Stowage

 

We are almost at the end of our trip along the wharves of Deptford Creek – I went up the Greenwich bank of the Creek as far as Lewisham Bridge, turned round and come back down again on our journey towards the Thames. Last week we arrived at Creek Road and the lifting Bridge – that leaves just the last little bit of Creekside to follow between the road bridge and the Thames.  This short final stretch has a couple of very important sites as well as some of general interest. – the East India Company, General Steam Navigation and a lot of coal wharves. Holding it all together and the oldest part of the area is The Stowage.

 

As I described last week the road bridge itself dates from the earliest days of the 19^th century and so is a relative latecomer to the Creek.  The Creek itself flows under the bridge heading northwards to the Thames. But, having passed under the bridge it turns leftwards, to the west and then swings round to the right as it reaches the major river. This means that the first few wharves on this west bank of the Creek are more or less parallel with Creek Road. I call it the ‘west bank’ because it is no longer ‘the Lewisham bank’ – in these lowest reaches of the Creek we are back in Greenwich on both sides of the waterway.

 

These first wharves of the Creek in this final section lie on a small strip of land and are thus fairly small. Today they are used as sites of smallish blocks of flats. Historically their address was in a road called Stowage – a local road so ancient that its origins are far from clear.

 

Today Stowage is a road running parallel to Creek Road - still on much of its traditional line - from what is now Glasier Street to St.Nicholas’ Church.  It’s full of those pink flats and houses which developers seem to like these days and I hope residents won’t mind me saying it has a bit of a back street feel to it.  Stowage has a long history and there have been many changes.

 

In the no-to-distant past Stowage was a road which began in Creek Road alongside The Hoy Canteen and ran along the side of the Creek before it turned west on what now remains of its route as I described above.  This short stretch of road from Creek Road is now apparently called Greenwich Quays.  I am unable to resist pointing out that ‘quays’ is not the word used traditionally for riverside areas in London - they are generally called ‘wharves’. I think ‘quays’ may be an American usage and anyway I guess developers think it sounds posher.  I also can’t resist remembering the change, just up the road, of ‘Surrey Docks’ to ‘Surrey Quays’ and all the grumbling that went on about that! Anyway we seem to have lost the traditional name for that short stretch of road which was part of Stowage and the addresses of those wharves between the Creek and Creek Road were numbered in Stowage.

 

There has been a lot of speculation about the name ‘Stowage’ which goes back many centuries. Generally it has been taken to mean some sort of storage area.  However a different account was put forward by the late Christopher Philpotts in his unpublished work on Deptford Creek and its archaeology.   He said that it was ’one of the mediaeval lanes of Deptford’ but that the reason for its distinctive route running north off Creek Road and then turning abruptly west is not clear.   He thought it might have been a path following an early river embankment, now lost, or perhaps was it just a lane to access the marshlands on the riverside. He said that The Stowage was in fact a property which existed by 1397, which was still there in 1515 and in the late 16th century. It is mentioned in documents about repairs to the river walls along the creek.   We know that a house called The Stowage was in use during the 19^th century for the management of the General Steam Navigation Company but –although Christopher Philpotts didn’t say so - this appears to be a different property.  He said that attached to the older house was a long wharf of 104 feet along the Creek along with other houses, warehouses, and sheds. It appears to have stood roughly where Greenwich Quays is - perhaps near Hoy Stairs

 

I have found no mention of this house anywhere else and so it is to a certain extent a mystery to me. Unfortunately Christopher Philpotts is no longer with us although I am assured he was a meticulous researcher and almost certain to be right.  But I can’t ask him where his information about it came from. In 1608 a team of officials went round Deptford to establish who was on which bit of property and who owned what, and who paid rent to who. It’s a long list and I can’t see in it any mention of a property called ‘Stowage’ although, to be fair, there were some awkward residents who ‘doth denye to shewe theire evedence to us’.  One of these was ‘in Deptford Strand three Cottages & a Stoor Howse garden & wharfe’. Later In 1768 a newspaper  report describes how a ‘waterman and three men dressed as sailors’ had entered Stowage House – beating the mistress, breaking the windows, destroying the plates and bottles and destroying the liquors’.  Hang on! ‘bottles.. liquors’ – so Stowage House must have been a pub.  Eventually the report says that a group of fishermen heard the noise, came in to rescue ‘the mistress and her maid’  and ‘gave the sailors a drubbing’.

