As we work our way down Deptford Creek on the Greenwich bank in the early 19th century we would have followed a road called Ravensbourne Street but that only went as far as the railway bridge. Today this is Norman Road and it continues under the railway to Greenwich High Road. So- let’s look at the railway and the railway bridge - or should I say bridges because there’s one over the road and one over the Creek and parallel to the one over the Creek it is a more modern footbridge, and we need to look at that too.
First of all though,I think, we need to look at the railway itself. The London to Greenwich Railway is actually avery important railway that everybody in Greenwich should be proud of. It is one of the earliest railways in the world - or what we think of as a railway, a powered locomotive running on a set route on rails. There were lots of short lengths of wagonway and ‘plateways’ that were laid down to make wheeled vehicles run over them more easily. Some people would say the first railway in London is the one which ran from Croydon up through Wimbledon and Merton, and places like that to Wandsworth. It was called the Surrey Iron Railway and the wagons on it ran on rails – but they were pulled by horses, so that’ not what we would recognise as a railway. We need to have steam locomotive chuffing along for it to be a proper railway trains, otherwise it doesn’t count.
The earliest railway in Kent – and in the south of England was the Canterbury and Whitstable in 1830. People might remember the locomotive which used to stand on display on the main road round Canterbury. One of the leading figures in the Canterbury and Whitstable was Charles Pearson – who had copperas works in Whitstable, as well as in Deptford in Greenwich. In Whitstable the railway ran on some of his land, and in Greenwich the railway ran alongside where his Greenwich copperas works had been.
The London and Greenwich Railway certainly used locomotives and it was also very early of course therewereearlier railways in the north of England and they were coming into London as fast as they could. It only by a very slim margin that the London to Greenwich managed to claim to have opened the first railway station in London earlier than Euston. Now Euston was, and is, a big important station while London & Greenwich’s Spa Road was – well - a bit minimal. The site of Spa RoadStaaionis just beforeyou get into London Bridge and it’s just a few bits and pieces in between the lines.
Regardless of all this the London and Greenwich is a very early railway and in many ways very unusual.I sometimes despair when I see books about early railways or talks or whatever and the London and Greenwich doesn’t get mentioned. It was different from other in that it was built by Royal Engineer and the Royal Engineers - just down the road in Woolwich had a lot of input into it. It is alsobuilton this huge brick viaduct which makes its way down from London Bridge to Deptford and it has been claimedthat it is the biggest brick structure in the world - although I don’t know if that is true or not.
What we are going to look is the bridge which took the railway over the creek. It is not strictly speaking the earliest part of the railway. The first sectionwhich openedwas from London Bridge to Deptford in 1836 and it tookanother two years to get the line over the Creek and into Greenwich. Although as we will see you could buy a ticket and get a train but you had to walk over the Creek first.
In the late 1820s and early 1830s there were several schemes to get a railway down from London into Kent and to the channel ports, as well as shorter lines throughout the area. In Greenwichthere was an increasingdemand for transport up to the City and West End. Boat services were increasing and under heavy demand as were coaches and horse drawn transport on the Dover Road – from Shooters Hill and over Deptford Bridge. In an article a couple of weeks ago I wrote about how Creek Road Bridge and Creek Road were being built in order to provide another route from London to the Kent towns and the coast. There were also plans for steam road vehicles as part of an expansion of routes to London by road – and also more frequent and better organised coach traffic. The Greenwich Railway was both complimenting and competing with all of these.
The London and Greenwich was promoted from 1831 and a committee had been set up to do this. One of the main drivers for the scheme and the Engineer who built it was an ex-Royal Engineer called George Landmann. I’ve written about him in Weekender before –but a brief recap won’t hurt.Landmann’s French father was an academic in the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich and George was born in 1777, brought up and educated on what we now know as the Arsenal site. He secured a commission in his late teens as a Royal Engineer and was posted to Canada. He was later in Gibraltar, was a battlefield Engineer under Wellington, and returned to senior posts in England. He resigned from the Engineers in 1821 – probably following a marital scandal – and set up as a civil engineer. He was clearly able to apply techniques he had learnt as a Royal Engineer – as for instance it might be thought that all those brick arches on the Greenwich line viaduct are very like those that his father taught to cadets at Woolwich learning how to design and build fortifications.
