A Rotherhithe Blog

Local history books by Stuart Rankin at the Canada Water library

2012-01-26T20:02:00.004Z

Putting my overall dissatisfaction with the library as a functional beast on one side, I thought it might be worth bringing attention to a series of books about Rotherhithe, if anyone is interested in the local history of the area.

Although I have a really good collection of local history books and papers, my approach to finding out about the area has been somewhat random, and I have to thank whoever selected the local history books in the library for including a series of which I was unaware.

The series are all referred to as Rotherhithe Local History Papers. All appear to have been written or put together by the excellent Stuart Rankin (who is my absolute local history hero, but sadly lives overseas) and appear to have been published locally in the late 90s and the year 2000.

The titles that I took out of the library are:

By Stuart Rankin:

A Short History of the Surrey Commercial Docks
Shipbuilding in Rotherhithe - Greenland Dock and Barnard's Wharf
Shipbuilding in Rotherhithe - The Nelson Dockyard
Shipbuilding in Rotherhithe - Bull Head Dock to the Pageants - Part I
Shipbuilding in Rotherhithe - Bull Head Dock to the Pageants - Part II

Edited by Stuart Rankin

Historical Notice of the commercial Docks in the Parish of Rotherhithe, County of Surrey By Nathaniel Gould (a reprint from 1844 with additional illustrations and an introduction)

Boys lying on the quayside, Rotherhithe c.1914

2012-01-26T19:00:00.001Z

Portcities

Description: Young boys lying on the quayside and peering over into the river at one of the Rotherhithe wharves. Waldo McGillycuddy Eagar took many photographs of the Thames and the people who lived, worked and played along its shores. His work forms a remarkable document of a maritime community that no longer exists.

Creator: Waldo McGillycuddy Eagar CBE

Date: c. 1914

Wasting Space - the new Canada Water Library

2012-01-24T19:03:00.009Z

I went down to join the new Canada Water library today. I was pleased that it was opening because I wanted somewhere to go and sit and work in peace and quiet. The Lib Dem newsletter 'Focus' was shoved through my letter box yesterday, confirming that the library is now open (which I suppose means that they were responsible for it), so I decided to go and look it over.

Three quarters of its exterior is still immersed in building works but the front door was easy to find and opened into a large space with a security guard sitting on a pedestal, a bit like a Wimbledon referee, a small reception desk, some computer consoles and, at the opposite end, a cafe. Some shelves appeared to be offering the latest best sellers. It seemed like a big space, poorly used.

Joining required a piece of identification which had an address (I used my driving license), and took only two minutes. The result was a credit-card sized plastic card with a membership number clearly marked.

I asked the receptionist, a nice lady, for a map, and although she had no idea whether there was one she found one in a brochure holder for me. It showed that there were two library floors. At the elevetor there was a sign showing which subjects were on each floor. History, the topic where I thought I would start, was on the top (second) floor.

I made my way to the stairs. The stairs confirmed my first impression of poorly used space, an unalterable part of the design, a mistake that cannot be corrected. It is true that the stairs are aesthetically very pleasing - a vast open wooden spiral leading from the ground floor to the first floor, using up an enormous amount of floor space on the first floor. A complete and utter waste of valuable space.

The second floor is not, in fact, an entire floor but a mezzanine or gallery - a narrow corridor that follows the perimeter of the library, and looks out over the first floor. Why? Why not put in an entire floor? My bewilderment increased when I climbed the steps to reach that level. The wall was lined with shelves carrying books, language tapes and the like. On the edge looking over the void was either empty wall or banks of desks and chairs with wall sockets for laptops. The few desks that were provided were full with people plugged in with their laptops - some with books, but most apparently surfing the web on the free wi-fi.

The history section, when I found it, was quite small. Looking specifically for local history I found that I have a much, much bigger collection of Rotherhithe and Thames books and information than the library has, which is a bit sad.

Back on the first floor, with a couple of local history books in my hands (you can take out up to 15) I had a wander round to see what the seating was like down there. It was almost non-existant. A small row of swivel chairs with views over Canada Water were fully occupied, and the few desks were taken. A numebr of desks with computers on them were free, but when I tried to log on using my full membership number (observing the rule that it was case sensitive) my number was rejected.

I continued my wander around the first floor and found myself at a childrens book section which, sadly, had a children's play area attached. There were only two children there but they were already disturbing the peace. Why? Why not put the kids books and the kids themselves down with the cafe in the under-utilized ground floor space and free more area upstairs for the much-needed work stations?

The books at the Canada Water library must represent a tiny fraction of the numbers that used to be held in the Albion Street library before it closed (now, apparently, about to be developed as yet more high rise housing). Overall, between the two libarary floors, I would be fascinated to see how the numbers between the new library and the old one compare, and how the content type breaks down, and how topics were chosen.

Back on the ground floor, still clutching my books, I asked the receptionist how to sign out my loans. He was very helpful and explained that it was self-service and showed me how to use the machine, which was straight forward (if a bit reluctant to accept some of my books). At the same time I asked him why my log-in had failed on the PC that I had tried and he gave me the essential piece of information missing from the log-in screen - you only enter the numbers, not the letters. It would have been SO useful if, instead of telling me that my membership code was case-sensitive, the log-in screen had told me to elminate the letters from in front of the number. And how can a number be case sensitive anyway? Silliness.

I cannot understand how someone granted it planning permission given that it simply doesn't make any sensible use of the internal space. The second floor is no bigger than a corridor, the first floor has two huge holes eaten out of it by the massive central stairwall and the children's play area, and the ground floor is simply underutilized. The lack of desk space would be laughable if it wasn't so damned infuriating.

Why the Council should feel the need to provide free wi-fi to anyone who happens to live in the area I cannot imagine - it is obvious that it will become a free Internet Cafe for people checking up on their Twitter and Facebook accounts rather than a resource for researchers and studying students.

What a complete waste of space, quite literally. Why the Council should have allocated planning permission to something that is more space than actual content I really cannot understand.

Someone told me today that we, the taxpayers, payed £14 million for that farce.

So I am now the happy owner of a membership card for a facility that cannot provide me desk space. Thanks, Southwark Council!

Stripped down as you've never seen her: Pictures of Tower Bridge

2012-01-07T13:37:00.004Z

A friend sent me this link to the Daily Mail, which has some marvellous photos of Tower Bridge under construction, which were found in a skip!

Stripped down as you've never seen her: Pictures of Tower Bridge during construction found dumped in a skip
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2067581/Stripped-youve-seen-Pictures-Tower-Bridge-construction-dumped-skip.html

Do have a look - they are fascinating and beautiful. There are eight in total, including the one above.

Still here

2011-09-29T10:09:00.003+01:00

Although I finished my one-year project to document the Russia Dock Woodland and Stave Hill Ecological Park I am still very much around and am completing my history of Rotherhithe offline.

If you want to email me with any queries or comments I would be very pleased to hear from you (my email address is in the header of the blog).

The "care" of one of the last 2 remaining composite clippers

2011-02-27T15:05:00.003Z

This is off-topic. It is, however, a rather chilling account of how a mixture of complacency and neglect, followed by belated and somewhat undirected good intentions conspired to let down an almost unique piece of maritime history. It seems remarkable that the various UK authorities who should have taken responsibility for one of the world's only two surviving composite clippers could have allowed matters to reach such a desperate point. Click the photos below to see them at full size on the Wikipedia and Clipper Ship 'City of Adelaide' Limited websites.

The City of Adelaide is the oldest surviving clipper ship in the world, and one of only two composite ships surviving (if you count the Cutty Sark, much of which burned down a couple of years ago in Greenwich, London). The story of the ship, built in Sunderland in 1864, reveals a busy and fascinating career in service between the UK and Australia before being sold into sundry other roles. The sepia photo below shows her in 1884. She finished the first part of her active career in 1894 as an isolation hospital ship, masts removed, moored off Southampton. Many ships which served this function were then broken up.

Thanks to the interest of one individual she survived, remarkably, to become a training ship for the UK Royal Navy from 1923 (and was renamed HMS Carrick) until a decision was made to break her up after the war. Again, she was rescued from that fate. One might have thought that these rescues were a positive sign for her future and that as time went on and she became a floating monument to maritme heritage, her future might actually be secure. The subsequent decline of this important representative of history, however, makes tragic reading on this thoroughly researched and fully referenced Wikipedia page about the ship, last updated in February 2011.

The ship's fortunes began to slide when The City of Adelaide was presented by the Admiralty to the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (Scotland) Club where it served as the club's headquarters from 1948, following a refit. From then until 1980 she was in use by the club but apparently allowed to decline because the club realized , belatedly, that they could no longer maintain her and looked for funding and a new owner for her. Nothing appears to have happened until 1989 when "the ship was flooded when the deck edge was trapped beneath the wharf on a very low tide". The mind boggles, particularly if you know anything about mooring boats of all sizes on tidal waters. There's a ghastly photo on the Wikipedia page of the ship below water, only the very top of the superstructure remaining visible. In a unique move the ship was given Listed Building status by a Scottish quango and was purchased for the token sum of £1.00 (UKP) in 1990. It was put under the charge of the Scottish Martime Museum. A reprieve? Apparently not, because in the year 2000 the trustees of the Scottish Maritime Museum applied for permission to demolish the newly designated Category A Listed Building. The application was refused.

From this point forward the story becomes really quite farcical, with a conference on the subject concluding that funds should be raised to save her (but no real indication as to where these funds were to be found) and the decision to give the ship its original name back, becoming once again The City of Adelaide. The Scottish Maritime Museum applied once more in 2009 for permission to demolish the ship "at an estimated cost of £650,000". In January 2010, the Australian Adelaide Preservation Trust made a proposal to take the ship off the UK's hands. To cut a long story short, the UK has proved unable to preserve this remarkable and once beautiful ship. It has fallen to the Australian organization to rescue her. Here's the concluding paragraph from the Wiki page:

Scottish Minister for Culture and External Affairs, Fiona Hyslop announced on 28 August 2010 that the City of Adelaide would not be deconstructed, and that Adelaide has been identified as the preferred bidder. Extensive work will be undertaken to allow the ship to be moved and displayed in Adelaide during 2011, the 175th anniversary of the settlement of South Australia, the first stage of which was completed in December 2010. The group based at Sunderland congratulated the Australian group but stated that their campaign to keep the ship in the United Kingdom would continue.

Based on the UK's previous handling of the ship, I sincerely hope that the Sunderland group fail.

Ships of this era are so rare. When wooden ships started to supplemented with iron frames and then replaced entirely with iron and steel there was a lot of money to be made from the breaking of wooden ships. This means that even when ships survived the dangers of their maritime careeers, their chances of remaining in one piece were very low. The City of Adelaide and the Cutty Sark were two remarkable survivors of this process of industrial change and systematic recycling - and it is nothing short of a tragedy that one of those two ships was allowed to sit and decay.

I have a serious affinity with ships and the UK's ship building heritage, probably partly because most of the men in my father's family were merchant sailors, my grandfather a rigger. I also live in the middle of a former wooden ship-building centre on the Thames, and it whilst hunting for information about the locally built Lothair that I stumbled across the above page about The Adelaide. I was seriously upset when the Cutty Sark burned down, but that at least seems to have been a freak (if irresponsible) accident. The City of Adelaide, by contrast, was allowed to decay over a period of decades. It really breaks my heart to see how The City of Adelaide was so tragically neglected by the UK, when she should have been preserved and honoured as a vital remnant of a rich ship building and sailing past. I hope that the Australians do a rather better job of caring for her. Surely they couldn't do much worse.

Sorry about this - I just had to get it off my chest.

See the Wikipedia and City of Adelaide websites for more information.

Birds, bees and a rather trendy caterpillar

2010-05-28T16:27:00.019+01:00

I went to meet Steve Cornish to talk about the reed warblers currently nesting in Downtown Pond, and to look at some of the recent work being carried out at the Russia Dock Woodland. The RDW is looking good, with water flowing well, lots of Yellow Flag irises in full flower, hundreds of damsel flies, and lots of pale pink dog roses scattered around. After we had failed to see the warbler (but saw a spotted woodpecker) we walked to the Stave Hill Ecological Park compound.

The Stave Hill compound is looking excellent with a vast and elegant wooden insect city sitting on a base of pebbles, water and apline flowers. But although these were great features the star attraction turned out to be some bee hives that I didn't know existed, complete with their handler Craig. The hives, which Craig makes himself, were quite unlike any hives that I have seen before, and I had thought were compost bins. Likewise Craig, in a business suit and bare-headed, did not fit my preconception of a beekeeper (which involved strange hats and a lot of netting). We went over to him as he opened up the hives to look for the Queen, pulling out frames covered in bees to locate her. The bees carried on working regardless, apparently unconcerned about their world being rearranged. I asked a lot of probably very silly questions and received some fascinating answers. Queen bees (we saw one) can live as long as eight years, whereas worker bees during the busy summer months may literally work themselves to death in only six weeks. The Queen that we were looking for wasn't laying eggs properly. If a Queen ceases to lay eggs then the hive will die out in a matter of around two months. Craig had a replacement for her to ensure the survival of the entire hive. If the Queen isn't replaced then not only does the population of the hive eventually die out, but the worker bees cease to work at full capacity. As well as collecting pollen and working in the hive, the workers are responsible for keeping the hive clean inside and out. They can also attract missing bees by generating the scent of the hive, which they do as a group with a fanning motion. The male bees from the hive have no stings, and I stood with one on the palm of my hand, a truly beautiful little thing. Craig says that many people confuse honey bees for wasps, which surprised me.

My thanks to Craig for the highlight of my week.

A presumably suicidal caterpillar, black and bright green, was trying to make its way into one of the hives, and that too ended up on my hand. I didn't photograph it but I looked it up when I arrived home and it was a Zygaena filipendulae moth (Six-Spot Burnet - you can find a photograph here if you want to see what it looked like).

Surrey Docks Farm & Greenland Dock on the 16th March

2010-03-19T07:12:00.001Z

After leaving Stave Hill Ecological Park I walked through the RDW and headed past the Downtown site and over the bridge to the Thames Path.

The Downtown site is an absolute disgrace. The strategy of leaving an area to decay so that people will support development is truly dishonourable. Fortunately local kids don't seem to have adopted it as a private hideaway (which is what we would have done when I was a kid, it has to be confessed).

I cut through the Surrey Docks Farm to follow the Thames Path and was lucky enough to see piglets! Quite gorgeous. As usual the farm looked great and the cafe, re-opened a few weeks ago, was absolutely heaving!

I walked back to my house along Greenland Dock where the coots and grebes were already attacking each other. A pair of grebes were laying claim to the pontoon under the Norway Cut swing bridge - last year they shared it with a pair of coots. We'll see who wins this year!

Stave Hill Ecological Park

2010-03-18T07:43:00.007Z

The SHEP is also looking extremely well organized. Spring is usually a period when the new growth climbs through the old, but at Stave Hill the old growth has been firmly removed and the new growth will have a free range. I walked past a man hoeing at the grass area below the windmill. It looked like hard work but everything was very tidy and clean.

The main highlights of the walk through the ecological park were the violets, a single lovely daffodil and two frogs mating in the tiny pond at the end of the butterfly sanctuary. The reed bed opposite Stave Hill pond, and the fabulous coloured bark of the surrounding shrubs, are as lovely as usual. The colours never cease to amaze at any season. The butterfly sanctuary has been crew-cut again, but will doubtless recover eventually. The bee-attracting budleias are all growing new leaves. The new moat at the end of the butterfly sanctuary still looks very harsh and new but it will hopefully mellow during the summer.

More from yesterday at the Russia Dock Woodland

2010-03-17T07:37:00.002Z

Spring is arriving

2010-03-16T21:45:00.005Z

Today was the perfect spring day. I arrived at about 12.30 and I was wandering around in a t-shirt. I had the emergency back-up of a jumper around my neck and a jacket arranged over my shoulder bag, but it was so warm that I didn't actually need either. I haven't felt so warm outdoors all year.

The park was very quiet. There was the usual assortment of women with pushchairs, men with small dogs and the odd jogger, but there weren't many other people around.

I haven't been in the parks for ages and it was great to go and stretch my legs and see what had changed. As everything was under snow the last time I was there quite a lot had changed!

Both the Russia Dock Woodland and Stave Hill Ecological Park looked very manicured.

I'll write about the Ecological Park in the next couple of days. In the Russia Dock Woodland there were patches of crocus and snowdrop. They were lovely. Daffodils still haven't come into flower but they should do in the next couple of weeks. The cherry laurel is in bud, and in the areas where it was seriously cut back it is making a radical come-back and the Red Nettle is widespread. The Yellow Flag, as usual at this time of year, is reviving and the bulrushes are fluffy, dispersing their seeds. Everything else has new buds and tiny green leaves. There is pussy willow and there are catkins.

There were several squirrels out and about.

There was a lot of bird song from the trees but the only ones I came face to face with were blackbirds, starlings, a magpie, lots of pigeons and two sparrows.

On the ponds there were mallards, moorhens, coots and, on Globe Pond, two Canada Geese.

On the insect front there was one gigantic and very cheesed off bumble bee, a ladybird on a dead oak leaf and a very surpising bright yellow brimstone butterly (which was just too far away to photograph).

Spring has certainly arrived, and not a moment too soon!

