I think I would like to start this week by congratulating Greenwich Council on their new review of the Riverside path: Rethinking the Riverside - A Review of the Thames Path.pdf , . It’s a great document which reports on the path, following a great deal of public consultation as well as looking at the views of various organisations with an interest - people from Greenwich University and others. I would very much like to congratulate Councillor Maisie Richards Cottell on having managed to get such a detailed work researched and published as part of her role as Chair of the Transport and Place Scrutiny Panel. I probably shouldn’t say this - but when I was Chairing the predecessor Scrutiny Panel, fifteen years ago, producing such a document would have been beyond unthinkable! But there you go!
Having said all those congratulations I also think that they’ve missed some important issues about the path and some very, very major problems - which is not to detract from what they’ve done so far. They’ve done a wonderful job consulting with the public but there are others out there who will have to be dealt with. Sorry.
So – I guess you will wonder why I should put myself forward beyond my role as a member of the public. I will give a little bit of my own biographical details on this and my work on the path as a historian – I’m afraid the University will say ‘amateur historian’ - and the background to the use of path with some of the legal issues and public participation over the previous centuries.
In the 1980s and 1990s I worked for an organisation which monitored development in London Docklands. Some of our staff managed to get questions asked in the House of Commons about the terrible mess which Tower Hamlets was making of their riverside path. Part of my job was going to meetings with what was then the London Rivers Authority – (later after the GLC was closed down it was ‘Association’). I particularly remember a report they did comparing various riverside walks in foreign capitals and I wonder what happened to that research -but they did much else. I wrote and self published a riverside walk around the Peninsula about this time. I was first elected to the Council in 2000 and there was then a full time officer working on the Riverside path. Inevitably the funding for his salary ran out.
When I came off the council 10 years ago I tried to set up a Friends of the Riverside Walk group and we had a couple of meetings but some hostility was quite clear and I abandoned it - which I’m sorry about now.
I guess it was originally just a walk along the river wall - and we have no idea how old that is . In 1867 the Court of Queen’s Bench heard that it was there at the time of Norman Conquest and for all they knew it was Roman. The public have walked it ever since but now they no longer walk on the river edge because of need for a cycle path and ‘health and safety’.
The oldest pictures which I know of which show people on the path are two of the 17th century gunpowder works (then on the site of Enderbys). In them people are taking the dog for a walk, sketching, chatting .. or just, well, walking. A few years ago the Enderby Group did a footfall survey on the path – and things haven’t really changed, except for the bicycles.
Ian Nairn, was a 1960s troublemaking architectural commentator with a short lived TV show. He describes the path starting at the Blackwall Tunnel’s ‘pretty art nouveau gatehouse’ then says the walk goes down a passage alongside the Delta Metal Company “which zigs and it zags and it doesn’t give up and eventually comes out at the river”. I remember that passage well . When I worked at Delta Metal in 1970 the path there was modernised and paved, but totally isolated from the rest. That is now the site of the golf course.
Nairn talks about the path taking “exciting forms...between walls ... under cranes ...nipping round the back of a boatyard’. Much of that stretch was straightened out in the 1980s. “A continuous flirtation with the slow moving river choked with working boats”. (if only!)
The right of way on this whole stretch was taken to the Court of Queens Bench by Greenwich Vestry in 1867 in a case against the shipbuilders, Maudslay Son and Field who had blocked the path. They were on the site we now call Bay Wharf where they built Cutty Sark’s two sisters, Hallowe'en and Blackadder. The case had huge public support with the gallery crowded with local people shouting and clapping. Mr. Soames whose soap works was on the site of the later sugar refinery said that companies would go out of business if the public could walk along the riverside past them. The Court and Lord Chief Justice Cockburn didn’t agree and declared in favour of the right of way. It is the same stretch which Greenwich Council went to court with in the 1990s when the then occupants blocked it and the right of way was declared again.
North of this in 1868 Lewis and Stockwell Shipbuilders built a large a dry dock (where the hotel is now) and this interrupted the river path. I don't know how this was resolved by the Vestry who thought it was ‘not a good idea to give up these old rights in a hurry’ but thought new employment opportunities were important. (Nothing changes, it really doesn’t).
When the Gas Works was built in the 1890s on what is now the site of the Dome, the riverside path was closed right round its site. Following an enquiry in the House of Lords Ordinance Draw Dock was built by the gas company as compensation for the closure. I hope Greenwich residents visit the draw dock - which is still a right of way despite scary notices from the people in the Dome and the hotel.
As for Nairn he got to the “final exciting stretch past Greenwich Power station and another good Riverside pub , The Yacht”. Then he says “God preserve it from the prettifiers” and, in a footnote “’They’ are trying to close it. Walk it as you would a country path, till they are sick to the guts”.
The council have intermittently taken an interest in the path - very much because of individual councillors. In the 1970s there was a councillors’ walk along the path set up by the late Derek Penfold. There are photographs but most of the participants are now sadly no longer with us – a young Jim Gilman .... librarian Barbara Ludlow.
It is only recently that’s the path has been seen as going right through the Borough on the riverside. The walk which Derek organised just went round the peninsula. You could get to Cutty Sark but what was then the Royal Naval College was locked and barred and bolted. I think the stretch through Charlton to the Barrier was probably in existence but I have a feeling that it wasn’t really possible to walk it but I’m not sure why. There was no way of walking into Woolwich and there was a long term blockage which was only resolved a few years ago. You couldn’t walk through what is now the Dockyard estate and nor could walk at all along the riverfront in Woolwich and you certainly couldn’t put your nose in the Arsenal or you would have been removed with a military escort.
So where does this all leave us ? What can this new report add? For one thing I’m very glad to see there is quite a bit of criticism of cyclists – for far too long many cyclists have claimed that they are so green in their method of transport it’s perfectly OK for them to run you over if they feel like it. And I write that as someone who cycled up to London every morning in the 1980s.
So what should happen next – I think they do need to look at river users. There are a number of sports clubs – the rowers, the yacht club, the kayakers and others. But more than them they must talk to the people who use the river as a workplace. It’s very easy to think that the working river has gone – and it’s a minute fraction of what it many of us will remember - but the river remains our biggest asset and we need to be careful what we do and remember that it will be here will be all gone and it will serve other communities. In the short term now we need to consider very carefully what is built on the Riverside and we need to preserve all of the traditional access points many of which are covered by specialist legislation. We need to be quite clear that the sea wall is not a proper place for willow trees – this is not a babbling brook! We need to make sure that the public understands that this is one of the major commercial rivers of the world.
Liquid history and all that.
No comments:
Post a Comment