 

Even more mysteriously - Christopher Philpotts’ sketch map of the area of Deptford Creek which covers Stowage shows a ‘canal’ going roughly from the site of Stowage House towards the copperas works. I can find nothing else about this ‘canal’ at all, not even in his manuscript.  In the sketch it looks quite substantial but strangely it does not have an outlet on the creek nor does it seem to go anywhere.  I would love to have some explanation of this.  I understand that there was some sort of archaeological assessment done in this area by a local archaeology team but that it is not available -  so please if anyone knows please tell us.

 

If I had just seen this feature on the sketch map, without the word ’canal’ above it, I would have guessed it be a long straight rope walk.  A lot of rope would be needed in a maritime area and rope makers walked 30 miles or so backwards everyday to make it – hence they are called ‘rope walks’.  Christopher Philpotts gave some details about rope walks here in the 17th and 18th centuries which stretched northwards towards the River. Nearby was an area called Ropemakers Fields and there were two more works near Flaggon Row, which is today’s McMillan Street

 

Before Creek Bridge was built there was, of course, a ferry service across the creek. I wrote about this in my article on the Creek Road crossing in May 2021. The map shows that the ferry went between sets of watermen’s stairs on the both sides of the Creek. In fact the map shows that on the Deptford side there were two sets of stairs. I’m not sure what the second steps were for or exactly where they were.  The other set of stairs still exist and are called the Hoy Inn Stairs and have some sort of relationship to what was The Hoy Inn in Creek Road. The Hoy was closed down following police complaints about drug taking, fights and so on and was almost immediately replaced by the Hoy kitchen - a café which remains in business to this day. I assume that the steps were named after the inn and I wonder if there was some sort of relationship between the pub and the ferry. Did the pub act as an agency for the ferry or did they collect the fares or maybe control the use of it.

 

I’m intrigued by a website run by the Friends of Deptford Creek. They describe how as recent development proceeded in Stowage that the Hoy’s owners took action to preserve the steps from developers and parked a number of cars on it to stop misuse (I think those cars might still be there!)  The web site goes to say that ‘land which had always been linked to The Hoy was assumed to be part of the property development package’  ...  it triggered a fight to hold onto access and the historical Hoy steps’.  What does this mean?  Does ownership of the Hoy convey some sort of customary rights with enough clout to see off a developer intent on doing what developers do?  I would love to know more.

 

The Creek users web site goes on to say that ‘banks of the creek were lined with crumbing wharf buildings and abandoned factories’  and this was only too true.  Even in the 19^th century this short stretch of wharves between the Stowage and the creek was mainly used for coal transshipment and scrap.  In the twentieth center this began to be replaced by scrap metal operations.  On maps the site nearest the road is marked in the 1900s as ‘Frogham Wharf’ and I have been at a loss to discover what it was used for – and it is a tiny site.  As the web site goes on to point out that ‘now stacked steel, aluminium and glass tower .. leaving those at ground level increasingly in the shade’.

 

As ever I have found newspaper reports on in Stowage. In 1775 there were fields nearby from where a horse has strayed ‘ a brown mare ‘her wind a little touched and a shoe a little loose’. They thought she might have gone Canterbury!  Later, and sadly, in 1863 a little girl of seven was left by her mother on the sofa with a friend in Stowage.  She got up to stir some rice on the fire, and she was wearing a crinoline.  She ran out ito the street in flames but could not be saved/

 

Next week I hope I can find some wharves where work was more than transshipment of coal and/or scrap.  We have some great places to come before we get to the Thames.