Opposite Stave Hill Pond, Thursday

2010-01-10T07:27:00.001Z

More from Thursday

2010-01-10T00:18:00.003Z

Enjoying the snow (more from Thursday)

2010-01-09T06:15:00.003Z

Colour in the snow (more from yesterday)

2010-01-08T08:12:00.001Z

Birds in the snowy Russia Dock Woodland and Stave Hill Eco Park

2010-01-08T01:01:00.004Z

Long-tailed Tit
Aegithalos caudatus

I only ever see these in the park in winter. One of my bird books says that
their surface area is high in relation to tehir volume and that as a result
they lose heat rapidly and have difficulty staying warm in winter when insects are
hard to find for sustenance. Populations have been known to fall by 80%.

Robin
Erithacus rubecula

Blue Tit
Parus caeruleus

Little gull in winter guise
Larus minutus

It's latin name refers to the fact that it is the smallest of the gull family.

Snow in the Russia Dock Woodland

2010-01-07T00:56:00.002Z

I took one look at the solid ice outside my front door and exchanged trainers for hiking boots. A good decision. There was no-one to see when I arrived at the park but by the time I left there were several mothers with children and a number of dog walkers, all sliding on the patches of ice. If you are thinking of going over to the park do be careful, whatever your footwear, the flight of "stairs" which take you from behind Globe Pond up to the windmill - they were treacherous.

There was a lot to see in the RDW and Stave Hill eco park. There were few colours around, but a few shrubs were in bud or even in full flower (including the mohonia below), and the light on the snow and the whites and shadows against the blue sky were spectacular.

There was a lot of bird life around, and several squirrels.

All the ponds were frozen, with a few disconsolate birds standing on the ice. On Globe Pond there were also pigeons standing on the ice, next to the seagulls, which was slightly peculiar to see. The overflow from Downtown Pond into the channel along Waterman's Wall had become a very attractive row of icicles, but there was a trickle of water making its way out beneath them. The channels themselves were all frozen solid.

Although some of the bigger paths in the RDW were quite well trodden, presumably by people getting to and from work and taking children to school, others were virtually untouched, with only a few shoe marks, pushchair tracks and dog prints to be seen.

Snowfall over Greenland Dock

2010-01-06T00:50:00.003Z

I was in the Moby Dick with friends when the snow started to come down with real attitude. It was so thick that at times it was impossible to see the far end of the dock. The Moby now has a cover for smokers which looks out towards the end of the dock so I was able to go and stand outside for a few moments without getting completely sodden.

A friend and I did take advantage of a break in the intensity of the snowfall to go and feed the water birds with half a loaf of bread given to us by the landlord. There were two swans, a large number of coots and a mass of greedy, aggressive seagulls - all of which had gathered together at the corner where the main dock meets the inlet, which was one of the few places on the dock where the water had remained unfrozen leaving a patch of water some 6ft by 6ft into which the swans and coots were tightly packed, leaving the seagulls standing morosely on the ice surrounding them.

New book on Rotherhithe

2010-01-03T21:23:00.003Z

Rotherhithe Photographs: 1971-1980 (Paperback)
By Geoff Howard
Vane Publishing
ISBN-10: 095613890X
ISBN-13: 978-0956138903

Available from Amazon.co.uk. I have it on order.

There's a review on the British Journal of Photography. Here's an extract (has one of the photos from the book):

Geoff Howard is an unassuming man, and he only mentions in passing that he once exhibited in the Whitechapel Gallery and published his work in Creative Review, and that his photograph of Martin Parr hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. But if his humble nature makes self-promotion tricky, it's also the secret to his fascinating fly-on-the-wall shots of 1970s Rotherhithe. 'I met Pam and Alan Field, a young brother and sister from Rotherhithe, at a party in north London when I was still attending college (at the London College of Printing),' he says.

'We got talking and they invited me down to their local in Rotherhithe. It was packed and there was a very aggressive atmosphere - when people finished their drinks they'd just drop their glasses on the floor, so by the end of the night you were ankle-deep in broken glass. But I got interested in it, so I started shooting pictures. It was very working class and I'm middle class but I can get on with most people and fit in. You just see how people live.'

His approach was anything but subtle though - using a Leica with a 25mm lens and a big flash, he'd simply walk up to groups and shoot them. But although he had some problems, he had less than you might expect. 'People were very amiable, and I don't think they really took me seriously,' he says. 'Plus I'd just take the shot and move on quickly. But I wanted to be aggressive and do that flash (of light) to capture what was going on. I was an available light photographer but the pubs were very dark so you couldn't shoot them like that - you'd need to really push the film and use a very slow shutter. I wanted to show it like it was, not just capture the atmosphere.'

Here's also what Southwark Weekender has to say (with another one of the photos from the book):

A photographer is searching for a woman he caught on camera nearly forty years ago.

The haunting shot is part of a series chronicling the lives of youngsters in 70s Rotherhithe and is now featured on the front cover of a book.

If the woman - walking down Rotherhithe Street on Christmas Day 1973 - can be found, the photographer will send her a free copy of the book.

Filled with evocative images of Southwark Park festival, old pubs and strip clubs, and now much-changed scenery, the shots cover life in the area from 1971 to 1980.

Geoff Howard, the photographer, told the 'News' that to begin with, his experience of south London was the Elephant and the London College of Printing, where he studied photography.

Geoff said: "In my final year I happened to meet a young couple, brother and sister, while at a party - they lived in Eugina Road with their divorced mother. We all became friends and I took to visiting frequently. As I always have done, I took photographs. The local pub, The Apples and Pears, had a very definite atmosphere, and these pictures were the start of me shooting more seriously.

"Documentary photographs acquire a different meaning with the passing of time. In some ways 1980 doesn't seem that long ago, but in other ways it seems a very long time ago - much has passed since then. The docklands redevelopment was certainly the end of the things I saw in Rotherhithe. I'm just glad I saw the things I did."

Happy New Year!

2010-01-01T01:08:00.002Z

A very Happy New Year with best wishes for 2010.
I hope that it's a good one.
And if it isn't I hope that you find a way to get to grips with it.

Building identification request

2009-12-26T12:24:00.005Z

Does anyone know what the building on the north bank of the Thames made of red brick is called (or at least exactly which road it is on)? It looks as though it was copied from a lego model but was apparently built so that as many rooms as possible had a Thames view.

I haven't got a photograph of my own but the one on the right is from Wiki.

It's not through want of trying. I've searched under every key workd I can think of and did a satellite tour of the Thames on Google Earth and still wasn't able to find it. I'm up in Wales and all the books that might have been able to help are at home in London, of course. It is beginning to drive me nuts!

UPDATED: Please see Mike's comment. Not only has he identified the building for me but he gave me a brilliant way of searching for this type of information in the future. I was going to delete this post when I had the answer but I'll leave it here so that Mike's advice will be available when needed.

A very Happy Christmas to everyone!

2009-12-25T22:51:00.001Z

Rotherhithe Heritage #9 - 1825-1855

2009-12-15T20:23:00.020Z

By the early 1800s the population had expanded massively in the area on the south of the river, and this meant that Southwark, Bermondsey and Newington were all beginning to be closely linked both with each other and with the city of London. Rotherhithe continued to remain apart from the main body of southeast London, but had a massive industrial frontage onto the Thames where ships continued to be built in the shipyards that fringed the peninsula. It had a population of only 13,000 people by 1831 and was separated from the rest of the area by market gardens and drainage ditches. However London's infrastructure, and its connections across the Thames continued to be improved. The old London Bridge was replaced in 1831 with a new bridge designed by John Rennie senior and built by his son John Rennie junior.

Going into the 1820s there were, as already discussed, four dock compnaies operating in Rotherhithe - The Commercial Dock Company (established in 1807), the Grand Surrey Dock Company (established 1801), the East Country Dock Company (established xxxx) and the Baltic Dock Company (established 1809).

In 1822 the King and Queen Granary was erected dowstream of the Bull Head Dock on the west of Rotherhithe. It had seven floors and was provided with its own dock for barges.

Nelson Dock dates from before 1800 but it up until the 1820s it was known as "the yard at Cuckold's point". Rankin suggests that the name change came about when the lease was taken by a shipwright named Nelson Wake. After the Randalls and Brents left the yard in 1818 it was split into two sections.

In 1825 construction of the Thames Tunnel began. I have covered the Thames Tunnel on detail on a separate post which can be found here:
http://russiadock.blogspot.com/2008/10/rotherhithe-heritage-8-thames-tunnel.html

Daniel Brent, sole survivor of S & D Brent had left Nelson Dock in 1815 and focused all his activities on Greenland Dock South Shipyard. The construction of the steamships The London Engineer (1818) and the Rising Star (1822) followed in 1826 by the warship Karteria (meaning perseverence). Partly funded by Lord Byron she was commissioned on a privateer basis by Captain Frank A. Hastings who had served at Trafalgar and was now working for the provisional Greek government. She was partly funded by Lord Byron, and was the only one of six of the same design originally planned. She had two paddles and two steam engines but could also travel under sail. Unlike The Rising Star she was actually used in combat. She had four 68 pound guns and an on board furnace which could heat shot until it was red-hot, which had a devestating effect on the opposing Turkish ships. The ship, commanded by Hastings, became something of a legend. The success of both the Karteria together with the new type of ammunition in naval combat, eventaully led to sailing ships being abandoned by the navy, and to the adoption of armour on ships.

In 1832 Rotherhithe became part of the Parliamentary Borough of Southwark. In the same year Rotherhithe was devastated by an outbreak of cholera. It extended from Rotherhithe to the rest of London. A massive 10% of the population of Bermondsey and Southwark were killed.

In 1835 a swing bridge was built over South Dock entrance. It was designed by James Walker. It was moved to the top of Greenland Dock in 1987. In the same year an additional set of river stairs were added in a narrow passage next to today's Surrey Docks Farm and they named for a pub which no longer exists.

Edward Blick, Rector of St mary's between 1835 and 1867, a former Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, carried out significnat pastoral work on Rotherhithe, including projects to supply additional churches and to build schools.

In 1836 girls ceased to be educated in the school established by Peter Hills and Robert Bell in St Marychurch Street and were instead educated at the new St Mary's School in Lower Road on land granted by Sir William Gomm to Edward Blick. Gomm was a considerable land owner extensive land ranging over areas south of the Rotherhithe Peninsula. St Mary's remained a school for some 150 years. Another school, Trinity Halls, later affiliated to Holy Trinity Church, was opened in 1836 on Trinity Street (now part of Rotherhithe Street) and was amalgamated with another local school in 1875. It operated until 1910.

St Mary's Church was the only Anglican place of worship in 1838 but three more were added between 1838 and 1850. Holy Trinity was built in Rotherhithe Street in 1837-8 by Sampson Kemphtorne on land given by the Commercial Dock Company. The church that stands on the site now is a 1960s replacement for the original, which was destroyed by an incendiary bomb in November 1940. Christ Church was built on the corner of Jamaica Road and Cathay Street in 1838-9 by Lewis Vulliamy on land given by Sir William Gomm. There's a small photograph of it on the Diocese of Southwark website. It was declared redundant in 1964, was used as storage for the Diocese until 1974, was demolished in 1979, and the site is now occupied by the Bosco centre at the edge of King's Stairs Gardens. All Saints was built on Lower Road in 1840 again by Samuel Kempthorne on land also donated by Gomm. Finally St Paul's was built in Beatson Street in 1850. None of them survive. St Mary's Church steeple was rebuilt in 1861. The north and south galleries were removed in 1876 and only the western (organ) gallery remains.

Of the non-Anglican churches those which served Rotherhithe residents in the 1800s include the Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Immactulate conception which was built on Bryan Road in 1858 and included a girls home and a convent. Two Wesleyan methodist places of worship were established early in the 1800s - a chapel in Silver Street near Nelson Dock which opened in 1800 and lasted until 1926, and a church in Albion Streeet which opened in 1806. A Primitive Methodist church opened on Jamaica Road in 1856, and the NonconformistCommercial Dock Chapel which was established in 1800 was served the dockland community.

The London and Greenwich railway was opened in 1836, running from Greenwich to Bermondsey and then London Bridge. It was London’s first railway. It must have been a remarkable sight traveling first through buildings and then over unused land on a massive brick viaduct which had 878 arches. It was carried over the Grand Surrey Canal and an 1845 picture of it shows the Rotherhithe church with the canal passing under the railway. Only 150 odd years ago and look at the traffic on the Thames – heaving with tall-masted ships.

Queen Victoria came to power in the June of 1837.

Joseph Horatio Ritchie, operating out of the Greenland Dock South Shipyard where Daniel Brent also constructed ships, built the paddle tug Dragon but after this date the shipyard seems to have been turned over to repairs.

The King and Queen shipyard to the west of where Globe Wharf stands is identifiable today by the bridge that passes over an inlet which is the remainder of the dry dock that once operated here. The upper part of the yard was taken over by William Elias Evans on the death of Peter Mestaer in 1818. The lower part remained unused for some time but Evans took that over too when his business expanded. He built steamers and carried out repairs. Rankin says that he was a poor businessman and in spite of considerable talent and skill experienced financial setbacks which forced him to give up the lower yard and occupy the upper yard exclusively. once again Rankin describes him as a pioneer who suffered impaired hearing which made him withdrawn and diffident. Between 1821 and 1835 he launched the Lightening and the Meteor. Both were Post Office packet boats based at Holyhead "which proved for the first time that steamships could operate in the open sea all year round" (Rankin 2005, p.93). In 1826 he launched the Constitutionen for the Norwegian post office - the first steamer to operate in the Norwegian fjords. He held the upper yard until his death and it continued to operate as two separate yards afterwards. The upper yard was renamed Prince's Dry Dock and the lower one became King and Queen Dock.

Over the next few years other railway were built which connected with the London and Greenwich.

From the 1830s ship breaking began to take over from ship building. Many ships whic had been built to fight in the Napoleonic Wars met their end in Rotherhithe. It becomes difficult to keep track of the ship yards, their owners and lease holders. Not only were ship yards divided into smaller components or amalgamated into larger enterprises but they were leased out to different owners at different times and owner names changed as new family members joined the business or new partners were included. The uses of these shipyards often changed. Finally, the names of the shipyards were sometimes changed as well.

Amongst the shipyards which were prominent in the first half of the nineteenth century was John Beatson’s ship yard at Bull Head Wharf (which was renamed Surrey Canal Wharf). It was located where 165 Rotherhithe Street now stands (a modern building). Beatsons purchased warships from the Admiralty for breaking up. Examples include the Treekronen (74 guns) broken up in 1825 the Grampus (5o guns) broken up in 1832 and the Salisbury (58 guns), broken up in 1837, the Charybdis (10 guns) broken in 1843 and the Admiral Rainer, an East Indiaman converted to a prison ship and renamed the Justitia, broken in 1855. They also broke up two of the most remarkable ships that saw action in naval battles: the Bellerapheron and the the Temeraire. The HMS Bellerapheron had been built in 1786 and was broken up at Beatson's in 1836. A 74-gun ship, she was built at Frindsbury (River Medway) by a builder named Graves. She was engaged at the battles of The Glorious First of June, the Nile and Trafalgar and was one of the best known ships of the Napoleonic wars. She is now perhaps best know for having held Napoleon a prisoner from July 15^th to August 7^th 1815 before he was handed over to the HMS Northumberland which took him to exile to St Helena. She was converted to a prison ship in 1824 , when she was renamed Captivity, before being broken up in Rotherhithe in 1836. In 1838 the three-decked 98-gun second rate ship of the line HMS Temeraire was purchased for £5530.00 broken up at their yard on Rotherhithe. Built in Chatham in 1798 she had seen action at the Battle of Trafalgar. Like the Belleraphon she had served as a prison ship, and was then used as a receiving ship before being broken up at Rotherhithe. The ship was so famous and such an enormous vessel to travel that far down the Thames that this last voyage attracted crowds of people who gathered to admire and watch her and the event was reported in the London media. She was the largest ship ever to have travelled that far upstream (the biggest ships trusted for construction to private firms were 74-gun ships). She was the subject of Turner’s famous “The Fighting Temeraire”, and even though it seems that many of the details in this painting were incorrect it is still a fabulous testament to a once great ship. Turner may or may not have seen this event, but he certainly captured all the glory and sadness that surrounded her - the unutterable sense of something so magnificent being dragged to a shorry end. I had a copy of the painting hanging on my bedroom wall from when I was sixteen years old. There is a sketch of her by William Beatson at her final resting place at the yard, where she looks really very sad (at the National Maritime Museum) Some of her timbers were used to build altar rails, a communion table and two bishop's chairs which were installed in St Paul's Church off Rotherhithe Street (now destroyed). The table and chairs are in are now in St. Mary's Church, Rotherhithe where they were moved after the Second World War.

The foundations of John Beatson's house at the yard were found in excavations at the site in 2000 (Heard and Goodburn 2000, p.26). It was a Regency style house to the south-west of the wet dock with bow windows and steps leading up to a front porch, the facade of the house facing the wet dock which openend out onto the Thames to the east. Two rooms at the front were separated by stairs going to an upper storey and there were another two rooms at the back. The house had apparently been destroyed by 1894 because it does not appear on the map of that year. Adjoining the house was brick built warehouse which extended to the river. It can be seen, in part, onWilliam Beatson's sketch of the Temeraire. It consisted of four levels each with a large door for unloading commodities.

In 1838 Bull Head Dock became a general engineering workship for the Thames Bank Ironworks.

Beatsons were also involved in ship repairs and timber imports, with a big storage building on the south side of Rotherhithe Street, opposite their thanmes facine operation. In 1839 they sold 4062 sleepers to Taff Vale Railway.

