Conduits in Greenwich Park

 

In two earlier articles I looked at early water supply systems in Greenwich which relied on conduits- lines of pipe work conveying fresh water from springs. They were, and are, mostly on the hillside sloping down from Blackheath and other similar sources and taking it to where it would be used. The first article looked at the conduit head in Eltham which was built for Eltham palace and also looked at fresh water sources generally. The second article looked in detail at one of the earliest conduits in Greenwich – the Arundel Conduit which goes down the outside of the Park ending up in the area now known as Ballast Quay. It has long been established that a whole system once existed and that Greenwich Park was where some of these water sources originated.

There has been a considerable amount of investigation of conduits in Greenwich Park over the years.  There are two buildings there which relate to the conduits as well as various stories of mysterious caverns and so on - most of which have proved to be totally unsubstantiated.  There is however a great deal of interest and in recent years numerous bloggers have written about the conduit remains in Greenwich Park and there are also indications of old water supply structures in the areas surrounding the Park.

The earliest map we have of Greenwich is the one drawn up for Samuel Travers’ survey in the late 17^th century.  It marks numerous conduit heads. Travers had apparently been tasked with identifying some of these. Along with the map he also produced a report which details what his team of researchers had found on the ground.

In the late 17^th century the Royal Hospital was established on the site of the Royal Palace and involved a great deal of work on new buildings and much else. initially Samuel Travers was asked to identify what property in Greenwich was actually owned by the Crown. However some buildings relating to military applications remained – for for example the gunpowder testing facility on the site which is now Enderby’s Wharf.   Travers was a career politician - if such a desciption is relevant in the late seventeenth century. He had been a Member of Parliament for a variety of constituencies in what were later known as ‘rotten boroughs’. The constituency for which he is best known is Bossiney which at one stage had only one voter.  He came from a family of Puritans based in Cornwall but left there and as a clever young man followed the traditional route of Oxford University and the Middle Temple becoming a lawyer. I am charmed that in later years he returned to Cornwall, living at Tintagel with its associations to King Arthur and Guinevere.

In 1693 he was appointed by William III as Surveyor General of Crown Lands - which of course included the Royal Hospital. A commission was appointed:- “to enquire what conduit heads, aqueducts or drains there are within this Manor for conveying water to His Majesty's Palaces or mansion houses in Greenwich, and how the same are now kept and preserved, and at whose charge; .......  and if any of them are obstructed, or otherwise damnified, to enquire by whose, occasion or neglect the same happened and what the charge of repairing the same will be."

The report, published in 1695 was entitled 'An account of the King’s Lordship or Manor of East Greenwich with its Rights, Members, and Appurtenances, in the County of Kent.”  The accompanying text is the best information we have of Greenwich as a whole and, along with the report, are models of clarity and competence. His map of Greenwich mark’s five conduits in the Park all helpfully numbered and seem to be in the places where remains of structures are found today.

 

Today the Greenwich Park website gives photographs and some information about the two brick built structures which remain both of which are on the sites of the conduits marked by Travers. They  have been extensively covered in numerous websites in recent years.  I should also add that while I’m aware of recent archaeological projects in the Park I am not aware of what they may have found and identified and what research may have been done on these structures. The Park website does not mention Travers but does note work on these structures by the architect Hawksmoor although they generally give a much bigger picture of Sir Christopher Wren. 

Hawkesmoor was on site in Greenwich 1715 as Wren’s clerk and that same year became clerk to the Fabrik Committee. He had been working on St Alphege’s Church since 1712. He failed to be appointed Surveyor at the Royal Hospital but was later Surveyor to the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches - which of course included St Alfege’s along with others like his astounding Christ Church Spitalfields.  Had I been writing this 40 years ago the narrative on Hawksmoor would have been led by the Ackroyd novel, with Iain Sinclair somewhere in the background.  I can’t find my copy so I can’t check if the conduit heads get a mention – so we’ve missed them being cast as entrances to some satanic ritualism or other.

However just because Hawksmoor worked on the site as clerk doesn’t mean to say that he designed the structures which are in the park today. I note that the Historic England entry on those sites  says information on this can be found in Pevsner’s volume on South London - if you look at that volume it mentions it briefly in an unattributed footnote with no additional information.

There has been considerable interest in these conduits over the last 100 years or so.  A Council survey was carried out in 1961 and there have been individual researchers of some persistence.  When the tunnel system was explored it was found to be of a much greater extent than originally thought.  Most coherant is the study drawn up by Harry Pearman in the 1960s done while he was working for Greenwich Council and published by the Chelsea Speliological Society. Harry managed to be clear and understandable.

 Since then there have been a number of other studies and not only of the two brick structures which remain in the Park. The subject  is very popular – for example the most well attended talk The Greenwich Industrial History Society has ever put on was about these structures - I remember so many people turning up that we ran out of seats and the men had to sit on boxes of books.

So what does Historic England have to say about the two structures remaining in Greenwich Park?           The larger of the two is on the west side of the Park just adjacent to Crooms Hill and probably about halfway up the side of the Park fence. It says:-

“Conduit house. Situated within an enclosure of iron railings. it is late 17^th  or early 18^th, attributed to Nicholas Hawksmoor, who was Clerk of Works at Greenwich 1698-1735 and restored in the later 20^th Century.  On the north front is an arch with a panel above it inscribed "Greenwich Hospital Standard Reservoir. It is built of brown brick with a vaulted and a once lead lined reservoir below from which pipework is said to run down hill to what were the Royal Hospital buildings.  This reservoir is said to be fed by pipes further up the hill And there is no passageway exit from the building.

Its brick walls are heavily covered with graffiti of varying dates and styles spanning two hundred years, from the late 18^th Century. In at least two places, dates from the 1700s can just be made out, plus initials. N and ‘R.E.’ were there in ‘1784’ and from 1791 are the remains of some looping letters – perhaps ‘F. E.’

The other remaining structure is on the other side of the park, roughly parallel to the Standard but is at One Tree Hill’, it is a semi-circular shaped brick and stone wall set in sloping ground originally  the entrance to a conduit. It was the central block, constructed of yellow brick and flanked by curving arms which slope downwards to ground level.  There is a central arch with a stone keystone and a stone plaque above it with an inscription which is now illegible. 

These two visible brick structures are only the most obvious parts of a whole network of pipes and of conduit runs in the Park. I have a huge pack of notes which I ought to return to in a future article. It is also clear that there were also major pipe runs and systems to the west of the Park. One major one which has been interpreted many times was the Hyde Vale conduit. Along with physical indications and notes in pre 19^th century documents there are numerous interpretations by all sorts of researchers. Hopefully I will return to them.