Last week I had an email – I was one of several people copied in - from someone who asked why there was no plaque up on a new building in Greenwich. This is the Wood Wharf Building on the riverside in West Greenwich where a previous building, among many other uses, housed a music studio. It was somewhere which provided rehearsal facilities for many artists who went on to become famous in the world of popular music.
Now I quite agree but that a plaque is needed there -but plaques are needed in lots of other places too. One thing that we have all been quite bad about is giving information about what happened in the past at particular sites. I thought about trying to write up the studios here. I had mentioned them, but very briefly when I wrote about the Greenwich Riverside here in early 2020 and again in my book on the area. . However it’s very very difficult to find out much about the studio – popular musicians are usually very difficult to contact for completely understandable reasons.
So, I’m writing this here now to ask if there is anybody out there who either worked in the Wood Wharf studio or who could give me an introduction to one of the musicians who recorded there. I would be very grateful. Thank you if you can help
As I said, I have written about Wood Wharf before, both here and in my book on the Greenwich Riverside. But both were very brief accounts and I thought it might be good ideas if I wrote something about one of the other uses of the wharf – and which could also do with a plaque.
Wood Wharf was on a stretch of riverside which is now all modern flats and all trace of its past has more or less gone. If you walk from Cutty Sark Gardens along the riverside, going up river, towards Deptford, eventually you will reach a junction with Horseferry Road. Look at the foreshore to see a set of rails – and that is the start of Wood Wharf. It went from there to the Oyster Catcher pub... BUT there is an added complication because ‘Wood Wharf’ was also the name of the road inland which ran parallel to the river from roughly the end of Norway Street back to Cutty Sark Gardens. On that road the studio’s address was 28-30 Wood Wharf.
Now, when I wrote about it before I recommended that people got hold of Ron Richards ' book ‘Victorian Wood Wharf and Greenwich Riverside 1820 to 2010' which tells the history of the road. Ron Richards is a very nice man who worked on riverside at Wood Wharf when it was Pope and Bond’s ship repair yard - which I remember well. He self-published the book and it was only ever available from him personally. Now I haven’t heard from Ron for some time and I don’t know if it’s still possible to get the book. So this article is also a bit of a plea for Ron, or his wife or his son, to get in touch and tell me how they all are and if the book is still available.
When I wrote before I quoted Ron’ book but I didn't add is that there is a very good report on Wood Wharf which was commissioned by the Groundwork Trust when they were trying to do improvement work there in the early 1990s - before the developers moved in! I don’t think it was ever published in the sense that you would go into a book shop and buy it. I was given a copy when it came out in March 1997. IT gives a lot of detail about the history of the Wharf and about the structure which I’m going to write about in a moment.
Also - like all of these development sites – one of the conditions of planning consent is that there is some background research done on the history of the site. This almost always means that an archaeological company is brought in to do it. Archaeologists are not historians and most of what they write about it is what they’ve dug up plus a brief ‘desktop’ history. One of the mysteries in my life is how you access these documents once they have planning consent and the new building have gone up. As far as I know they go off into the planning department files and never see the light of day. Which is a real pity. Happily for Wood Wharf one of the site reports can be accessed on the archaeologist’s website. It has several pages of details of what they found on the site with also detailed diagrams and many photographs. There is however no information about the ‘desktop’ history which they would have done and which went off the planners.
What both reports -by Groundwork and the archaeologists – describe is a ferry which once ran r there. Both accounts get much of their information from an article in the technical magazine ‘The Engineer (2nd of December 1892). There is also some information from the other side of the River on the website of the Isle of Dogs History Trust. And also – remember the rails on the foreshore I said you should look out for –they are part of it too.
So, we’re going to look at a steam ferry which was here in the 19th century. . The reports talk about it at length and have amazing pictures of it – which I won’t be able to reproduce here because I have no idea who owns the copyright on them. Who actually owns pictures is one of the hazards of writing history these days, I’m afraid and it means the best illustrations are never seen.
Hundreds of new people have now moved in and live in this area. Some of them are right above the ferry site but will have no idea what happened there or about the various bits and pieces remaining on the foreshore. Which is why we need plaques?