In the 1840s the victualling yard was used to expand the gasworks and eventually the entire remaining site was sold to form the Surrey Entrance Lock and the Surrey Basin.

In 1842 the Brunel engine house was built and in 1843 the Thames Tunnel opened. The Brunel engine house, now a museum, provided a steam pump to remove water from the Thames Tunnel. It was restored in the late 1970s with a replica of the cast iron chimney added in the early 1990s.

A report which appeared in 1843 said that 30,000 of Southwark’s residents had no piped water. If you want to see a hair raising account of health and sanitation issues in the Southwark area at this time see Leonard Reilly’s book Southwark: In Illustrated History (1998, particularly p.56-61). Rotherhithe was one of the poorest areas at this time.

The 1843 map to the left shows the extent of the Rotherhithe docks and ponds at this time. The Grand Surrey Canal basin opened out onto the Thames at the west, and the canal had been widened at its northern end to form the Grand Surrey Inner and Outer Docks (the latter later becoming Russia Dock and now tncorporated into the main thoroughfare through the Russia Dock Woodland). Greenland Dock to the south was half its present size with the Surrey Grand Canal passing across its end. The East Country Dock had been built in the early 1800s over 5.6 acres on land now covered by South Dock. The other docks, connected to Greenland Dock which had access out onto the Thames to the east of Rotherhithe are marked simply as the Commerical Docks on the map. They were, heading north, Norway Dock (today a housing development built into the shallow remains of the dock called "The Lakes"), Lady Dock, Acorn Pond and Lavender Pond.

The dockland areas of Rotherhithe were now increasingly focused on timber and grain. Timber ponds were used as part of the timber processing system. The timber, imported from Canada and the Baltic, was floated in the ponds in order to remove sap from the wood. Open sided sheds were constructed in order to store the timber. Grain also required dockside storage and granaries were built to accomodate it.

As well as ship building, maintenance and repairs around the edges of Rotherhithe and commodity handling in the centre of Rotherhithe there were numerous supporting businesses in the area. On the river front along the short section between King's Stairs to Elephant Stairs Humphrey (1997, p.41) says that there were 4 mastmakers, 1 shipmaker and 2 shop's blockmakers. Rope makers worked inland because of the space required for rope production but there are deeds in the Southwark Local Studies Library for one between Rotherhithe New Road and Southwark Park Road. A look at the 1843 map of the area shows rope walks at Bermondsey Wall East (formerly Rotherhithe Wall), to the west of Marigold Street.

Humphrey (1997) says that in 1843 the Commercial Dock Company was paying around one fifth of the parish's rates.

John Jenkins Thompson built boats at the Horeseferry dock from 1830. The Horseferry Dock was named for a ferry which ran between Rotherhithe and Limehouse. The dock is now completely lost but was located immediately opposite the entrance to Regent's Canal Dock. Thompson built yachts and lifeboats until the 1840s when he began to build steamers including the Ariel (1844), the Brighton, the Dieppe and the Newhaven (all in 1847 and all with mahogony hulls for the Brighton and Continental Steam Packet Co.).

In 1844 the steamer Ariel, which was launched. She was built with a mahogany hull was launched from Rotherhithe, built by John Jenkins Thompson for the Woolwich Steam Packet Company. It had a passenger capacity of 600 people. The launch was reported in the Illustrated London News on the 20th April of that year on page 248. Here's the short story that accompanied the picture to the right (the italics are as in the original article).

On Tuesday last, Rotehrhithe was a scene of unusal gaeity, owing to the launch of a new steamer, the Ariel, bult by Mr Thompson for the Woolwich Steam Packet Company.
The main dimensions of this fine vessel are - length, 120 feet; breadth, 14 feet 6 inches; tonnage, 120; she is built with a round stern, and of diagonal planking, three thicknesses, all mahogany; she has two engines of 20 horse power each, and has been built expressly for a passage vessel between Woolwich and Hungerford; and will carry, with her coals, boilers &c, 600 persons, at a draught of 3 feet 6 inches.

The publication of such details in the ILN indicates that people in 1800s London still understood ships and took an interst in the details of newly launched ships. In the 1850s Thompson built two Dapper class gunboats for the Crimean war, the Hind and the Jackdaw. The Jackdaw was the last Royal Navy commission to be built on Rotherhithe.

Another shipbuilder who made vessels for the Crimean war in the 1850s was Charles Lungley who built mortar floats - unpowered sea vessels each carrying a single large calibre mortar.

From 1846 there's a fascinating record from London's Central Criminal Court dating to teh 26th October. A case of larceny was brought against one James Carbry, aged 29, who was indicted for stealing three copper bolts (value 1s), and four copper nuts (1s 3d), the goods of ship-broker William Philip Beech from Rotherhithe (who was connected with the Beatsons). Carbry had been employed on a vessel from which the items had gone missing. Evidence against him was given by Henry Peachey the foreman to Beech, and by Thomas Watkins (police constable K310) who arrested the prisoner in a marine store , having found the property tied in a handkerchief. Carbry said that he had been given the items by a man. He was found guilty and imprisoned for three months.

A somewhat unusual activity in the area was the builing of railway engines betweeen 1848 and 1849. Under Adams and Hill six locomotives were built for London and the South Western Railway.

A number of innovations were changing the ship building industry on a permanent basis. Pearsell (1986) describes some of them. New types of propulsion had been introduced including paddle steamers and screw propellers. New hull designs resulted in imporved and faster forms made of multiple materials. The introduction of iron for shipping caused something of a revolution in terms of the size of vessels that could be constructed. Some ships were iron hulled and others were composites, made of a combination of wood and iron. Hulls were sheathed in metals which protected them against the sea. New iron rigging was introduced and ship designs became increasingly specialized for the purpose they were to serve. The ability to produce much larger vessels may have been the most important change that the use of iron introduced. Persell says that in 1815 the optimal size for a wooden shop was 200-250 tons. Wood, used as the principal construction material until the mid 1800s, constrained the size of ships that could be built. The largest were the East Indiamen at 1400 tons. With iron, ships could be considerably larger.

Although the increased size benefited those engaged in long distance trade, improving speed, cargo space and fuel efficiency, the larger sizes were increasingly difficult to accomodate by older shipyards and locks.

By the mid 1800s the same family who had bought King’s Mills from the Royal Navy and converted it from a victualling yard were still running the King’s Mills but it was a very different enterprise. Steam power had replaced water power for the process of milling and the mill pond was now used as a timber pond.

Also in the mid 1800s the premises of Charles Hay and Sons, a company established in 1789, was still in the hands of the Hays and the business repaired barges. Charles Hay was the son of Francis Theodore Hay whose tomb can still be seen in St Mary's churchyard.

The Nelson Dock had been split into two after 1818 but became a single shipyard again in 1850 when Thomas Bilbe and William Perry took it over. The modern sailing ship Dame de Serk immediately adjacent to the carpark of the Holiday Inn sits on a patent slip installed by Bilbe. A cradle was moved up and down the slip by hydraulic rams. It had its own engine room which is currently housed in the Mills and Knight (Nelson Dock) building on Rotherhithe Street, which was then part of the shipyard. Bilbe and Perry built composite ships designed with wooden planking over iron frameworks. Hulls were sheathed in copper or Muntz metal. The ships performed well and reached high speeds. Examples are the Red Riding Hood which launched in 1857 and the Argonaut in 1866 (the last ship to be built in Nelson Dock). Rankin says that such ships were top of the market (2005, p.76):

Such vessles being used in opium running, and the intense competition to get the new season's tea back to Britain.

In 1846 another report appeared, from the Metropolitan Commission for Sewers which in 1849 reported that in Rotherhithe the King's Mills Sewer had ten years' accumulation of sewage in it, and that the Paradise Row sewer was waterlogged for at least 20 hours a day. The sewers were failing to discharge into the Thames, and were backing up into sewage ditches instead. Between 1848 and 1849 cholera outbreaks in south London were killing over 1.3 people in every 1000. This figure contrasts with the a figure of 0.37 per 1000 in the less polluted reaches of the Thames. It is probably no coincidence that the first recorded cases of typhoid were in Rotherhithe some 15 years earlier.

In 1851 Rotherhithe Gas Works opened. Up until this point in time it had been piped into Rotherhithe by the Phoenix Gas Company which had works at Deptford Creek and Bankside. Phenix had provided the Thames Tunnel with the gas for its 100 gas lights on its opening in 1843. The new Rotherhithe works were owned by the Surrey Consumers’ Gas Company which was founded in 1849. They had to build their own wharf in order to bring in coal supplies. Gas production only ceased here in 1959.

The East Country Dock Company was purchased by the Commercial Dock Company in 1850 for £40,000.

Under the Commercial Dock Company James Walker rebuilt Greenland Dock and its entrance lock between 1851 and 1852. In 1855 a patent self-acting sluice was added, and this has been preserved in its original location. The lock gates are modern.

In the London Illustrated News a story on page 268 on Saturday April 23rd 1853 was entitled "Hales Rocket Factory at Rotherhithe and begins, promisingly, "An event of ten days since invests the barren locality, pictured on the preceding page, with extraordinary interest". Acting on information authorities searched the premises in Rotherhithe of Hale's Rocket Factory on the west bank of the Surrey Grand Canal near the Plough bridge. They discovered "a large stores of arms, ammunition, and materials of war". The stores were thought to have belonged to Mr Kossuth and his adherents. Mr Hale himself is described as a "well known inventor" who was working a perfecting a war rocket "which rotates around its axis like a rifle-ball, and carries no stick". The News concludes that the connection betweeen the two men was due to Kossuth suggesting improvements in the manufacture of the rockets to Hale.

The Metropolitan Board of Works was founded in 1855 to manage London-wide issues and projects centrally. One of their projects was the purchase of 63 acres for a community park, which eventually became Southwark Park.

The Greenland Dock North Shipyard was leased by Charles Lungley between 1854 and 1869. He built the Dane. The Dane was used first as a transport in the Crimean war before becoming the first mail steamer to run between Britain and South Africa. As with the Greeenland Dock South Shipyard the North Shipyard was used after this date for repairs rather than ship building.

The Lower Road workhouse built in 1728 was under the control of the Rotherhithe Vestry but between 1839 and 1869 it became the responsibility of the Rogherhithe Board of Guarndians and was partly regulated by the Poor Law Board. The role of the workhouse was to provide board and loadgings in return for labour. In Rotherhithe one of the activities carried out was rope making. An infirmary with 52 beds was added in 1866. It had one full time salaried nurse but all other nursing staff were unpaid paupers. Humphrey says that of the 194 workhouse inmates in May 1866 140 were dsabled, old or infirm, 19 were children and only 34 were able bodied (1997, p.59).

By 1857 the Kings Mills Wharf was occupied by wharfingers Messrs R and F Mangles (who purchased the site in 1803), Messrs H. Powell and Sons who continued the building's 18th century tradition of producing sea buiscuits in a factory at the site which included 8 ovens each with its own chimney, and it was also used to store tar and turpentine. The mill no longer used a mill pond (which was converted to a timber pond) and used steam instead. Part of the wharf had been sold in the 1840s for the development of the gas works and the Surrey Basin and its Thames lock.

In 1957 Bull Head Dock was still in use by shipwrights but it was in the company of two manure producers - one processing guano, the other manufacturing chemical manure.

The Kings Mill stairs were renamed the Surrey Dock Stirs from around 1860 onwards.

Iron began to be used extensively, partly because of improved vessel size and speed and fuel efficiencies and was cheaper than wood to maintain, partly because timber ships were found in the Crimean war to be very poorly equipped to deal with shells, and partly because timber was in increasingly short supply.

Stuart Rankin describes how this caused practical problems for Rotherhithe's ship builders (Rainkin 2005, p.3):

The rapid increase in ship size engendered by the adoption of iron coninced with an expansion of the Rotherhithe docks, thus preveneting the shipyards from expanding inland. By the 1860s, Rotherhithe shipyards were no longer able to compete at the quality end of the market for larger shis, and local costs were so high in cmparison to Scotland, the Mersey or Tyne, that the building of small ships was uneconomic.

Another problem for builders of wooden ships was the shortage of timber.

The Upper Globe Dock Shipyard (where Globe Wharf stands opposite the Deal Porters pub) had been used as a base for ship building by by 1860 it has become a repair and maintenance yard under the General Iron Screw Collier Co.

In 1858 John Beatson died.

In 1860 the Surrey Entrance Lock and the Surrey Basin opened. The engineer responsible was George Parker Bidder the former partner of Robert Stephenson. His remarkable abilities for mental arithmetic meant that he could work out logarithms in his head. The lock was 250ft long and 50ft wide and 27ft 3ins deep. For some years after the opening of the new entrance the former entrance lock to the Grand Surrey Canal into Stave Dock was still in use and this left an area of land in between the two lock entrances which formed an island which became known as the Island Yard. today it is the site of the pub the Old Salt Quay (formerly Spice Island).

Albion Dock opened in 1860 as an enlargement of a timber pond. Its general orientation is now marked by the Albion Channel, a shallow canal leading from the Surrey Basin (now known as Surrey Water) towards the Surrey Quays shopping centre emerging in Canada Water, the former Canada Dock. Albion Dock had been infilled but the canal was excavated during the dockland regeneration work, with the spoil used to create Stave Hill.

Between 1860 and 1887 the King and Queen Dock (formerly the King and Queen Lower Yard) was held by William Rennie who was a noted naval architect and designer of clipers but most of his designs were built elsewhere.

In 1861 William Philip Beech formed a partnership with Henry Castle to take advantage of the retirement of a large number of wooden warships, East Indiamen and other vessels. Castle had attempted to purchase the HMS Rainbow in 1838 from the Admiralty in order to break her up but was unsuccessful in breaking into the business until his partnership with ship broker Beech. In 1841 Castle had moved from his premises at 11 Lucas Street in Rotherhithe to the King and Queen Dry Dock at first in partnership with his brother in law but by 1845 he was the sole tenant and in 1860 had gone into busniess with his sons. Beech was based at Bulls Head Dock. The partnership between the two of them took their joint business away from Rotherhithe to Charlton

A dry dock was added to Horseferry Dock in 1862 the whole site was turned over to repairs.

In 1862 a swing bridge made by Henry Grisssell in 1862 was provided for the Surrey Entrance Lock on the western side of Rotherhithe. It survives but has been moved to cross Steel Yard Cut (the link between Greenland Dock and South Dock). In the same year a new lock built by the Commercial Dock Company created a connection between Lavender Lock and the Thames to provide an additional access to the dock system for small river craft (not ships).

The Holiday Inn incorporates the Columbia wharf building. This was built in 1864-65 by the Patent Ventilating Granary Company. It was the first grain silo erected in a British port. The architect was James Edmeston. It is a very attractive building when viewed from the river, with lozenge-shaped windows in the top floor, but it was far more elaborate in the past. There is an image of it on the cover of the 1868 Godfrey edition of the Rotherhithe O/S map.

In January 1865 the Grand Surrey Dock Company and Commercial Dock Company amalgamated and became the Surrey Commercial Dock Company.

Southwark Park opened on 19th June 1869. It caused some upset in the area when it was not named Rotherhithe Park because its area was entirely located within the parish of Rotherhithe but for political reasons it was named after Southwark's parliamentary constituency.

In 1871 HMS Queen was broken up in Lower Globe Dock by thomas and William Philip Beech who took over the Beatson ship building business on the death of John Beatson. She was a triple decked 110 gun First Rate ship of the line and should have been worth a considerable amount of money, but her back was broken when she arrived at the yard, meaning that the long lengths required for purchase were no longer available. She was the last wooden warship broken this far up the Thames. The Illustrated London News covered the story on September 9th 1871. Following Beech the yard was occupied by a succession of wharfingers.

Edward Blick was succeeded in 1867 as the Rector of St Mary's by Edward Josselyn Beck who continued to promote building projects. The 1803 rectory, next door to the former Peter Hills School in Rotherhithe village was enlarged in 1869. In 1870-2 the church of St Barnabas was constructed on Plough Way by William Butterfield. The first local authority school in Rotherhithe was established on Albion Street in 1872.

Rotherhithe LT railway station opened in 1869 on Brunel Road.

Maritime industries began to relocate either downriver or to other ports in Britain.

Pearsell (1986) gives a number of possible reasons for the Nineteenth Century decline in Rotherhithe ship building including

Restrictions in depth and width of the Thames upstream of Deptford
Tides in the Lower Pool possibly hampering the manoevering of larger vesseks
Lack of space in Rotherhithe yards along the water front due to the inability of yeards to expand backwards into Rotherhithe
Specialization in wooden ship manufacture when iron was increasingly favoured for construction
Thames wages were higher than other areas meaning. It was cheaper to build wharves, factories and warehouses
Early Nineteenth Century strikes in London undermined the faith of the Royal Navy in the reliability of private yards.

From 1870 sailing ships lost ground permanently throughout the world.

Relics of the Grand Surrey Canal and its locks

2009-12-08T12:40:00.001Z

It would have been impossible for me to match up the modern landscape with the reality of what was where in the 1800s without all of Stuart Rankin's work, captured so splendidly in his 2004 "Martime Rotherhithe - History Walks" (Southwark Council - details in Bibliography).

