THE UPPER KIDBROOKE 1

 

Last week I did what was an introductory article in response to a request for some information about Kidbrooke Village. I hope that article last week wasn’t too boring but I felt I ought to give a bit of background and also explain why it’s quite a difficult area to write about. I have a lot of information but was a bit perplexed as to how I could put it in a sensible order. 

Perhaps I should start with why it’s called ‘Kidbrook’. It seems that it means’ kite brook’. Michael Egan, who wrote a booklet ‘Kidbrook’, gives a list of 40 variants on the name of this bird going back to 1115.  Most writers have assumed that it means the bird we now know as a ‘red kite’, which may have frequented what was then marshy land.  Kidbrook fundamentally consisted of land around a network of streams running on the western slopes of Shooters Hill. Three main streams have been identified and writers on the area have described their various routes flowing west and south until they reach the river Quaggy, which then joins the river Ravensbourne near Lewisham Station – and flows on to become Deptford Creek.

I thought it might be interesting if I also followed the courses of these three rivers and see what lay along their routes; how they impacted on the area and how it has grown sand changed. Although stretches of the most southerly of these streams, the Lower Kidbrook, is still open in the fields alongside Kidbrook Park Road, most of the streams are now buried underground. We can’t see them but it doesn’t mean they’re not still there.  Road names often refer to them and also the marshy nature of the area.

I thought I should start with the Upper Kidbrook which was the most northerly of these streams and ran through the farmland south of the Dover Road, the A2. It appears that most of this stream is buried and there is virtually nothing to see of it so I hope that what I have written is comprehensible as  there is virtually nothing to see above ground and the about information is patchy, to put it mildly. I have been reliant on an article and notes by Michael Egan made in the 1970s before the motorway was built,  by information in Neil Rhind’s encyclopaedic works on Blackheath and a similar attempt  to  follow the stream by the current blogger, Running Past.  I’ve been working away on it and it’s going to be much longer than I thought so there will be lots of episodes and I might end up venturing extensively into Lewisham.

The Upper Kid Brook is said to originate in a marshy area near the corner junction of Hervey and Begbie Roads. Although the 19th century Ordnance map evidence doesn’t really bear this out but shows a stream running south from the main road. However I will stick with what the various writers on the stream have said and go to this corner junction which is also the corner of a large stretch of open land which is used by Blackheath Rugby Club.

This field has an interesting recent history. Throughout much of the 20^th century it was the sports field for the Harvey factory which was then in Woolwich Road on the East Greenwich and Charlton border. Charlton Athletic are also said to have trained there. The Rugby Club manages this old playing field as a community resource and for its own purposes.

I have always thought that factory playing fields are interesting creating a huge social infrastructure which we have now lost - their demise as factories have closed has added to our increasing social isolation. Harvey’s field is only of many playing we will encounter as I look at the various streams in the Kidbrook area.

I wrote quite a bit about Harvey works here in Weekender a couple of years ago. They were a metal fabricating company originally specialising in ‘holes’ - perforated  metal - had a copy of a thick catalogue full of hundreds of holes they could produce in metal. They also some very large metal objects like the huge dishes at the Goonhilly radio communications centre. There is a film showing one of their fractionating towers being taken to Scotland by road which I would very much recommend – is on YouTube.

Their Greenwich factory closed in 1977 and the sports field was sold to the Inner London Education Authority who wanted to build a school for children who were physically unable to access normal education. This school was never built and the old playing fields remained unused except by locals for dog walking and local children to run about. I very much remember debates at Greenwich Council in the 2000s when use of the site was considered and locals campaigned for it to remain a community resource – leading to its current management by Blackheath Rugby Charitable Trust. I remember making a speech about it at a Council meeting - but what I had to say is of no relevance here.

Whatever! The Upper Kid Brook seems to have risen and from the playing field area. The most recent writer that I’m aware on the Kidbrooke streams is the blogger ‘Running past’. They have actually managed to identify a spot which looks as though it’s the place a watercourse could run. But there is a remarkable lack of information about the next section of the Upper Kidbrook and we must assume that it is somewhere underground in a pipe or whatever and invisible from the mid 19th century. There has been almost nothing on any map that I have seen which shows or even hints at its course. Michael Egan said that he worked out the route of the brook from maps in the sewer records at Greenwich Council. He was researching pre-1980 and such records may not be available now

It seems Hervey Road followed the line of the stream when it was developed in the mid 19th century. The sewers were laid in 1870 but development seems to have been confined to the north side of the road. Following it leads us next to Eastbrook Road – one of many ‘brook’ names in the area as we will see. Running Past blogger points out there is a dip in Eastbrook Avenue which must indicate the path of the brook.  The late Neil Rhind pointed out that ‘Eastbrook’ is not the original name of the road and that it was changed in 1870. That change of name must indicate an awareness of the stream in this area.

In Volume III of his great work on Blackheath Neil Rhind gave a lot of detail about the farmland which through which the Kidbrook streams ran before development in the late 19^th century.  There were a number of farms in the area but very little information about which farm covered which particular piece of land.  Neil makes it clear that several of them were under one management and he also discusses some of the crops grown there. This was not in any way subsistence farming but businesses growing for sales in the adjacent urban areas or in central London.  I think it very likely that they were selling to, or under contract to Greenwich Palace and later to the Royal Hospital.

Working westwards the next road we come to after Eastbrook is, or was, Woodville Road. Neil Rhind says that some houses were built here in the 19^th century, when no.2b was occupied by a Thomas Clack who was chief electrician on cable ships for TELCOM.  The road was apparently renamed Rochester Way in the 1930s but was later removed for the A 2 motorway. A small relic of Woodville Road can be found in Woodville Close which can be reached via a brick lined corridor alongside the motorway from Hervey Road to a small enclave of housing. No mention is made of the brook here.

The next feature today on the presumed route of the brook is a major obstruction - the A2 motorway heading for Dover. It emerges into Kidbrook from the beneath the roundabout which it entered as the Blackwall Tunnel Approach road. It dates from the early 1980s and was constructed` after Michael Egan’s booklet was written.  I suppose a future researcher into the line of the Upper Kid Brook would find much information in the records of the construction of this section of the motorway since it must pass underneath it. The motorway itself runs below ground level in a cut  - as I recall this was to cut traffic noise following a campaign undertaken by lady members of Greenwich Communist Party. Unlike now, there were no yoga classes in the 1980s to distract them.

Before the motorway was built we could continue to follow the line of Hervey Road . Once across the motorway Hervey Road has been renamed ‘Annesley Road’ and it takes us to Kidbrook Park Road. Neil Rhind gives some interesting information on occupants of the road given the RAF’s use of land to the south and in the Second World War. At no.10 was the Colquhoun family – Cecil Colquhoun was Director General of Aircraft Production from 1941. Earlier 10 had been the home of Sir Ernest Swinton  ‘responsible more than anyone else for the development of the tank in modern warfare’.. At no.11 was Lt. Col. Charles Phipps, Director of Factory Safety during the Great War. At no.15 William Mosses, a leading trade unionist in federating craft unions in the Great War period.

To be continued .............................