From 1834 the railway viaduct began to be built between London Bridge and Deptford. The contract was Mr. Mackintosh – almost certainly the same Mr. Mackintosh we have met earlier when he had the contract to stabilise the ground at the point at which the Creek meets the Thames on the Greenwich side and where the Phoenix Gas Works was built. But the railway was on a massive scale. They built the viaduct from the middle outwards beginning at what was called Corbett’s Lane –somewhere near where the Rotherhithe New Road is now. Barge loads of bricks came up from Sittingbourne and were delivered via the Surrey Canal – 100,000 bricks were laid every day and 400 men were employed to work on the line and to lay them. A year after they started work 400 brick piers had been built, six months later there were 540 arches with two miles of track on it.
A bridge was built over the canal and then others over the main roads which went under the railway. The quality of the brick work on these bridges and arches was amazing – go and look at it. On the bridges and hr viaduct the Greenwich line is the most easterly section. Most of the bridges are built on the skew and the brickwork is mainly still immaculate. That work is nearly 200 years old and onmost daysat least 8 heavy trains an hour have thundered along it for 18 hours or more a day – much, much larger and much, much faster traffic than anything envisaged when it was built. Just go and look at the quality of it.
This isn’t the place to go into a lot of detail about the building of the Greenwich railway. If you want that detail you need the late Ron Thomas’s ‘London’s First Railway’ (Batsford 1972) which I have beside me as I write this. There are other books –one early one is by a Mr. Bennet who remembered playing in the arches as they stood on marshy fields when he was a lad. There were some unusual features – some of the arches were let out as houses and pubs but eventually settled down to house workshops and businesses. There was also a walk way – a ‘boulevard’ which went right down alongside the railway; much of that still remained when I began to explore the line in the mid-1980s;
We need to look at the last stretch of the line as it crossed the Ravensbourne and ran into Greenwich. In June 1835 some experimental trains were run and the first ‘proper’ train ran from Deptford to Spa Road in February 1836. By then there was a timetable and about 700 people a day were travelling on the line. But they only had one working locomotive. In December the Lord Mayor of London officially opened the railway between Deptford and London Bridge.There were Beefeaters in uniform, there were bands from the Coldstream Guards, the Scots Guards, the Grenadier Guards and there were lots of speeches. But you still couldn’t get to Greenwich.
Or at least you sort of could. ….there were a lot of problems with getting the bridge over the Creek and I’ll talk about that next time but once Deptford Station was opened temporary measures were set up to get Greenwich residents to use the railway.
The North Pole Tavern is still in Greenwich High Road and next to it, in 1836, was Rose Cottage – and that became a railway ticket office. The lane it was in was called Blue Stile. Youi bought your ticket there and then went out of the back door and walked across the field and marsh ground to the Creek where there was a footbridge. I am a bit confused by this footbridge but I think it was a wooden bridge known as the Ha’penny Hatch – there is a recent replica of it alongside the railway now. I assume it was built by the railway company to get passengers from Greenwich over to Deptford but I don’t know that definitely.
At night there was only one candle in a lantern to light people over the fields to the bridge. Half way across the fields there was a pond – 50 feet wide and 3 ½ feet deep – and it was exactly where you would walk in a direct line over to the bridge and Deptford Station. There were records of at least a dozen people ending up in the pond rather than on a train.
The bridge was a toll bridge – hence ‘Ha’penny Hatch’ but you didn't have to pay if you had a railway ticket and you were given a white ticket at the booking office to let you over for free. These weren’t given out automatically and if you didn’t have one you would be sent back to the ticket office. The same procedure of course took place on the reverse journey from Deptford to Greenwich.
This all closed in early 1837 when the viaduct was extended to Greenwich, but there still wasn’t a Greenwich Station.
More about this next time
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