I'll replace some of these photographs when I take some better ones. The advantage of going out when a full winter sun was in the sky was that everything looked so magnificent. The disadvantage, of course, is that the contrast between the bright sun and the shadows made for some really poor photos of anything but wildlife! I've never got used to carrying filters, so I'll just have to go and re-take these when the light is more forgiving.

As I outlined in one of my earlier heritage posts the Grand Surrey Canal Act was passed in 1801 and in the years that followed the a basin and a small entrance lock for barges were constructed.

The canal itself never reached its planned destination, and branches only ever reached Camberwell and Peckham. Nor did it carry the type of traffic its investors had hoped for - instead of carrying timber it actually served the local market gardens.

In the late 1840s it was decided to add another basin, the Surrey Basin today surviving and maintaining its original odd shape, known as Surrey Water. This lock opened into the Thames via a new lock, which is still preserved under the 1950s red swing bridge. The round structure out in the Thames just beyond the lock entrance is a "dolphin" built at the same time, and was used to help craft maneovre into the lock. The old lock, opening into a different part of the same system, was used in tandem, creating an "island" where the modern Old Salt Quay public house and the modern building next door now stand.

The remains of the canal, the Surrey Basin, the late 1840s lock, the dolphin, the remains of the early 1800s lock and the places in which the canal was widened to extend the dock system, can all still be seen clearly in Rotherhithe.

The following photographs show some of those clues in the modern landscape.

Starting at the Thames, the lock of the 1800s survives as an inlet downriver of the Old Salt Quay and immediately next to the modern building next door. The first view was taking from the south of the lock, the second from the north.

The late 1840s lock is still in situ and although blocked off from the Thames survives complete, connecting to Surrey Water. The photo at the very top left of this post shows the lock gates with the walkway across the top of them.

The dolphin, outside the lock entrance, is a great favourite with cormorants and shags.

The Surrey Basin, now Surrey Water, to which the lock was connected, is now a great home for water birds of both freshwater and marine types. As well as swans and ducks there were seagulls and shags when I visited the other day. In the mid 1400s this was one of a set of basins which were connected into the greater network of docks, and to the Grand Surrey Canal. If you stand at the lock end of the Basin and look out towards the left you can see the inlet into what was once Island Dock, a slender dock which connected into the much large Stave and Russia Docks, both of which formed part of the original Surrey Grand Canal. Look ahead and to the left, where the Basin runs into the modern "Albion Channel" and you can see where it used to connect to Albion Dock. The first photo is a view to the lock entrance. The second is a view to the inlet to Island Dock (now a walkway to the ecological park flanked by housing). The latter is a particularly bad photograph but I will replace it when I take a better one.

The Surrey Canal itself ran from Stave Dock into Russia Dock, at the end of which it became a proper canal suitable only for travel, not mooring, and ran along the end of Greeland Dock, which in the mid to late 1800s stopped just short of where the Moby Dick is now located. The inlet which is overlooked by the Moby and the remains of the lock beneath the road are more recent but they mark both the route of the canal and the point at which the canal exited from the Russia Dock.

The edge of the Russia Dock itself is easily spotted as a quayside preserved in the Russia Dock Woodland, and known as "Waterman's Walk".

To follow the route of the canal from the late 1840s lock, stand at the lock facing the Surrey Water. Take the footpath that heads along the left (north) of the basin until you reach the inlet. Then turn left and head up the walkway, Dock Avenue, past the wooden shelter until you reach Stave Hill. You are now standing more or less where Stave Dock and Russia Dock used to meet. Walk around Stave Hill and take the path immediately opposite Dock Avenue. You will find yourself overlooking a big green area with picnic tables - the former Russia Dock. On the far side is Waterman's Walk, the quayside of Russia Dock. Cross the green to Waterman's Walk and head to the right (south) towards Greenland Dock. Follow the path under the road (a late 1800s lock) and you will find yourself at the Moby Dick with the blocked off inlet in front of you. This is where the Surrey Canal emerged. If you look over at the water sport centre you will see a small beach / slipway. This is another marker of the route that the canal took.

Rotherhithe Heritage #10 - 1843 - 1870

2009-12-07T16:49:00.010Z

John Jenkins Thompson built boats at the Horeseferry dock from 1830. The Horseferry Dock was named for a ferry which ran between Rotherhithe and Limehouse. The dock is now completely lost but was located immediately opposite the entrance to Regent's Canal Dock. Thompson built yachts and lifeboats until the 1840s when he began to build steamers including the Ariel (1844), the Brighton, the Dieppe and the Newhaven (all in 1847 and all with mahogany hulls for the Brighton and Continental Steam Packet Co.).

As far as I can tell from contemporary maps it was in the late 1840s that part of the land occupied by the Kings Mills Wharf was sold off to allow the expansion of the docks and for a new lock to be added.

In 1844 the steamer Ariel, which was launched. from Rotherhithe where she was constructed. She was built by John Jenkins Thompson for the Woolwich Steam Packet Company and had a mahogany hull. Ariel had a passenger capacity of 600 people. The launch was reported in the Illustrated London News on the 20th April of that year on page 248. Here's the short story that accompanied the picture to the right (the italics are as in the original article).

On Tuesday last, Rotherhithe was a scene of unusual gaiety, owing to the launch of a new steamer, the Ariel, built by Mr Thompson for the Woolwich Steam Packet Company.
The main dimensions of this fine vessel are - length, 120 feet; breadth, 14 feet 6 inches; tonnage, 120; she is built with a round stern, and of diagonal planking, three thicknesses, all mahogany; she has two engines of 20 horse power each, and has been built expressly for a passage vessel between Woolwich and Hungerford; and will carry, with her coals, boilers &c, 600 persons, at a draught of 3 feet 6 inches.

The publication of such details in the ILN indicates that people in 1800s London still understood ships and took an interest in the details of newly launched ships. In 1847 Thompson apparently leased additional space at the Barnard Yard because the Banshee, commissioned by the Admiralty, was launched from there rather than the Horseferry yard. The Banshee is described by Murray in his 1852 Treatise. She was a paddle steamer designed by Oliver Lang (junior) with engines by Penn, was a particularly fast steamer and Rankin says that she was once timed at 16.3 knots. She was entirely wood-built. She cost £39,000 and was one of the last mail packets to be ordered by the Admiralty. Murray says that she provides an excellent of example of "what may be accomplished by Government builders when they are not trammelled by considerations of armament or displacement". She was employed on the Holyhead to Dublin service, a run which usually took well over four hours but she was regularly the fastest vessel on the route, completing the Holyhead to Kingston run of 55 nautical miles in three and a half hours (fastest time). The packet service was taken over by the City of Dublin Steam Packet in 1850 after which Murray says that the Banshee was sent to Malta, a trip which required the removal of half her boiler power in order to store sufficient coal for the trip, effectively reducing her speed to 12 knots. She was scrapped in 1864. Sadly I have been unable to find an illustration of her so far. In the 1850s Thompson built two Dapper class gunboats for the Crimean war, the Hind and the Jackdaw. The Jackdaw was the last Royal Navy commission to be built on Rotherhithe.

Another shipbuilder who made vessels for the Crimean war in the 1850s was Charles Lungley who built mortar floats - unpowered sea vessels each carrying a single large calibre mortar.

From 1846 there's a fascinating record from London's Central Criminal Court dating to the 26th October. A case of larceny was brought against one James Carbry, aged 29, who was indicted for stealing three copper bolts (value 1s), and four copper nuts (1s 3d), the goods of ship-broker William Philip Beech from Rotherhithe (who was connected with the Beatsons). Carbry had been employed on a vessel from which the items had gone missing. Evidence against him was given by Henry Peachey the foreman to Beech, and by Thomas Watkins (police constable K310) who arrested the prisoner in a marine store , having found the property tied in a handkerchief. Carbry said that he had been given the items by a man. He was found guilty and imprisoned for three months.

A somewhat unusual activity in the area was the building of railway locomotives. Rankin (2004) describes how the Bull Head yard which was converted to a general engineering works in 1838 by John Hague. He says that the demand for locomotives was so great in this period of massive railway construction that the big engineering works were having difficulty meeting demand, and small workshops were able to to meet some of these gaps in demand. The Thames Bank Ironworks (run by Christie, Adams and Hill) produced six locomotives between 1848 and 1849 which were built for London and South Western Railway. As with ships, each engine was assigned a name. They would have had to be removed via the river to a be offloaded at a wharf which linked directly onto the railway system. Rankin says that of the engines produced by small workshops these were amongst the better ones. The Steam Index website has this to say about them:

Bradley 1: 43: first three cost £1800; later three £1900 each. A lot of trouble was experienced with the fisrt No. 109 Rocklia, but Nos 110 Avon and 111 Test were less troublesome. Nos. 112 Trent, 113 Stour and 114 Frome were slightly larger. Bradley include a photograph of Frome (Fig. 13). They were withdrawn 1868-70.

"Bradley" refers to the author Bradley, D.L. who wrote Locomotives of the Southern Railway. London: RCTS. 1975/6.. Volume 1.

A number of innovations were changing the ship building industry on a permanent basis. Pearsell (1986) describes some of them. New types of propulsion had been introduced including paddle steamers and screw propellers. New hull designs resulted in improved and faster forms made of multiple materials. The introduction of iron for shipping caused something of a revolution in terms of the size of vessels that could be constructed. Some ships were iron hulled and others were composites, made of a combination of wood and iron. Hulls were sheathed in metals which protected them against the sea. New iron rigging was introduced and ship designs became increasingly specialized for the purpose they were to serve. The ability to produce much larger vessels may have been the most important change that the use of iron introduced. Persell says that in 1815 the optimal size for a wooden shop was 200-250 tons. Wood, used as the principal construction material until the mid 1800s, constrained the size of ships that could be built. The largest were the East Indiamen at 1400 tons. With iron, ships could be considerably larger.

The Nelson Dock had been split into two after 1818 but became a single shipyard again in 1850 when Thomas Bilbe (designer) and William Perry (shipmaster) took it over. The 1952 sailing ship Dame de Serk, a French navy training ship, which is located immediately adjacent to the car park of the Holiday Inn sits on a patent slip installed by Bilbe (photograph to the left). A cradle was moved up and down the slip by hydraulic rams. It had its own engine room which is currently housed in the Mills and Knight (Nelson Dock) building on Rotherhithe Street, which was then part of the shipyard. Bilbe and Perry built composite ships designed with wooden planking over iron frameworks. Hulls were sheathed in copper or Muntz metal. The ships performed well and reached high speeds. Examples are the Red Riding Hood, a composite clipper made for the Orient Line, which launched in 1857 and the Argonaut in 1866 (the last ship to be built in Nelson Dock). Rankin says that such ships were top of the market (2005, p.76):

Such vessels being used in opium running, and the intense competition to get the new season's tea back to Britain.

In 1851 Rotherhithe Gas Works opened. Up until this point in time it had been piped into Rotherhithe by the Phoenix Gas Company which had works at Deptford Creek and Bankside. Phoenix had provided the Thames Tunnel with the gas for its 100 gas lights on its opening in 1843. The new Rotherhithe works were owned by the Surrey Consumers’ Gas Company which was founded in 1849. They had to build their own wharf in order to bring in coal supplies. Gas production only ceased here in 1959.

The East Country Dock Company was purchased by the Commercial Dock Company in 1850 for £40,000.

In the London Illustrated News a story on page 268 on Saturday April 23rd 1853 was entitled "Hales Rocket Factory at Rotherhithe and begins, promisingly, "An event of ten days since invests the barren locality, pictured on the preceding page, with extraordinary interest". Acting on information authorities searched the premises in Rotherhithe of Hale's Rocket Factory on the west bank of the Surrey Grand Canal near the Plough bridge. They discovered "a large stores of arms, ammunition, and materials of war". The stores were thought to have belonged to Mr Kossuth and his adherents. Mr Hale himself is described as a "well known inventor" who was working a perfecting a war rocket "which rotates around its axis like a rifle-ball, and carries no stick". The News concludes that the connection between the two men was due to Kossuth suggesting improvements in the manufacture of the rockets to Hale.

In 1851 the Great Exhibition was held in Hyde Park. The main exhibition hall was the Crystal Palace, vast glass structure which was dismantled after the Exhibition and was relocated and reassembled in Sydenham (south London). It burned down in 1936.

In 1854 England became involved with the Crimean war, which again increased the demand for ships.

The Greenland Dock North Shipyard was leased by Charles Lungley between 1854 and 1869. He built the Dane here for the Union Steam Colliers Co (renamed the Union Steamship Co in 1856). She was a 530 ton ship with an average speed of around 8-9 knots. The Dane was used first in the South Wales coal trade but was soon chartered by the French government as a transport in the Crimean war to carry materials to and from Turkey. After the war she was laid up before carrying mail and a few passengers on a line to Brazil from Liverpool. She then became the first mail steamer to run between Britain and South Africa on a contract to make passage from the UK to the Cape within 42 days. It was worth £33,000 a year. As with the Greenland Dock South Shipyard the North Shipyard was used after this date for repairs rather than ship building. She was next chartered by the British government mission to Zanzibar to suppress the slave trade. She met a sad end, being wrecked off Cape Receife (South Africa) in December 1865, albeit without loss of life.

The Lower Road workhouse built in 1728 was under the control of the Rotherhithe Vestry but between 1839 and 1869 it became the responsibility of the Rotherhithe Board of Guardians and was partly regulated by the Poor Law Board. The role of the workhouse was to provide board and lodgings in return for labour. In Rotherhithe one of the activities carried out was rope making. An infirmary with 52 beds was added in 1866. It had one full time salaried nurse but all other nursing staff were unpaid paupers. Humphrey says that of the 194 workhouse inmates in May 1866 140 were disabled, old or infirm, 19 were children and only 34 were able bodied (1997, p.59). The watercolour by Yates showing the workhouse dates to 1826.

By 1857 the Kings Mills Wharf was occupied by wharfingers Messrs R and F Mangles (who purchased the site in 1803), Messrs H. Powell and Sons who continued the building's 18th century tradition of producing sea biscuits in a factory at the site which included 8 ovens each with its own chimney, and it was also used to store tar and turpentine. The mill no longer used a mill pond (which was converted to a timber pond) and used steam instead. Part of the wharf had been sold in the 1840s for the development of the gas works and the Surrey Basin and its Thames lock.

In 1857 Bull Head Dock was still in use by shipwrights but it was in the company of two manure producers - one processing guano, the other manufacturing chemical manure.

The Kings Mill stairs were renamed the Surrey Dock Stirs from around 1860 onwards.

Stuart Rankin describes how this caused practical problems for Rotherhithe's ship builders (Rankin 2005, p.3):

The rapid increase in ship size engendered by the adoption of iron coincided with an expansion of the Rotherhithe docks, thus preventing the shipyards from expanding inland. By the 1860s, Rotherhithe shipyards were no longer able to compete at the quality end of the market for larger ships, and local costs were so high in comparison to Scotland, the Mersey or Tyne, that the building of small ships was uneconomic.

Another problem for builders of wooden ships was the shortage of timber. Even though John Evelyn had identified increasing shortages of timber as a huge problem in the 1700s replanting had not been sufficient to provide the shipbuilding industry with sufficient supplies.

The Upper Globe Dock Shipyard (where Globe Wharf stands opposite the modern Deal Porters pub) had been used as a base for ship building by by 1860 it has become a repair and maintenance yard under the General Iron Screw Collier Co.

In 1858 John Beatson died, ending a fine family tradition.

In 1860 the Surrey Entrance Lock and the Surrey Basin opened. The new dock was constructed in the area that we now know as Surrey Water, and was called Surrey Basin, and the new lock connected Surrey Basin to the Thames. Although shut off from the Thames the lock is still there, beneath the 1950s red lift bridge. The engineer responsible was George Parker Bidder (picture shown left) the former partner of Robert Stephenson. His remarkable abilities for mental arithmetic meant that he could work out logarithms in his head. The lock was 250ft long and 50ft wide and 27ft 3ins deep. For some years after the opening of the new entrance the former entrance lock to the Grand Surrey Canal into Stave Dock was still in use and this left an area of land in between the two lock entrances which formed an island which became known as the Island Yard. today it is the site of the pub the Old Salt Quay (formerly Spice Island). The remains of the older lock have survived today as an inlet around which the Thames Path is diverted.

James Abbot McNeil Whistler completed a series of Thames etchings in the mid 1800s. His etching of Rotherhithe (right), dating to 1860, was done on the balcony of the Angel Inn looking northwest toward the City with the dome of St. Paul's is visible on the horizon at the far left.

A dry dock was added to Horseferry Dock in 1862 the whole site was turned over to repairs.

The Holiday Inn incorporates the Columbia Wharf building. This was built in 1864-65 by the Patent Ventilating Granary Company. It was the first grain silo erected in a British port. The architect was James Edmeston. It is a very attractive building when viewed from the river, with lozenge-shaped windows in the top floor (see photo right), but it was apparently far more elaborate in the past. There is an image of it on the cover of the 1868 Godfrey edition of the Rotherhithe O/S map.

In January 1865 the Grand Surrey Dock Company and Commercial Dock Company amalgamated and became the Surrey Commercial Dock Company.

