere under the new housing? It was usually pumped for 16 hours a day by a rotary steam engine of 60 horsepower for pumps which lifted about 750,000 gallons a day. There were two Cornish boilers to generate steam. The water was ‘fresh, clear and bright’ but it was very hard and I’ll come back that in a moment. There were also reservoirs on the Waverley Road site and another one higher up where Griffin Road is now.
A big reservoir was built in 1854 near Heavitree Road, and it is very much still there, I have a very detailed write up of that by somebody involved in the Plumstead Common group and which was published on the Greenwich Industrial History blog. The date of 1854 is on a plaque above the access. 1854 as the date makes sense in terms of when the waterworks was opened but the writer of the article thinks it may have been built earlier in 1840.II’m not sure why he thinks that if the author is still around and reading this – why? Why 1840? Here’s a link to the article: Greenwich Industrial History: Search results for Heavitree
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The water coming out of the ground in Plumstead
was very, very ‘hard’. Now I don’t have a problem with that at all in fact I
think soft water is a bit sinister, but clearly people in Woolwich at the time
didn’t think so. They thought the water should be ‘soft’. Now we need to meet
Dr. Thomas Clarke, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Aberdeen. He had developed the process of ‘lime softening’ for hard water,
which is commonly referred to as the ‘Clark processes. A ‘Clark degree’
defines the amount of water hardness of water.
He patented a ‘soap test’ for
hardness in 1841 which was widely
adopted.
Davis looked at the water in his reservoirs and thought the water smelt bad and there was a lot of vegetable matter on the surface and the water was hard and he didn’t like it. He did a bit of research and he got in touch with Thomas Clark and Clark was able to use his patented process for water softening on the water at the Waverly Road waterworks. I’m not sure if there was one of Clark’s water softening plants on site there but the water was being softened by the process somewhere locally.
So, the Plumstead works was soon selling softened water to over 2,000 houses in Plumstead and were looking forward to selling too many more as new housing multiplied round the area. However it emerged that the works was in financial trouble. They simply didn’t have the money to finance necessary expansion works. Inevitably there were a number of accusations floating about as to what had actually happened.
Although growing quite quickly and very popular the works was very undercapitalized and some of the subscribers had not paid their money in. Davis had conveyed his land to the company without charge but they needed to build another engine house and get much more equipment and there was no money to do any of this.
The Pure Water Company ended up in the Bankruptcy Court and the works were sold by auction. They were purchased by the Davis who then subsequently sold them to the Kent Water Company. The Plumstead Works was from then on run by the Kent Company and eventually passed to the Metropolitan Water Board in 1904. At the same time Kent took over a North Kent Water Company –but that’s another story – about Dartford!
There is however something else about the story of the Plumstead works which is completely separate from the Kent Company. This was the future of Dr. Clark’s process which had been very popular. At around the same rime in the 1860s the Herbert military hospital was opening in Shooters Hill Road. . It was built according to the principles laid down Florence Nightingale. She said they needed soft water and that a hospital couldn’t be run to a proper standard with hard water. And so a water softening plant was built at Shooters Hill. On the site which is now the Severndoorg Castle car park. If you look on the map it’s marked as a 'waterworks; or later as a' pumping station' but it was actually a water softening plant for the military hospital down the hill.
Davis died himself 1868 while on holiday in Paris but he had had a distinguished career in Woolwich as a member of the local board and as the first member of the Metropolitan Board of Works from Woolwich. His son was to take over the development of the Park Estate area. He had made a big contribution to the health and welfare of people in Woolwich and it is perhaps ironic that the longest lasting of his projects was the brewery!
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