Greenwich pits, holes.mines and quarries.

 

This is going to be about a world which is all round us but which we do not notice. In Greenwich and Woolwich are the remains of many quarries and underground workings.  How many of us knew they were there? They range from the humble dene hole – and they can wait to be explained in the future – to actual underground mine workings.  It’s all about chalk and sand and the building industry.

The A2 Dover Road runs up Blackheath Hill from the valley of the river Ravensbourne and then follows a ridge across Blackheath and Charlton to continue up Shooters Hill. Most of the old pits lie south of that road on the slopes which run down to marshland and the River.

In 2002 Blackheath Hill collapsed suddenly and dramatically leaving what was initially a six metre diameter hole.The road was built by the Romans nearly 2000 years ago, and while travellers used it go from London into Kent and the coast, so other people burrowed underneath it for chalk – no wonder it collapsed!   On the Lewisham side of the road, the south side, look behind theflats and houses and industrial buildings where there are the chalk faces of pits from which chalk was quarried over centuries. This area was known as ’the lime kilns’ and Greenwich South Street was once Lime Kiln Lane. At the top of Blackheath Hill lying under Point Hill is the once notorious and much publicised Blackheath Cavern. It was used as a night club in the early 19^th century- where there were all sorts of goings on – and it is, of course, an old chalk mine. There is also a small sand mine in a nearby Greenwich back garden.

Blackheath itself is a mass of hollows and bumps. In 1695 Henry Cleisby was in trouble for digging ‘great quantities of sand and gravel’ there. Inside Greenwich Park itselfare all sortsof hollows and bumps, the Observatory Garden was once a gravel pit. Above Maze Hill Station the area now known as Woodlands was once Ballast Field where gravel was dug and possibly taken down to Ballast Quay to provide return cargos for ships which had brought coal down from the North East to London.                                                 

Another large chalk pit is now known as the Angerstein Triangle. It is where the railway line emerges from the Blackheath tunnel on its way to Charlton Station. This was the site of the Southern Railway signal works and is now the police carpound.

Charlton Football Ground is called ‘the Valley’ and is another old pit- called the Great Pit or the Ballast Pit.In the 1800s it was quarried by Lewis Glenton. He was a limeburnerand also a developer who built houses and churches in Blackheath and Kidbrooke as well in the City of London and Brighton.His Charlton pit was later filled with debris from the London Sewer Works.As well as the football ground with its massive stadium this old pit now contains two housing estates, a tower block, some shopsand a Thames Water pumping station,.

Glenton also built a railway from his pit to the riverside – the route is today's Ransom Road and it passes under a little low bridge because the trucks which ran on it would have needed very little headroom.  Some railway track remained by the riverside until  veryrecently and there is probably some still inside the old Bridonrope works in Anchor and Hope Lane,

On the Woolwich side of Charlton Lane were ‘the sand pits’. This is the famous bit. Charlton Sandpit is now part of an extended Maryon Park.  Much of the pit itself is fenced off and known as ‘Gilbert’s Pit; a protected area ofgeodiversity interest,and a Site of Special Scientific Interest.  Sand from this pit supplied the local glass works until the 1960s.

The land which is now Maryon Parkwas presented to the London County Council by Sir Spencer, Maryon Wilson and was the site of a worked out chalk and gravel pit.  It is easy to see this if you look around standing in the central lawn in the southern part of the park where high cliff faces stand all around you.

East of Maryon Park is the 1960s Morris Walk Estatewhich is also built on the site of sandpitsand developedfor housing from the 1840s. These pits belonged to John Long who usedTrinity Wharf in Warspite Road to exportsand.

North of the railway on the Charlton and Woolwich borders were more pits.  The railway runs through a series of tunnels and Woolwich Dockyard Station itself is sited in an old sand pit.  In 1849 railway builders came across ‘a cave’ here and visitors were shown round at 3d. a time. Furtheron SprayStreet and the area around Woolwich Arsenal station was partof a sand pit owned by the Pattison family.  

All of these pits are easy to see if you know what you are looking for. All of them have a flat bottom where the current buildings are and the cliff faces rise up all around.  In the summer they are covered with thick vegetation and hidden behind trees growing ever taller up to the light.  We need to look in winter when bare chalk faces will appear.

And then there are the actual mines. In 1899 the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society built the Bostall Estate and a mine was dug to provide chalk for the building operations. When the estate was finished the shaft to the chalk mine was capped with a steel grill. The works canteen was re-named the Co-operative Hall – and remains as the amenities building for the Abbey Wood camp site. The underground galleries remained accessible up until the 1960’s when it was still possible to crawl into the rubbish filled entrance. 

 To the north of this at Kings Highway and Wickham Lane is a much larger series of underground workings connected to the brick making industry. These extensive chalk mines to the west of Wickham Lane, Plumstead, were dug in the 19th and early 20th centuries to support brick and tile making works by a series of companies involved with the building trade. This is a very large area of interconnected underground workings and may include areas considerably older than the documented brickworks.  Chalk from the mines was mixed with brickearth to make London stock bricksand there were internal rail systems where trolleys brought the chalk to the surface. 

More underground workings are thought to exist in Wickham Lane and across the Bexley border.  Near Plumstead cemetery and on the edge of Bostall Woods is Turpin’s cave, another small chalk mine built into the site of a larger pit.From the 1800s to the present day there has been an explosion of building in south-east London and beyond - the bricks had to be made somewhere!

 This has been a very quick look at a few of the sires left from what was a massiveindustry in the extraction of chalk and sand for buildings, ballast, glass and pottery.More information can be found on the Subterranean Greenwich web site (https://subterraneangreenwich.wordpress.com), and in extensive research undertaken by Subterranea Britannica and the Kent Underground Research Group.