Ship building continued for a while in Rotherhithe. Lavender Dock Shipyard was used for ship building between 1865 and 1870 by John and William Walker who specialized in composite ships including the Mikado (1868), the Ambassador (1869) and the Lothair (1870). The last of the large ships to be built on Rotherhithe was the Lothair. She was a 825 ton (gross) ship built of wood and iron and was one of the fastest clippers ever to be built but was lost at sea in 1910. The picture to the left is the714 ton Ambassador. There are some simply amazing photographs of the surviving beached remains of the Ambassador in San Gregorio in Chile on Lago Cardiel's Flickr site (one of which is shown in thumbnail here, below left, with a link to the correct page). Cardiel's page also provides a history of the ship in "translation engine English" (if you read Spanish the much better option is to look at the original page from which the translation is take n, which also has some terrific photos of the wreck). Her figurehead was rescued in the 70's and today can be seen in the Patagonian Institute in Punta Arenas (Chile). The survival of the remains is due to the fact that instead of being scrapped she was beached and abandoned. She was pillaged for parts but astonishingly the wooden parts of her frame survive. Apart from the Cutty Sark (or what remains of it since it burned due to an industrial vacuum cleaner catching fire overnight) it is, as far as I know, the only surviving composite ship.

Rotherhithe LT railway station opened in 1869 on Brunel Road.

Maritime industries began to relocate either downriver or to other ports in Britain.

Pearsell (1986) gives a number of possible reasons for the Nineteenth Century decline in Rotherhithe ship building including

Restrictions in depth and width of the Thames upstream of Deptford
Tides in the Lower Pool possibly hampering the manoevering of larger vesseks
Lack of space in Rotherhithe yards along the water front due to the inability of yeards to expand backwards into Rotherhithe
Specialization in wooden ship manufacture when iron was increasingly favoured for construction
Thames wages were higher than other areas meaning. It was cheaper to build wharves, factories and warehouses
Early Nineteenth Century strikes in London undermined the faith of the Royal Navy in the reliability of private yards.

There are other possible reasons too. During the 1800s the requirement for warships of the previous century had been radically reduced when the Napoleonic wars ended in 1815. The Crimean war lasted only two years. Ships were commissioned for wars underway in foreign nations but not in large numbers. Power was seated in government and the politicians of the Victorian era believed that peace was essential to stability. Instead, the emphasis was on long distance trade and the establishment of trading colonies for which postal services were also required. Ships needed, as well, to incorporate passenger accomodation. New types of shipping activity required different types of ship design.

From 1870 sailing ships lost ground permanently throughout the world. The work taking place along the Thames quays began to decline but the work within Rotherhithe at docks and ponds was very much on the increase and the character of Rotherhithe changed forever.

More photos from last week

2009-12-06T22:27:00.006Z

Entrance to the Ecological Park, near Stave Hill.

Hop
Humulus lupulus L.
Cannabiaceae

A bright climber with yellow flowers. Irritatingly
familiar, but yet to be identified.

Reeds in the sunlight, opposite Stave Hill pond.

This looks like something to do with the Ecological Park's occasional
events for children.

Cotoneaster
Bright autumn berries near the "waterfall" at lower Downtown pond

Honesty. Increasingly battered! Next to Waterman's Walk.

A carpet of bright moss, next to Downtown pond

More from yesterday

2009-12-05T07:56:00.002Z

Grey squirrel, holding the pose in a most obliging fashion.

Reeds in the sunshine, Stave Hill pond

Only a few leaves left, Russia Dock Woodland.

Bulrushes, Downtown Pond
Typha latifolia L.
Typhaceae

Coloured bark, opposite Stave Hill Pond

The world's worse photo of a goldfinch,
included only to demonstrate that it was actually there!

Freezing cold but very pretty

2009-12-04T21:36:00.011Z

I only passed through the edges of the Russia Dock Woodland on the way to trying to find photographs to match up with my latest Rotherhithe heritage post but there were some good things to see. The channel along Waterman's Walk is looking particularly good with lots of water. I was very glad to see that the burned out motorcyle had been removed from the woodland walkway on the otherside of the channel.

There were birds in the trees - goldfinches (of which I took probably the world's worst photo), sparrows, magpies and great tits. In the reeds opposite the Stave Hill pond I watched a very entertaining blue tit for quite a long time. Blackbirds were turning over the leaves.

The ponds are looking good. The bulrushes are looking velvety, Yellow Flag shoots are coming up and the ducks, coots and moorhens were all noisy and active. Opposite the Stave Hill pond the reeds were spectacular in the sun and the bark on the surrounding trees was instantly eye-catching. A blue tit was making a riotous din in the reeds, and leaves in the shadow were still frosty.

I only walked through the margins of the park but it was good to see so many bright red berries giving colour to the walks. The honesty is looking very ragged but it is still there in patches. The few leaves remaining on the trees looked beautiful in the sun, and the remainder, swept onto verges or bright in the water provided a multi-shaped mosaic of colour. Lovely.

Rotherhithe Heritage #9 - 1825-1843

2009-11-29T20:09:00.040Z

To recap briefly, the Napoleonic wars had ended in 1815. By the early 1800s, according to the first official population Census of 1801, the population had expanded massively in the southeast London area on the south of the river, and this meant that Southwark, Bermondsey and Newington were all beginning to be closely linked both with each other and with the city of London. Rotherhithe continued to remain apart from the main body of southeast London, with only a relatively small proportion of the peninsulas interior turned over to docks and ponds, but it had a massive industrial frontage onto the Thames where ships continued to be built in the shipyards that fringed the peninsula. It had a population of only 13,000 people by 1831 and was separated from the rest of the area by market gardens and drainage ditches. The above watercolour by George Yates shows the bridge and Dock House where the Surrey Grand Canal met the Thames on the west side of Rotherhithe.

In spite of its relative independence early in the 1800s the population of Rotherhithe was growing, the shipping industry was healthy and London's infrastructure, and its connections across the Thames continued to be improved. The old London Bridge was replaced in 1831 with a new bridge designed by John Rennie senior and built by his son, John Rennie junior.

Going into the 1820s there were, as already discussed, four dock companies operating in Rotherhithe - The Commercial Dock Company (established in 1807), the Grand Surrey Dock Company (established 1801), the East Country Dock Company (established 1807) and the Baltic Dock Company (established 1809). The map to the right shows Rotherhithe in 1828.

In 1822 the King and Queen Granary was erected downstream of the Bull Head Dock on the west of Rotherhithe. It had seven floors and was provided with its own dock for barges.

From the early 1820s it becomes difficult to keep track of the ship yards, their owners and lease holders. Not only were ship yards divided into smaller components or amalgamated into larger enterprises but they were leased out to different owners at different times and owner names changed as new family members joined the business or new partners were included. The uses of these shipyards often changed. Finally, the names of the shipyards were sometimes changed as well.

The Barnard Yard, managed by Frances Barnard since her husband died in 1805, was by now enormous, covering an area to the north of the modern New Caledonian Wharf development on Odessa Street, and was split into two parts. The lower yard was the larger of the two parts and was occupied by the partnership Frances Barnard, Son and Roberts for shipbuilding and repairs. The upper yard was occupied by F.E. and T Barnard and specialized in spar and mast making. Other ship builders leased space from the yards for projects for which their own yards were either too small or too busy.

Nelson Dock dates from before 1800 but it up until the 1820s it was known as the yard at Cuckold's point. Rankin suggests that the name change came about when the lease was taken by a shipwright named Nelson Wake. After the Randalls and Brents left the yard in 1818 it was split into two sections.

The floating dock at Rotherhithe shown above, right, dates to around 1820.

In 1825 construction of the Thames Tunnel began. I have covered the Thames Tunnel in detail on a separate post which can be found here:
http://russiadock.blogspot.com/2008/10/rotherhithe-heritage-8-thames-tunnel.html

In 1829 the South Metropolitan Gas Company was founded in 1829 . It built works along side the Grand Surrey Canal on the Old Kent Rd and these were finsihed in 1833. The company's offices were added a year later.

In 1835 a swing bridge was built over South Dock entrance. It was designed by James Walker. It was moved to the top of Greenland Dock in 1987, where it can still be seen and used. In the same year an additional set of river stairs were added in a narrow passage next to today's Surrey Docks Farm and they named for a pub which no longer exists.

London's first railway, the London and Greenwich Railway was opened in 1836. Bermondsey Spa Road to Deptford. It was the largest brick structure anywhere in the world with 878 arches made of 19 million bricks. The viaduct was required both because of the marshy land and because the dozens of roads which it crossed. In December 1836 the railway was extended from Bermondsey to London Bridge, and the modern section of the viaduct that leads into London Bridge is original. The extension to Greenwich to the east followed 2 years later in 1838. Apparently there was a plan to enable horse drawn carriages to go up onto trains, and a ramp to enable this survives at Deptford Station but the plan was never actioned. The viaduct carried the railway over the Grand Surrey Canal and an 1845 picture of it by Smith (above left) shows St Mary's church to the left of the picture, surrounded by buildings, another church to the north (Holy Trinity) and a third right next to the railway arches on Deptford Lower Road (All Saints). The canal is clearly visible passing under the railway. Only 150 odd years ago and the traffic on the Thames is heaving with tall-masted ships.

Edward Blick, Rector of St Mary's between 1835 and 1867, a former Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, carried out significant pastoral work on Rotherhithe, including projects to supply additional churches and to build schools.

In 1836 girls ceased to be educated in the school established by Peter Hills and Robert Bell in St Marychurch Street and were instead educated at the new St Mary's School in Lower Road on land granted by Sir William Gomm to Edward Blick. Gomm was a considerable land owner with extensive land ranging over areas south of the Rotherhithe Peninsula which he had inherited in 1822. St Mary's remained a school for some 150 years. Another school, Trinity Halls, later affiliated to Holy Trinity Church, was opened in 1836 on Trinity Street (now part of Rotherhithe Street) and was amalgamated with another local school in 1875. It operated until 1910.

St Mary's Church was the only Anglican place of worship in 1838 but there was a need for more churches as the population grew and extended over a larger area. Three more were added between 1838 and 1850. Holy Trinity was built in Rotherhithe Street in 1837-8 by Sampson Kempthorne on land given by the Commercial Dock Company and was consecrated in 1839. (see picture right). The church that stands on the site now is a 1960s replacement for the original, which was destroyed by an incendiary bomb in November 1940. Christ Church was built in a simple Gothic style on the corner of Jamaica Road and Cathay Street in 1838-9 by Lewis Vulliamy on land given by Field Marshal Sir William Gomm who was buried there in 1875. There's a small photograph of it on the Diocese of Southwark website. It was declared redundant in 1964, was used as storage for the Diocese until 1974, was demolished in 1979, and the site is now occupied by the Bosco centre at the edge of King's Stairs Gardens. All Saints was built on Deptford Lower Road in 1840 was another Gothic style structure with tower and spire and cost £3000.00. It was again built by Samuel Kempthorne on land also donated by Gomm. Finally St Paul's was built in Beatson Street in 1850. None of them survive. St Mary's Church steeple was rebuilt in 1861. The north and south galleries were removed in 1876 and only the western (organ) gallery remains.

Of the non-Anglican churches those which served Rotherhithe residents in the 1800s include the Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate conception which was built on Bryan Road in 1858 and included a girls home and a convent. Two Wesleyan Methodist places of worship were established early in the 1800s - a chapel in Silver Street near Nelson Dock which opened in 1800 and lasted until 1926, and a church in Albion Street which opened in 1806. A Primitive Methodist church opened on Jamaica Road in 1856, and the Nonconformist Commercial Dock Chapel which was established in 1800 was served the dockland community.

Queen Victoria came to power in the June of 1837 following the death of her uncle William IV who died leaving no legitimate children. By now the power was very much in the hands of government, but Victoria was considered to be an important symbol of state.

Joseph Horatio Ritchie, operating out of the Greenland Dock South Shipyard where Daniel Brent also constructed ships, built the wooden-hulled paddle tug Dragon in 1838 but after this date the shipyard seems to have been turned over to repairs. The Dragon was made for the Symington Patent Paddle Towing Company.

The King and Queen shipyard to the west of where Globe Wharf stands is identifiable today by the bridge that passes over an inlet which is the remainder of the dry dock that once operated here. The upper part of the yard was taken over by William Elias Evans on the death of Peter Mestaer in 1818. The lower part remained unused for some time but Evans took that over too when his business expanded. He built steamers and carried out repairs. Rankin says that he was a poor businessman and in spite of considerable talent and skill experienced financial setbacks which forced him to give up the lower yard and occupy the upper yard exclusively. once again Rankin describes him as a pioneer who suffered impaired hearing which made him withdrawn and diffident. Between 1821 and 1835 he launched the Lightening and the Meteor (both to the right, above). Both were Post Office packet boats based at Holyhead "which proved for the first time that steamships could operate in the open sea all year round" (Rankin 2005, p.93). In 1826 he launched the Constitutionen for the Norwegian post office (picture left) - the first steamer to operate in the Norwegian fjords. He held the upper yard until his death and it continued to operate as two separate yards afterwards. The upper yard was renamed Prince's Dry Dock and the lower one became King and Queen Dock.

Packet boats and ships were carriers of people, freight and post. They were designed to be stable in heavy seas and could cover either large or small distances. The requirement for transportation of freight, post and passengers to the US saw the development of routes from London and Liverpool to New York. The importance of the Liverpool route expanded shipping -related activities on the Mersey, offering challenges to other ship building and repair centres. Many European migrants to the U.S. travelled on these packet ships. The requirement for packet ships was a boost to ship builders who had the skills and facilities to meet that requirement. An 1886 article reproduced in the New York times gives a lovely description of the joys of passenger travel on a packet between Liverpool and New York in 1842;

At the period of which I speak the sailing packets which ran between London and New-York, and between Liverpool and that port, were ships of 500 to 600 tons burden. The staterooms--as the little cabins ranged on either side of the saloon were termed--were below the sea level. They were incommodious, dark and ill ventilated. In fact, the only light they enjoyed was that furnished by small pieces of ground glass inserted in the deck overhead, and from the fanlights in the doors opening to the saloon, and this was so poor that the occupants of the staterooms could not even dress themselves without making use of a lamp. The sole ventilation of them was that afforded by the removal of the saloon skylights, which , of course, could only be done in fine weather. The consequence was that the closeness of the atmosphere was in the staterooms was at all times most unpleasant; while the smell of of the bilge water was so offensive as to create nausea, independent of that arising from the motion of the vessel. In the Winter, on the other hand, the cold was frequently severe. There was, it is true, a stove in the saloon, but the heat from it scarcely made itself appreciably felt in the side cabins. In other matters there was the same absence of provision for the comfort of the passengers. The fresh water required for drinking and cooking purposes was carried in casks; and when the ship had a full cargo, many of these were placed on deck, with the result that their contents were sometimes impregnated with salt water from the waves shipped in heavy weather. At all times the water was most unpalatable, it being muddy and filled with various impurities from the old worm-eaten barrels in which it was kept. Not only was the water bad, but the supply occasionally proved inadequate and when the voyage was an unusually long one the necessity would arise of placing the passengers upon short allowance. There was always a cow on board, but there was no milk to be had than what she supplied, no way of preserving it having then been discovered. Canned fruit and vegetables were equally unknown. There was commonly a fair provision of mutton and pork, live sheep and pigs being carried; but of other fresh meat and of fish the stock was generally exhausted by the time the vessel had been a few days at sea, refrigerators at that period not having been invented.

Over the next few years other railway lines were built which connected with the London and Greenwich.

From the 1830s ship breaking began to take over from ship building. Many ships which had been built to fight in the Napoleonic Wars met their end in Rotherhithe. The end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815/16 meant that the skills of shipbuilding and repair were now much less in demand.

Amongst the shipyards which were prominent in the first half of the nineteenth century was John Beatson’s ship yard at Bull Head Wharf (which was renamed Surrey Canal Wharf). It was located near the Youth Hostel and Spice Island/Old Salt Quay where 165 Rotherhithe Street now stands (a modern building). Beatsons purchased warships from the Admiralty for breaking up. Examples include the Treekronen (74 guns) broken up in 1825 the Grampus (5o guns) broken up in 1832 and the Salisbury (58 guns), broken up in 1837, the Charybdis (10 guns) broken in 1843 and the Admiral Rainer, an East Indiaman converted to a prison ship and renamed the Justitia, broken in 1855. They also broke up two of the most remarkable ships that saw action in naval battles: the Bellerapheron and the the Temeraire. The HMS Bellerophon had been built in 1786 and was broken up at Beatson's in 1836. A 74-gun ship, she was built at Frindsbury (River Medway) by a builder named Graves. She was engaged at the battles of The Glorious First of June, the Nile and Trafalgar and was one of the best known ships of the Napoleonic wars. She is now perhaps best know for having held Napoleon a prisoner from July 15^th to August 7^th 1815 before he was handed over to the HMS Northumberland which took him to exile to St Helena. She was converted to a prison ship in 1824 , when she was renamed Captivity, before being broken up in Rotherhithe in 1836. In 1838 the three-decked 98-gun second rate ship of the line HMS Temeraire was purchased for £5530.00 broken up at their yard on Rotherhithe. Built in Chatham in 1798 she had seen action at the Battle of Trafalgar. Like the Bellerophon she had served as a prison ship, and was then used as a receiving ship before being broken up at Rotherhithe. The ship was so famous and such an enormous vessel to travel that far down the Thames that this last voyage attracted crowds of people who gathered to admire and watch her and the event was reported in the London media. She was the largest ship ever to have travelled that far upstream (the biggest ships trusted for construction to private firms were 74-gun ships). She was the subject of Turner’s famous “The Fighting Temeraire”, and even though it seems that many of the details in this painting were incorrect it is still a fabulous testament to a once great ship. Turner may or may not have seen this event, but he certainly captured all the glory and sadness that surrounded her - the unutterable sense of something so magnificent being dragged to a sorry end. I had a copy of the painting hanging on my bedroom wall from when I was sixteen years old. There is a sketch of her by William Beatson at her final resting place at the yard, where she looks really very sad (at the National Maritime Museum) Some of her timbers were used to build altar rails, a communion table and two bishop's chairs which were installed in St Paul's Church off Rotherhithe Street (now destroyed). The table and chairs are in are now in St. Mary's Church, Rotherhithe where they were moved after the Second World War.