The ferry was at the end of Horseferry Road and there had been a series of earlier ferries from there to the Isle of Dogs over the centuries. In 1812 an Act of Parliament established a Poplar and Greenwich ferry which was a horse ferry which explains the name of the road. It carried horses and cattle and was part of the general expansion on the Isle of Dogs which included the West India Docks. Much aggravation ensued from the watermen who owned other ferries and it was not until the 1880s that things settled down. .
The Greenwich Ferry Company, bought the rights to
the ferry for £80,000, and in 1888 a steam ferry took over the old horse ferry site.
‘Ambitious and mechanically daring’ it was designed to carry large vehicles
onto ferry boats regardless of the state of the tide.
The Ferry was opened on 13th February 1888 ‘in the presence of a large company of distinguished ladies and gentlemen.’ It was launched by the Countess de la Warre. Muriel de la Warre was, appropriately the granddaughter of railway contractor Thomas Brassey. She went on to become an active suffragette and a member of the Labour Party.
The engineers of the ferry were Clark and Standfield. It had three basic elements – two steam ships, and a landing stage on both shores. With carriages designed to move on wheels and rails up and down an inclined concrete ramp which moved according to the state of the tide. Underneath the road was a large room with stationary steam engines which powered the movement of these platforms on the slips. It was held in place by steel cables and counterbalanced with 20 ton weights 145 feet below in deep shafts. There were openings in the river wall which the steel cables went through and were wound onto drums and were connected to the counterweights. There were three ‘locomotive type’ boilers to supply the power.
The underground chamber was below what were then nos 28-30. The archaeologists who investigated the site described the Engine Room as having ‘roof beams made of riveted steel plate and supporting a woodblock roadway above’. It survived up until the new flats were being built as ‘a structure of some significance, although not listed or scheduled’.
There were two steel-hulled ferry-boats, identical at each
end so they could shuttle back and forth without turning. They were designed by George Skelton and
built by Steward & Latham at Britannia Yard in Millwall. There were wooden fenders to cushion the
impact with the landing platforms. One boat was named the Countess of Lathom and
was a ‘double twin screw of very powerful build.’ It was constructed to ride at
the landing stages at each bank between two piers, the sides locking with the
piers and open for carts and carriages. It was
estimated that the ferry-boat could hold up to fourteen carts.
Coming
from the street potential customers went to one or
other of the parallel traveller-platforms and from them to the movable landing-stage alongside the ferry-boat. Both platforms and landing-stages were designed ro run on rails laid on concrete ramps following the river bed at an incline. The whole structure was
built by Appleby Brothers of East Greenwich, who also built
the ferry-boat engines. I have written about Appleby’s in both Weekender and in my Greenwich
riverside book. They were on the Greenwich Peninsula having taken over
Bessemer's old works which was on the site now used by Hiltons.
The Steam Ferry was not a success and eventually the directors of the company tried to get the London County Council to take it over. They admitted that with only a half-hourly service and with only one steamer employed, the ferry was not a remunerative business
Sometime after 1914 a single storey building was constructed on the ground above the Engine Room and the inside face of the riverside wall was heavily reinforced with concrete. However, the approximate positions of the cable ports can still be seen on the external face of the wall as well as the relics of the rails on the foreshore. It is possible the underground chambers were used as an air raid shelter in the Second World War. . In the mid-1990s investigations were carried out and Clive Chambers, who was not a young man, dived down into the then flooded chamber and managed to take some pictures. Later the archaeologists did their survey and photographs before the developers moved in. All of this was going on beneath the recording studios.
This article has been about two things and is asking for two things from the readers. One is for support for more plaques and ideas some other plaques that we need to lobby for. The other is for information about the music studio which or an introduction to one of the musicians involved on the understanding we are asking them about the buildings.
Web sites file:///C:/Users/Mary%20Mills/Downloads/wood%20wharf%20compassa1-8935_1.pdf https://islandhistory.wordpress.com/2015/04/23/potters-ferry/
Greenwich Weekender March 2024
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