The foundations of John Beatson's house at the yard were found in excavations at the site in 2000 (Heard and Goodburn 2000, p.26). It was a Regency style house to the south-west of the wet dock with bow windows and steps leading up to a front porch, the facade of the house facing the wet dock which opened out onto the Thames to the east. Two rooms at the front were separated by stairs going to an upper storey and there were another two rooms at the back. The house had apparently been destroyed by 1894 because it does not appear on the map of that year. Adjoining the house was brick built warehouse which extended to the river. It can be seen, in part, on William Beatson's sketch of the Temeraire. It consisted of four levels each with a large door for unloading commodities. The site plan copied above is published in Heard and Goodburn 2000 (p.29) with the foundations of the house and warehouse clearly shown facing the dock.

Beatsons were also involved in ship repairs and timber imports, with a big storage building on the south side of Rotherhithe Street, opposite their Thames facing operation. In 1839 they sold 4062 sleepers to Taff Vale Railway.

In 1838 Bull Head Dock became a general engineering workshop for the Thames Bank Ironworks.

In the 1840s the victualling yard was used to expand the gasworks and eventually the entire remaining site was sold to form the Surrey Entrance Lock and the Surrey Basin.

In 1840 the first postage stamp was introduced, part of a series of reforms to the postal system which standardized and simplified the formerly expensive and complex process of handling and delivering post.

Humphrey (1997) says that in 1843 the Commercial Dock Company was paying around one fifth of the parish's rates.

One of the most remarkable feats of the early 1800s in London was the design and construction of the Thames Tunnel. In 1842 the Brunel engine house was built and in 1843 the Thames Tunnel opened. The Brunel engine house, now a museum, provided a steam pump to remove water from the Thames Tunnel. It was restored in the late 1970s with a replica of the cast iron chimney added in the early 1990s. The shaft of the Thames Tunnel still survives and when work on the East London Line is completed in 2010 should be opened, once more, for visitors to view in person.

By the mid 1840s there was a clear dichotomy in the shipping activities in Rotherhithe between businesses operating on the Thames fringes of Rotherhithe and those operating in the expanding dock system within the centre of Rotherhithe. Ship builders were building a mixture of wooden, composite and iron ships but ship construction was being gradually replaced by repairs, maintenance and ship breaking. The docks mainly dealt in the handling of commodities - particularly timber and grain.

More from Thursday in the park

2009-11-28T16:17:00.003Z

Opposite Stave Hill pond

Clover at Stave Hill pond

View towards the City from Stave Hill,
with the Michael Rizzello sculpture in the foreground

Downtown pond

Last season nest in the butterfly sanctuary

At the foot of Stave Hill

Yesterday at the Surrey Docks Farm

2009-11-27T07:09:00.002Z

Here are some of the photos from yesterday's visit to the Surrey Docks Farm. As usual, if you want to see a bigger image just click on the photo.

Blue skies and sunshine in late November

2009-11-26T15:39:00.017Z

The clouds threatened rain but the sushine was out and the sky was blue so we kitted up against the wind and headed into the park. Yesterday there had been ambitious talk of walking into town along the Thames Path but that was before the epic chat-athon which finally ended at 3am accompanied by a trail of empty wine bottles. My father only arrived for a visit yesterday but we're both exhausted already!

We took the meandering path that heads from opposite Onega Gate up towards the main green. Most of the leaves have left the trees and been cleared away from the paths and margins. It all looked beautifully well cared for - apart from a burnt out motorbike that had been tossed next to one of the bridges, which I've reported. There wasn't much to see in the way of flowers or insects and even the berries are few and far between but there were some surprising and enjoyable exceptions. A berberis with dark green shiny leaves had produced some richly yellow flowers. The Cotoneaster wilsoni hedge at the end of the Stave Hill walk was a mass of red berries, there were lovely deep blue cornflowers on the chalk patch in the ecological park near the windmill and there were two violets, endearingly pale with delicate petals near the Stave Hill pond. There was nothing much happening at the Stave Hill pond, although the bulrushes look great and the vetch pods promise another great showing for next year.

We had the park almost to ourselves. Apart from a couple of dog walkers and a woman with a pushchair there was simply no-one else to be seen. We saw a single squirrel, a sparrow, a great tit, a couple of magpies, dozens of pigeons and some crows. Apart from that only the ducks and coots were out in force. It is good to see the ponds looking so healthy The Downtown pond had enough water for it to cascade gently into the channel, and the ducks were clearly enjoying it. Globe pond has stayed clear of duck week and there were dozens of mallards and mallard hybrids pootling around in the sun.

After the important job of feeding the ducks at the Downtown and Globe ponds we went to the top of Stave Hill and leaned into the wind, admiring the views in the bright light. Whenever I'm walking through the woodland I get a sense of open walks and spaces but from the top of Stave Hill you can see just why it is referred to as a woodland - the trees seem so dense and appear to extend for miles. Although the leaves have gone the bark still provides a patchwork of different colours.

After a good circuit of the park we headed past the travesty of the Downtown site and over the bridge to the Thames Path and walked the short distance along the river to the Surrey Docks Farm. The light on Canary Wharf and the neighbouring buildings was quite extraordinary and very beautiful.

The Farm itself was nearly empty of people, but the farm animals were terrific - all looking so healthy, happy and full of life. The goats have thick shining coats (I must ask what Kath feeds them - I could do with that sort of a shine myself and L'Oreal Elvive doesn't seem to be doing the trick, whether I'm worth it or not!). The donkeys were munching contentedly in the warmth of their blankets (in Barcelona FC colours, I was pleased to note) and the pigs were as delightful as usual. In all, the farm was as much of a pleasure as usual and we lingered with the pigs for a good long time. The vegetable garden is thriving and the peas are actually in flower. There was one of the biggest cabbages I have ever seen. The farm is advertising free range meat for sale (goat, pork and lamb) which as soon as I have some space in the freezer I shall go and try. I shall post some of the farm photos tomorrow.

It was again nice to see the sculptures which had to be brought just within the farm gates (a few metres from where they were originally located) following the theft of the owl. As one would expect, they continue to be well cared for and none have gone missing.

As we left the Thames Path, intending to do a circuit of South Dock to look at the boats before returning along Greenland Dock to Russell Place the skies opened so we simply hurtled down the side of Greenland Dock arriving home damp but not sodden. I noticed that the pontoon in the inlet to Norway Dock ("The Lakes") has begun to sink. I derived huge amusement earlier in the year from watching a pair of great crested grebes and a pair of coots sharing the pontoon as a nesting site, and I am very sad to see it sinking. I'll try to find out who to report that to and see if it cannot be saved for future nesting activity.

Les Butler's blog

2009-11-11T07:50:00.002Z

If anyone is wondering why the link to Les Butler's wonderful blog of insect life in Stave Hill Ecological Park has been deleted it is because Les has deleted his entire blog for heartfelt personal reasons (see his comment on my previous post).

This means that all the links on this blog to his are now defunct, for which my apologies.

I will miss those wonderful macro-lens photographs very much. Hopefully Les will find a new location to take his photographs in the non too distant future.

Here are a few that he sent me a long time ago, as a reminder of the great work that he was doing even then.

Thanks Les, for all the great photos! I hope that you find a new venue to take and post more great photos and if you do, please send me the web address.

Recovering laurel, the new toad sanctuary and the felled tree stumps

2009-11-09T07:31:00.000Z

More Autumn photos from Saturday

2009-11-08T07:23:00.003Z

More photos from Saturday

2009-11-08T06:35:00.000Z

Autumn colours

2009-11-07T22:06:00.007Z

I've been in Wales for so long that the entire area has changed in my absence. There are more leaves on the floor than in the trees, and everything is orange, yellow and brown with only a few silvers and greens picked out in the sun. It was a lovely day today, cold but clear and full of sun-filled light.

There was a limited range of flowers, which was to be expected, but far fewer berries than I had anticipated. The highlight of the entire walk was the first violet of the season. It was absolutely lovely, its open face completely perfect and fresh.

The cherry laurel next to Downtown pond is already recovering after being cut right back.

The new toad moat and butterfly tower still look absolutely dreadful - crude scars in the ecological park, but the plan is that the harsh borders should be allowed to develop natural vegetation so that toads and newts will be attracted to the water and butterflies to the small mound behind. It seems a shame that the trees immediately adjacent to the moat should have been cut down. The raw stumps look awful and it is seems odd that trees in an ecological park should have to be sacrificed, but as usual I am conscious of my ignorance of the management of this type of environment.

There were lots of birds in the shrubberies, but none visible. A Canada goose, several mallards and some coots and moorhens were pottering around on the ponds, all of which were happily full of water. I saw a single squirrel. Apart from that life was very quiet.

There were very few people around but the sad remains of Guy Fawkes night were evident in the form of an abandoned disposable barbeque and some disposable firework settings. I guess that there will be yet more to clear up after tonight.

Fox cruelty in Rotherhithe

2009-09-22T09:59:00.003+01:00

I've just posted this story on Recent News page the Friends of Russia Dock Woodland website and thought that it might be of interest to other Rotherhithe residents who don't visit that website. It is most unpleasent reading.

I really hate to report on something so horrific, but the facts of the matter do need to be communicated to the public so that we can all keep a sharp eye out on behalf of our local wildlife. Steve Cornish (Chair of the Friends of Russia Dock Woodland) has had the Wildlife Crime Officer down in the Woodlands this week and he agrees that this should be made public information.

Steve rang me last week and told me a terrible story about the torture of a fox in the Russia Dock Woodland. This is not hearsay - it was observed and has been photographed. A fox was found shackled in the undergrowth next to Lavender Pond. Local residents could hear the chain jangling for days on end but couldn't work out where the noise was coming from. Then it must have unshackled itself and was seen by a local resident in her garden with the chain hanging from its leg (the resident took the photo). She then called the Fox Project who contacted their local volunteer. She took four hours to find the fox which was shackled to the ground unable to move and in distress. She stated to the Wildlife Crime Officer that "the other end of the chain was buried into the ground and the earth replaced so that it couldn’t move. They had to dig down deep to remove the chain. The (fox cub vixen) was taken to the Fox Project headquarters in Tonbridge where they managed to save the foxes leg and released it into a woodland in Kent. A good ending to an horrific story.

I haven’t posted the photographs on this page in case children stumble across this page. You can, however, download a photo of the fox chained, with the chain pierced through its Achilles tendon by clicking here. It is not a pretty sight, but it happened and we need to be aware so that we are alert to other situations which might arise.

The recent articles in Southwark News and Sky News have highlighted other problems about foxes being trapped for the purposes of dog fighting. Whilst the dog fighting has not been confirmed independently, the capture of foxes recently has been witnessed. If you see anything that might be a problem please call the RSPCA Cruelty Line Cruelty line: 0300 1234 999.

Village Choice - a Financial Times article about the benefits of living in Rotherhithe

2009-09-21T10:53:00.001+01:00

Financial Times (Jenny Wiggins)

This is a bit late (the article was published in the FT on July 18th) but I didn’t post about it then and it is still very much of interest. Here’s a short extract but see the above page for the full story which took up three quarters of a full FT page:

“One of the joys of moving to a new city is that you have no ingrained prejudices about where to live. You can settle in a neighbourhood simply because it is likable, not because it is close to family or friends or because of the social signals the choice sends out.

On moving to London four years ago I landed in a temporary flat chosen by my employers in an unfashionable neighbourhood named Rotherhithe on the south bank of the Thames. I spent several frustrating weekends travelling west, north and south searching for a permanent home before a radical thought struck me. What was wrong with staying put?

Located in a crook of the river between Bermondsey and Deptford in the borough of Southwark, Rotherhithe has an illustrious history, mostly due to its seafaring connections. It was once known as Redriff, which, according to historian Peter Ackroyd, might refer either to “red reef” or derive from redhra, the Saxon word for sailor, and hythe, for haven. “In that case it has been connected with sailors and shipping for more than a thousand years,” he writes in his book Thames: Sacred River.

The area was one of the departure points for the Mayflower in 1620 as the Pilgrim Fathers sailed off to begin new lives in the New World and three of the ship’s four owners are buried on the site of the first local church, St Mary’s.

During the second world war much of Rotherhithe was bombed and destroyed and, after its docks were closed in the 1960s and 1970s, extensive rebuilding by the Docklands Development Corporation left it riddled with bland brick houses and apartment blocks. But hasty development has not erased all traces of its charm. Although I ended up settling in Bermondsey and have now lived in London long enough to have visited many of its nicest neighbourhoods, I think parts of Rotherhithe hold a genuine village atmosphere that is hard to find elsewhere in the capital.

While much of the Thames’s southern bank swarms on weekends with non-locals visiting the London Eye and Royal Festival Hall, shopping for food at Borough Market and dining at the restaurants that sit in the shadow of Tower Bridge, Rotherhithe remains very much a hidden treasure.”

See the above page for the full story.

With photos, a map and details of local estate agents. Financial Times, July 18/19 2009, House and Home section, p. 2.

September in the Russia Dock Woodland and Stave Hill Eco Park

2009-09-12T11:08:00.008+01:00

I spent most of August and the first week of September in Wales so I've not had much chance to visit the Woodland and Ecological Park. It was great to see the photographs and news reports in Southwark News and elsewhere of the Green Flag ceremony, during which a new noticeboard was established and our own Green Flag was raised on its flagpole next to the St John's bridge, by the green. A lot of work has been carried out in the woodland by volunteers including the Orange RockCorp. But I was sad to see Les Butler's report on some of the areas which are apparently suffering neglect.

I have missed so much of the local park this year, but I was very startled to realize that autumn was underway again. It seems like only five minutes ago that I was taking far too many photographs of beatifully coloured leaves against the grass. This year has vanished in the blink of an eye.

It was good to see the donkeys from the Surrey Docks Farm being exercised in the Woodland and the Eco Park. They looked very content.

Green Flag status

2009-08-20T08:33:00.002+01:00

In the process of dashing between London and Wales I completely forgot to post that the Russia Dock Woodland has been awarded Green Flag status. We are really terribly pleased!

Here's the news update that I put on the Friends of RDW website, penned by Chairman Steve Cornish:

We are pleased to announce that Russia Dock Woodland was successful in its bid to be awarded Green Flag Status this week. The woodlands was officially awarded this coveted honour on the 23rd of this month at the awards ceremony in Bournemouth.

This is all due to the combined hard work and commitment of Southwark Councils Parks Dept, the Friends of Russia Dock Woodland group, Stave Hill Ecological Park (managed by the Trust for Urban Ecology), Quadron services, and of course the general public.

The Friends of Russia Dock Woodland is in its sixth year. Many woodlands users will remember back in the early days when the ponds were bone dry with no natural water supply. Now instead of bed spreads, bike frames and Tesco supermarket trolleys in the ponds, we have, fish, turtles, frogs, toads, newts, which attract the kingfishers, herons, and bats. This is all due to the refurbishment of the wind turbine back in 2003 which now pumps fresh underground water from the Aquifer 200 feet below Rotherhithe.

There are well over 100 bird and bat boxes in the woodlands that have been made and erected by the pupils of bacons school.

Plus as reported in the Southwark news over the last three years all the five footbridges throughout the woodlands have now been named after the five junior schools on the peninsula - Redriff, Peter Hillls, Alfred Salter, Albion Street, and St Johns. All these school's have made their own sculptures with the help and guidance of Kevin Boys the local surrey docks farm blacksmith.

We now have hundreds of new visitors to the woodlands every week which we feel is simply because it is a place of tranquillity where the wildlife comes first and people can relax with their families.

A bit of off-topic silliness

2009-08-18T07:32:00.001+01:00

Someone pointed out an Internet project to me which is so daft that it made me a) smile and b) contribute. Just for fun here are my contributions to the website onemilliongiraffes.com

http://www.onemilliongiraffes.com/

In the final one on this page (actually the first one I sketched) I forgot to give the poor sod ears in the version that I submitted to the onemilliongiraffes website! I added them later.

More from August 15th 2009

2009-08-17T07:27:00.003+01:00

Elder

Fennel plant, butterfly sanctuary

Blackberries by the punnet-load!
My neighbours have already made blackberry jelly with some of them.

Yellow flag pods. These are fabulous when they
break open and you can see the huge chestnut coloured seeds inside.

Great Willowherb

Grebes on Greenland Dock

2009-08-16T07:23:00.000+01:00

The Grebes are still on the pontoon at the inlet to The Lakes (Norway Dock). One was tending the disgraceful nest, while the other was taking the adolescent out for a quick tour. The coots were out and about two, with three adolescent chicks, all making the most amazing din.

Wales Yo-Yo

2009-08-15T19:10:00.007+01:00

I've been back in London for a few days but I'm off again tomorrow. I managed to fit in a quick trip to the Russia Dock Woodland and the ecological park today between sorting out ironing, packing and checking that everything is in place for friend who will be staying in my absence. I'm off the the Cader Idris area for some serious walking. I bet it rains! It always rains in Wales :-) But the waterproofs are packed ready.

Here are some of today's snaps. I managed to go out in the only hour or so when there was almost no sunshine!

I have a new camera/lens combination so I was eager to see how it worked out and I am much happier with the new setup. I'll see how it works out in Wales! If you want to see a bigger version of any image just click on the photo.

I came back via the Surrey Docks Farm, which was busy with lots of parents and children around the place. It is great to see that the sculptures which used to be just outside the farm have now been brought within the Thames Path gates and look absolutely excellent. I didn't take any photos because they were covered in children at the time, but they really fit in perfectly.

I've set up the blog to post some more of the pics from today automatically over the next couple of days.

Sanfoin

Ladybird or Harlequin, I'm not sure which although I suspect the latter

I need to look this one up. It was prolific in the wet areas of the
Downtown Pond, just to the side of the bridge

Teasel

Bright colours in the Butterfly Sanctuary

Sanfoin again.
I just love the markings on the petals.

Flowers from Sunday 12th

2009-07-16T08:33:00.006+01:00

Budleia globosa

Yellow Loosestrife
Lysimachia vulgaris
Primulaceae
Perennial

Great willowherb
Epilobium hirsutum
Onagraceae
Perennial

Fennel
Foeniculum vulgare
Apiaceae
Perennial

Scabious
Still working on which one

More photos from Sunday 12th

2009-07-15T08:06:00.003+01:00

Purple Loosestrife
Lythrum salicaria
Lythraceae
Perennial

Viper's Bugloss
Echium vulgare
Boraginaceae
Biennial

Greater Knapweed
Centaurea scabiosa
Asteraceae
Perennial

Meadowsweet
Filipendula ulmaria
Rosaceae
Perennial

Creeping Cinquefoil
Potentialla reptans
Rosaceae
Perennial

The seed pods of Garlic Mustard
Alliaria petiolata

More insects from Sunday

2009-07-14T07:56:00.004+01:00

Gatekeeper butterfly Pyronia tihonus on Tansy (Tanacetum vulgare)

Gatekeeper butterfly Pyronia tihonus

Six spot burnet on a vetch (Vicia) flower
Zygaena filipundulae

For some stunning photographs of the Burnets see
Les's most recent post. Lovely!

Six spot burnet
Zygaena filipundulae

The remains of a Burnet's pupae

Some of the insects from yesterday

2009-07-13T07:20:00.006+01:00

Six Spot Burnets
Zygaena filipendulae
Day-flying moths. They look amazing in flight.
There were dozens of them in the area behind the windmill

Throughout the Woodland and Stave Hill Ecological Park these flowers,
Common Ragwort (Senecio jacobaea), were covered with the same type of caterpillars.
They look like the larvae of the Cinnabar Moth (Tyria jacobaeae), which will be
one to look out for later in the year.
Senecio means an old man, and refers to the grey hairy seed pappus. I believe
that the jacobaea part refers to St James, but I have no idea why!

As above

Thanks to Les's blog I was able to identify this pretty little thing as
a male Large Skipper butterfly (Ochlodes venatus)

This is a very blurred photo but I am guessing that it is the
female of the same species, on the basis of photos in my insect books.

A month and a half later and things have changed

2009-07-12T15:42:00.014+01:00

The last time I was in the Woodland and Ecological Park was six weeks ago. It seems amazing that life could have been so crazy that I simply didn't manage to cross the road at some point. I suppose that the upside of missing so much of the parks in the summer is that I saw an awful lot of the north Welsh scenery, which has been marvellous.

Les's blog has continued to be a complete marvel. Every time I look at his blog I think that I really ought to take out my macro lens, although I'm not convinced that I could get the same stunning results. Today I had the 24-85mm lens because I wasn't sure what I was going to find when I got there, and that seemed like the most versatile. I was there at 1420 and stayed for well over an hour, with the sun alternately bright and hot, or hidden behind the passing clouds. The Woodland was full of people, with lots of people sunbathing around the green, walking along the paths and feeding the ducks. It was a nice atmosphere.

There has been a lot of change! No more roses or yellow flag irises, and all the white garlic mustard and purple honesty have gone to seed, producing short forests of green disks. There is a riot of colours from newly flowering plants - yellows, pinks, blues, whites and purples.

I was overjoyed to hear the grasshoppers that I've been seeing in Les's photographs. They really do provide a song for the summer. The insect life was out in force. A 6-spot burnet flew straight into my face, which startled me so much that I nearly bottled out of approaching them with the camera, but in the end I took several photos. The only butterflies that I saw were gatekeepers but there were lots of these. A mystery butterfly or moth needs Les's experienced eye to judge, but it looked most attractive sitting on a long leaf overhanging the Stave Hill pond, with a bright blue damselfly hovering immediately below - I'll post a photo of it tomorrow.

I saw very little in the way of animal or bird life. No foxes or squirrels were visible. There were lots of mallards, a few coots and a single heron on Globe Pond.

It is nice to see the foliage recovering in key areas of Stave Hill Ecological Park. The butterfly sanctuary is recovering nicely, the areas in front of and behind the windmill proved to be excellent for flower and insect spotting. There's a new area in the ecological park behind the ivy wall, which has been dug out and now contains water. There is also a stone marker of some sort on the top of the mound which sits above it. I have no idea what that is all about. The mound and has been fenced off now, and the path diverted around it. There were no radical changes to the Russia Dock Woodland but it was nice to see that all the ponds were full of water and that all the water plants are thriving fabulously.

There will be more photographs from today during the week to come.

More re Deptford - Albury Street

2009-06-26T09:16:00.005+01:00

I've been away in north Wales excavating or, as my father puts it "digging holes in Anglesey" with the Anglesey Rock Art Project, so apologies for the lack of posts recently.

Others have been keeping busy locally including Les Butler and his wonderful Walks With My Camera Blog and Caroline on her Caroline's Miscellany blog.

A recent post of Caroline's looks at Albury Street, one of the revelations from the Deptford walking tour that we were both on a couple of weeks ago. Here's a short extract from her post:

Albury Street was originally Union Street, a name commemorating the union of England and Scotland in 1707. While the south side of the road has been rebuilt with modern homes, the north still has its terrace of wonderful eighteenth-century houses. As a thriving dockyard town, Deptford needed homes for all classes and while labourers might live in wooden cottages, shipbuilders and naval officers wanted something more upmarket. Thus local bricklayer Thomas Lucas built the Union Street homes from 1706; he also built St Paul's Church on the High Street.

See the above link for the complete post, with photographs.

Unlikely nesting companions

2009-06-08T12:35:00.004+01:00

I mentioned a several days ago that on Greenland Dock, where the former entrance to Norway Dock forms an inlet under the Norway Swing Bridge, a litter-covered pontoon is being shared by a pair of coots and a pair of grebes. On the way back from the Deptford guided walk yesterday (see post below) I got off the 199 bus just outside South Dock and walked past the boats until I reached the inlet.

Sure enough the couples are still sharing accomodation. In the top photo you can see the coot, at the top centre of the photograph on her tall nest. If you look carefully you can just make out a flash of colour to the far right of the photo, about half way down, which is one of the grebes (easier to see if you click on the photo to enlarge it).

In the second photo you can see the grebes who have nested precariously and unimpressively on the edge of the pontoon just below the coot's reed tower. Both sets of parents have been making use of all the litter to line their nests.

A great day with Sovereigns, Sailors, Shipwrights and Skulls

2009-06-07T17:14:00.054+01:00

What a great day!

We were lucky with the weather. It was completely dry - not a rain drop in sight. And we even had some sunshine! Given that this followed a night of torrential rain and thunderstorms and was followed by yet more torrential rain from around 6pm onwards and I consider it a minor miracle that we didn't get soaked.

We congregated at the foot of Deptford Bridge DLR station where the remains of a former gin distillery are still in evidence.

Please also see the comment added to this post, with some corrections and additional information.

Jackie Stater is an excellent guide, with a good clear speaking voice, a head full of fascinating knowledge and a welcome sense of humour. Her guided tour of Deptford showed a number of sides of the place of which I was simply unaware and I now understand why Deptford inhabitants become so fed up with people being so negative about it. Jackie is a Blue Badge Guide who has done tours in Greenwich and other areas of London.

A quite unexpected upside was meeting up with some people who are part of a mutual local web world, all of us with different types of web presences. It was particularly great to catch up at long last with Caroline who originally brought this walk to my attention - we have been exchanging odds and ends of chat for ages now. But local people were not the only ones in attendance - tow of the party had come from much further afield.

Being a guided walk, our tour was organized on a geographical basis, but on this page I've taken Jackie's key themes and organized them chronologically, to form something of a narrative.

The name Deptford means "ford over the creek". The creek concerned is the River Ravensbourne (a rather unprepossessing entity which passes Deptford Bridge DLR station in a concrete culvert). The river is a Thames tributary and is known as the Deptford Creek in its tidal section, becoming a river for its non-tidal part.

What we now think of as Deptford was two different settlements - Deptford Town and Deptford Strand (sometimes written Strond). Deptford Strand is probably the older of the two areas in terms of continuous habitation, located along the Thames and the centre of the ship building industry. Deptford Town is the area now covered by modern Deptford High Street.

The Romans

There is plenty of archaeological evidence for the Romans having passed through Southwark. As Jackie pointed out, if Watling Street, roughly following the current line of the A2, were to pass over the creek a bridge would have been required. The earliest record for a bridge dates to 1345 but apparently archaeological data suggests an earlier date, which is not unexpected.

The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

Small communities were dotted throughout these areas during the Medieval period are well documented.

At the church of St Nicholas tt is thought that the west tower, built of ragstone and not, as the more recent parts of the building, of brick, may date back to the fourteenth century at least as far as the small south window. The tower that extens above the small window may haev been a 17th century restoration.

The church would have been a big local landmark, becoming more important as the Deptford Strand community expanded and the ship building industry, with its associated trades and supply requirements, evolved over the decades.

Henry VIII and Elizabeth I

The troublesome sovereign established the Deptford Royal Docks here in the 16th century, and Deptford was suddenly very much on the map. We went and stood next to a road sign which said "The Stowage" and Jackie joked that she had brought us all the way from Deptford Bridge to look at a road sign! But history is embedded in strange places, and in this case a road name was an indicator of a piece of important history in Deptford Strand. Jackie explained how The Stowage is where two institutions originate.

The first was Trinity House which was established by Henry VIII in either 1513 or 1514. The Guild of Master Mariners was based here lead by Thomas Spurt. The role of Trinity House was to train mariners but their scope expanded to include dredging the river, issuing licenses to river pilots and also to allocate buoys, lighthouses and other river markers. It was also responsible for almshouses which were once located behind the area where our group were standing by the road sign. Masters from Trinity House were regular visitors to the adjacent St Nicholas Church and then went to visit the almshouse residents. The almshouses remained there until 1877 but were demolished. Jackie says that etchings and paintings of them survive, which will be worth hunting down. Trinity House survives but moved in 1660 to the Watergate Street in the City and in the 18th Century to its present location by Tower Hill tube station.

The second establishment of note for this location was that of the East India Company. They were given a charter by Elizabeth I to trade with the East Indies. They had both a shipyard and warehouses here. They remained here until the 18th Century but then moved later.

On a more trivial front, Francis Drake was knighted here by Elizabeth I while his ship, The Golden Hynde, was moored here. The ship was eventually left here, moored up on the Thames at Deptford, and disintegrated here. A sorry end for a strong ship, but it was the traditional way for breaking a ship in the area. There is a replica today in dry dock near Southwark Cathedral.

Deptford was clearly a very lively place during the time of Shakespeare. It was still a thriving ship building centre and was home to all sorts of people both permanent and transient. It was here that Christopher Marlowe, a brilliant poet and playwright, met an untimely and unfortunate end. There are all sorts of stories surrounding his death and some of these are connected with a well-known idea that he may have been an Elizabethan spy. He is thought to have been buried in the Churchyard of St Nicholas but this has now been lost. A commemorative plaque has been erected on the eastern wall of the churchyard (apologies that my photograph is slightly out of focus).

The Seventeenth Century

Deptford in the Seventeenth Century is probably best known for the famous diarist John Evelyn and the visit of Tsar Peter the Great. John Evelyn's diaries are fascinating to read because he lived through both Oliver Cromwell and Charles I, saw the Fire of London and experienced London during the plague, but he was also a great horticulturalist, an intellectual, and a prominent contributor to the court of the day. Jackie gave us a fascinating fact - Evelyn highlighted the problem with the shortage of timber which was about to consume the ship building industry. he encouraged landowners with great parks to restock with suitable timber. It is thought this had a direct impact on the fact that there were enough ships for the Napoleonic wars. He established wonderful gardens at his wife's semi-rural estate of Sayes Court in Deptford, importing plants from abroad to make it a real landmark garden of its day. Now there are few remains of the estate recognizable.

Tsar Peter I of Russia, Peter The Great, came to stay at Sayes Court when he traveled to the ship yards of Deptford. Russia had no navy and therefore had none of the skills that were required - including ship building, navigation and general seafaring. As Russia needed a navy these skills needed to be acquired and with the permission of William III Peter came to England and intended to stay in Deptford for two to three years - a remarkable thing because no Tsar had left Russia in peacetime for over 100 years. Peter apparently worked in the dockyards himself, gaining hands-on experience. He was unable to stay Jackie explained that he was hoping to travel incognito but that with a retinue of 250 people and being 6ft 7ins tall he stood out more than somewhat. Although he was here on a serious mission to learn a trade, he was only 25 years old and something of a party animal, enjoying wine, women and riotous behaviour. One of the funniest accounts in Evelyn's diary is his disgusted account of the wheelbarrow races held in his beloved gardens. The damage was appalling and cost a fortune to repair. On the east side of Deptord High Street, above what is now a charity shop, there is a plaque that commemorates a former Quaker place of worship where Peter The Great was thought to have worshipped. In the event he was only able to stay here for four months but he took back a large team of specialists from England who helped him to form an efficient Russian navy.

Two ship building families stand out at this time in the ship building world, named Pett and Shish. The Pett family are first recorded in the reign of Edward VI in the late 1500s but continuing into the early 1600s. The Shish family are first known from the latter 1600s but continue into the 1700s. Between them they dominated the local shipyards. The Petts had extensive woodlands in Kent for their ship building activities - now known as Pettswood. Upriver of the docks remains all that is left of the Shipwright's house, which Jackie says is best seen from the river. It was rebuilt in the seventeenth century when it became rather endearingly known as the "Shipwright's Palace". The Shish family were the subject of one of a disapproving comment by Samuel Pepys - he referred to one of them as low, illiterate and overly pious - apparently he knelt in his own coffin for his night-time prayers!

There is a plaque on the north wall of the St Nicholas churchyard to John Addey who was a master shipwright at the Royal shipyard and a local benefactor (1550-16 April 1606).

In 1697 the Church of St Nicholas we rebuilt in red brick by C. Stanton but not much of the original construction survives today due to damage inflicted in the Second World War.

The charnel house at the Church of St Nicholas dates to the late 17th and early 18th centuries. it is an inoffensive looking building, more like a large brick-built shed than a mausoleum. Burials had to be made on consecrated ground, which meant churchyards, but these had limited space. The solution was to exhume older burials to make way for new ones. But the bones of the older burials still needed to be kept on consecrated grounds so they were stored in buildings called charnel houses, of which this is one. At St Nicholas it is surrounded by a beautifully perfumed rose garden. It once had a Grinling Gibbons carving set up over the door, and this is now sensibly kept inside the church itself. It depicts the Vision of Ezekiel and shows the prophet by the Valley of the Dry Bones, which as Jackie said is rather appropriate for the context. It is told that John Evelyn discovered Gibbons, who became a renowned master wood carver. The church was closed but Jackie told us that other examples of his work can be seen on the inside of the church (open Weds to Sat 9.30am - 12.30pm).

The Eighteenth Century

Albury Street was built in 1707 and was the work of Sir Thomas Lucas who also did work on St Paul's. These buildings were designed for well off shipwrights and other skilled workers. Although there are modern buildings on the south side of the street, the wonderful houses on the northern side used to flank both sides of the street. Albury Street was former Union Street, named for the recent union with Scotland. The buildings are wonderful in their own right but the most remarkable features of each are the carved porches. Sadly many are copies. Following the decision to list the decaying buildings to preserve them the former London County Council took many of the valuable furnishings and store them until after redevelopment. Tragically many of these stored features were stolen from storage (sounds very like the Cairo Museum!) and many of the present examples are copies or features taken from elsewhere. As Jackie pointed out, this side of the street is a reminder of the former prosperity of the area including St Paul's. Apparently Deptford Church Street, now a ghastly dual carriageway, was an elegant shopping street.

The church of St Paul's is one of the surprising jewels of Deptford and is listed in England's Thousand Best Churches by Simon Jenkins. It dates to 1723 and is one of 50 new churches financed during the reign of Queen Anne under the 1711 act to meet the needs of an expanding population into areas which were semi-rural and only lightly populated. Churches were required by people moving into new areas so they were built to attract new residents to new homes. St Paul's was the design of architect Thomas Archer who was also responsible for St John's in Smith Square, London (well worth a visit). It is a truly remarkable structure, owing much to the Roman Baroque, with pedimented porticos, a tall tower over a massive portico which includes a semi circle of columns over a semicircular staircase leading to the front door. The interior was not open when I went back to look at it later, but it is apparently spectacular, with the original pews and galleries in tact.

At St Nicholas there were yet more things going on. The small tower at the east end of the building, with its tiny green domed roof, is thought to date to the 18th century and was an addition to the original design. The wonderful stone skulls which surmount the gate posts at the eastern end of the churchyard probably date to this period. Jackie pointed out that as well as being a reminder of our mortality the laurel leaves that surmount the skulls are a symbol of renewal. It has been suggested that they were the inspiration for the pirate skull-and-crossbones flag but who knows? A nice thought. Jackie also pointed out that on either side of the gateposts at the east end of the churchyard there are three golden balls, each arranged in a pyramid. This is because as well as being the patron saint of sailors, St Nicholas was the patron saint of pawnbrokers - as well as being the St Nicholas we know as Santa Claus. St Nicholas was a 4th Century Bishop living Asia Minor. The three balls of the pawnbrokers are supposed to derive from the fact that late one night he threw three bags of gold into a house in order to save save the three girls within from a career in prostitution, a destiny ensured by the extreme poverty that prevented them acquiring husbands through lack of dowry. There are other versions of the story, needless to say.

The growth of industry

Deptford contains many echoes of the old industries which occupied the areas bordering the creek, and which Jackie says gave the area the name "Dirty Deptford" because of the nature of the industries that grew up here - beer brewing, a gin distillery (founded 1770) flour mills (for example the Mumford Mills founded in 1790, the paintwork of which is still visible on the now-converted building). Jackie explained how gin had become such a problem. Water being hazardous to the health the main public drink was beer. When gin became available it was untaxed and inexpensive but was consumed in the same quantities as beer - and by being so much more potent had a much greater impact on the public, as depicted so memorably in Hogarth's sketches and paintings.

London's first railway

We turned briefly off Creekside to walk onto the blue footbridge that crosses the Creek. The original footbridge was built in the 1830s and was known as the Ha'penny Hatch because there was a halfpenny toll to cross it. The one we were standing on is a modern replacement. It sits parallel to the railway, which runs along a brick-built viaduct.

The railway was first built in 1836 and was London's first railway line, extending from Bermondsey Spa Road to Deptford. It was a magnificent feat of engineering, the largest brick structure anywhere in the world with 878 arches made of 19 million bricks. The viaduct was necessary to prevent the need for dozens of roadway crossings and to avoid the marshy land of Bermondsey, southern Rotherhithe and Deptford. By December of the same year the railway was extended from Bermondsey to London Bridge, and the modern section of the viaduct that leads into London Bridge is original.

The extension to Greenwich to the east followed 2 years later. In 1878 it was extended even further to the west. The delay was due to the issue of how to get the line through the middle of Greenwich park. Local residents were up in arms about it but the final blow was perhaps dealt by the Astronomers Royal who said that vibrations from the trains would cause errors in their calculations. In the end it was decided to tunnel beneath the park. 120 trains a day operated on this line, which is remarkable. Apparently there was a plan to enable horse drawn carriages to go up onto trains, and there is a ramp at Deptford Station, if you know where to look, to accommodate this plan. Sadly it was not considered to be commercially viable and never happened.

The railway arches were intended to be developed as homes for those displaced by the building of the railway line. Jackie showed us drawings of the show houses and they looked quite lovely. Apparently they were state of the art with gas cookers, lighting and heating - but they were never built because not only did they leak but the noise from the 120 daily trains was intolerable! But they were used for businesses of the day, mainly rag and bone men who Jackie says were still around in the early 1980s.

Through the railway arch one can see a view up the Creek towards the remarkable multi-coloured Laban building.

The huge scaffolding type frame above the railway is the derelict remnant of a lifting mechanism which lifted the railway track so that tall boats could pass down the Creek. The current road bridge that extends from Deptford to Greenwich can still be lifted when required for the same purpose.

In 1889 the Ferranti Power Station was built. Photographs of Greenwich Reach from this period always show a power station in the background. this was the Ferranti Power Station, the first high-pressure high voltage electricity power stations in England. it was named for Sebastian de Ferranti who was a pioneer of electricity production and was the chief engineer at the London Electric Supply Corporation. The power station increased the capacity of electricity generation in London and powered much of the west end of London. It went out of use in 1957, the main power station was destroyed in the 1960s and the associated buildings were demolished in 1992.

The early 1900s

At the end of our walk Jackie told us the a piece of history associated with 34 Deptford High Street. It is a landmark in the history of forensic evidence. In 1905 shopkeeper Thomas Farrow and his wife Anne were murdered. Their killers were tracked down by the newly developed science of fingerprinting. The Stratton brothers were the first people to be convicted of murder by fingerprint testing in the UK. Alfred Stratton had left his thumb print on the cashbox of the shop.

Macmillan Street, and the Rachel Macmillan Nursery in that street, were named for a socialist reformer of infant education.

Sisters Margaret and Rachel Macmillan were instrumental in the passing of the 1906 Provision of School Meals Act in order to promote health as a contributor to education in children. In 1910 a clinic to promote health for impoverished children was established in Deptford, serving local schools. Later infant schools were established in which the training of teachers for infant aged children was a primary consideration. Rachel, pictured left, died in 1917 but her sister Margaret continued with their work and published two books on nursery education.

WW2

Although Rotherhithe took the brunt of the wartime damage in the immediate area Deptford was not unscathed. The Church of St Nicholas was almost entirely destroyed by bombing and what survived was further damaged by local kids who used the ruins as an unofficial playground. Shades of The World My Wilderness! It was rebuilt after the war by T F Ford & Partners in 1958, and the brick built building is mostly part of that reconstruction.

Modern Deptford

As industry moved out of the area, many of its premises were converted to housing (either demolished to do so, or with original buildings converted) or taken over by artist communites. Jackie told us that the February 2001 edition of Italian Vogue "discovered" Deptford a few years ago, describing it as the new Monmartre. Not inapproriate in many ways because when Montmartre in Paris was a centre for impoverished artists it was not unalike Deptford. In deptford the abandoned industrial buildings had large floor spaces with big windows which let in lots of light. They were cheap, and there was cheap accomodation in the vicinity. This allowed the growth of art and craft collectives which are very much in evidence today. The New York Times simialry suggsted that Deptford was the "real" London, where visitors could come to eat in the pie-and-mash shops which are lost in other areas, and where independent stores and ethnic variety lived in harmony with the artists. There's a short article on the subject on the This Is London website and another on The Times website, which quotes the New York Times article.

The Birds Nest public house on Deptford Church Street once had a theatre incorporated into it. It has a somewhat tatty exterior but Jackie told us that while today it is a good and inexpensive hostel for backpackers but still has theatre in the round and highly rated musical performances that have put it at the centre of Deptford's revival as an edgy cultural centre. If it has a website I couldn't find it.

On Creekside the APT Gallery, which stands for Art in Perpetuity Trust, is a co-operative which looks very inviting and is open to the public from Thursday to Sunday 12noon to 5pm. Examples from their current exhibition can be found here.

Further up Creekside we passed Cockpit Arts - a modern building which looked 60s to me, built on the site of former industrial buildings. Over 100 artists work there producing mainly craft works and working with big retail groups. Most of the artists are young and highly innovative. A mural painted on the outside of the building shows various aspects of Deptford life and was featured on a Dire Straits album.

Passing up the Creekside towards the Laban contemporary dance academy we passed the Ferranti Park, a modern and lovely children's play park which was named for Sebastian de Ferranti, of whom more later.

The Laban contemporary dance academy is an extraordinary building, designed by the same architects, Herzog and de Meuron, responsible for Beijing National Stadium designed for the 2008 Olympics and the conversion of a power station into the Tate Modern. Even the surrounding landscape is wonderful with an angular amphitheatre made of grass steps and a wonderful artificial grass topography which everyone can explore and enjoy. There are performances open to the public at the centre.

The Creekside Centre which looks to improve local environment and ecology. It is approached through wonderfully designed metal gates designed by APT Studio sculptor Heather Burrell, more of whose work can be seen on a dedicated page on the APT website here. Remember the Leaf Cycle in the middle of Rotherhithe Tunnel roundabout? That is one of Heather Burrell's. Surrounding the wooden building, which is the heart of the centre, there is display of things pulled out of the Creek itself. Walks are organized to go and clear the creek and view the Creek at close quarters. The land occupied by the centre is the former railway gasworks which illuminated 200 lamps along the railway line.

The modern Deptford High Street is rather different from the elegant shops which would have lined Deptford Church Street in its more prosperous ship buildng times, but it is still a subject of fascination if you look hard enough. Not only are the buildings above shop level still often very attractive, but the shops themselves are interesting. Nearly all the stores on the High Street are independent retailers. A Peacock's at one end and two Cost Cutters are probably the only chain stores present. As to the rest - fascinating fishmongers, butchers and exotic vegetable shops are worth a viewing in their own right. And there's a terrific market on a Saturday.

The most obvious sign of late Twentieth Century developments in the area in the 1990s are the modern buildings of Lewisham College and the DLR extension. The Deptford Church Street branch of Lewisham College was probably built during the early 90s. The DLR extension passes from north of the river, through Deptford and heads out to Lewisham. It seems amazing to me that it opened as long ago as 1999, which was ahead of schedule.

The building programmes that mark today are housing projects. Housing is going up like nothing I could have imagined when I came to live in Rotherhithe in the mid 80s. It began even before Britian won the Olympic contract, but it has been expanding at a rare rate ever since. Obviously most of the investment has gone into developing the Thames-side land between Rotherhithe and Greenwich, but the investment in new homes will hopefully benefit Deptford and its uniqueness rather than undermining it.

Last lot from 29th May 2009

2009-06-05T12:42:00.007+01:00

Sunlight through the woodland
Russia Dock Woodland

Water-cress in Stave Hill pond
Rorippa naturtium-aquaticum
Brassicaceae
Perennial

Male mallard on lower Downtown Pond

Dog Rose
Rosa canina
Rosaceae
Perennial

Another lot from 29th May

2009-06-04T11:11:00.000+01:00

. . .

Downtown Pond (lower)
Yellow flag and reeds

Wonderful to see the water levels so healthy!

Cut-leaved cranesbill
Geranium dissectum
Geraniaceae
Annual

Magpie (Pica pica) at Downtown Pond
with Yellow Flag in the background

Curled Dock
Rumex acetosella
Polygonaceae
Perennial

A bee enjoying the Budleia globosa in the butterfly sanctuary
. . .

Sovereigns, Sailors, Shipwrights and Skulls: Diving into Deptford

2009-06-04T08:37:00.005+01:00

Thanks to Caroline of the Caroline's Miscellany blog for posting about a guided walk in Deptford. It runs for over two hours so there should be plenty to see and learn. It takes place on Sunday the 7th June and is called Sovereigns, Sailors, Shipwrights and Skulls: Diving into Deptford. It is run by qualified Bluge Badge Guide Jackie Stater. Details for meeting are shown on the walk's web page. Meet at the appointed place and pay £7.50 for the guided tour. No booking necessary.

No prizes for guessing what I'll be up to on Sunday afternoon! What little I know of Deptford, mainly through John Evelyn's diary, indicates that it has a fascinating past.

It is one of lots of events featured on the Story of London website operated by the London City Hall website (amongst many other London walks). The best way to find walks in your area is to use the website's postcode search facility.

Caroline has also posted about the Ian Visits website, which has a dedicated London events page. More fascinating stuff!! You can even sign up to a free email newsletter about upcoming events,

May 29th - insect fest, butterfly sanctuary

2009-06-02T20:39:00.002+01:00

The last three of these photographs show moths which were landing on vetch and birdsfoot trefoil, but I haven't narrowed them down yet. As usual with that wretched telephoto lens they are rather blurred, in spite of being sharpened in Photoshop. If anyone has any suggestions they will be very welcome!

More from 29th May

2009-06-01T08:06:00.002+01:00

Variable Reed Beetle ??
Plateumaris sericea

Tufted Vetch
Vicia cracca
Leguminosae
Annual

Red Clover
Trifolium pratense
Leguminosae
Perennial

Field Mouse-Ear
Cerastium arvense
Caryophyllaceae
Annual

Vetch - but not sure which one at the moment

More from the 29th May 2009

2009-05-30T07:34:00.001+01:00

Painted Lady
Vanessa cardui

Resident in north Africa and southern Europe
A summer visitor to northern Europe, some returning to the Mediterranean in early autumn
Prefers nectar from thistle (its larval foodplant) and knapweed

I have a photograph of a Painted Lady sitting on my watch in one of the most barren
areas of the eastern Sahara desert, drinking water from my wrist. Remarkable.

Elder
Sambucus nigra

Caprifoliaceae

Sanfoin
Onobrychis vicifolia
Leguminosae
Perennial

I am fairly confident that this is an Oedemera beetle- perhaps nobilis?
It fits the description in my books for the male of the specis.

Bittersweet
Solanum dulcamara
Solanaceae
Perennial

Poisonous!

End of May

2009-05-29T18:25:00.006+01:00

Back from Wales, which was very beautiful in a very intense way. I have never seen growth like it in all the years that my family have lived there.

I went over the road on May 29th and found that the vegetation is growing in a very healthy and happy way. Everything is very green, and the damp areas are enjoying a particularly rich time.

The first thing that I noticed as I crossed to the winding path was the squishing of cherries underfoot. When I looked up I startled multiple birds of diferent species who all took to the wing leaving me staring at cherries of different ripeness and colours overhead.

The hawthorn is now over but elder is everywhere, it stiny white flowers clustering together in big flat rounded disks. Wild roses are distributed throughout both the woodland and ecological park, some of them beautifully perfumed. Willow fluff is falling like snow, coating everhting and floating like dust on ponds and channels. The honesty and garlic mustard flowers are over, as are most of the red and white nettles. The yellow flag is having a party and the reeds are growing beautifully. In the butterfly sanctuary I was overjoyed to see the the Budleia globosa has come into flower and is a riot of insect life.

At both the Downtown pond and Stave Hill pond the damsel flies were out in force. In the former case both Azure damsleflies and Large Reds were there in force but in the latter only the Azures were in evidence. There were a few aquatic birds with chicks on all the ponds (mallards and moorhens), two Canada Geese on Globe Pond and some coots. magpies dominated the terrestrial birds, closely followed by blackbirds and a few great tits, but there wasn't much else to see or hear in the trees.

There were dozens of butterflies everywhere. Sadly I didn't manage to photograph more than a couple - there was a slight breeze and they were refusing to settle. Those observed included a Peacock, three Painted Ladies, a Red Admiral, some unidentified whites, and a Common Blue. Dozens of tiny dark winged insects which may have been bufterflies or daytime moths moved in clouds and resettled quickly on the vetch and birdsfoot trefoil in the butterfly sanctuary (I'll post photos in the next couple of days).

Of the insects the bees were most in evidence, lots of different types enjoying the Budleia globosa in the sun. Vast white daisies were attracting all sorts of tiny characters, which sat in the sun on the surface of the flowers themselves or, in the case of the ghastly blackfly, clustered along the stems in thick communities.

On Greenland Dock the former inlets into Norway Dock is now home to coots and moorhen couples with their chicks. A pair of Great Crested Grebes were sharing a pontoon with two coots and their chicks. This surprised me because coots are usually fierecely territorial. Apart from a single swan there was not much else to report.

I'll post more photographs over the next few days. The rose to the right, which is a short walk in the direction of Globe Pond from Downtown Pond has the most heavenly perfume - keep an eye and a nose open if you are over in that area.

A little gruff humour

2009-05-29T12:23:00.000+01:00

All examples of expenses taken from an article in The Times at the weekend which summarized the most recent of the MP expense claims to have been revealed by The Telegraph.

A Message from your MP

I want a floating duck house
I need to clear my moat
I have to mend my tennis court
That’s why I need your vote.

I have to build a portico
My swimming pool needs mending
My lovely plants need horse manure
And the Aga needs much tending

A chandelier is vital
Mock Tudor boards are great
My hanging baskets won awards
And I’ve earned a tax rebate.

I need a glitter toilet seat.
My piano so needs tuning
Maltesers help me stay awake
And my orchard must need pruning

I could have said the rules were wrong
And often thought I should,
But somehow it was easier
To profit whilst I could

The public really have to see
That the rules are there to test
And that by ripping off the taxpayer
We were merely doing our best

The Speaker of the House became
Our sacrificial beast,
But the public are still braying for
More corpses at the feast.

What do the public want from us,
Those vote-wielding ingrates?
They really should be grateful
To be financing our estates.

Sucking dry state coffers
Is so very much in fashion that
It seemed a shame to miss the chance
To join the trend with passion

The message is so clear, you see,
(We merely learned it late):
That the British way of living
Is to screw the bloody state.
.
.
.
.

Once there were swarms of butterflies in our skies

2009-05-23T13:13:00.003+01:00

The Guardian, UK
(By Patrick Barkham, author of the forthcoming A Butterfly Year)

There was recently a fascinating article in The Guardian (27/04/09) about the challenges facing the butterfly in modern times.

As well as peticides and climate change other man made problems have lead to dwindling numbers. In some cases only recently have the lifecycles of certain species been fully understood and, as some of these can be remarkably complex, this has prevented butterfly conservationists from being able to prevent or at least slow down the decline of some species. This is a truly fascinating article about butterflies, what different species require in order to survive, and how changes in the landscape are inevitably causing them difficulties. It is also very well written.

Here's a short extract, but do visit the above page for the full story:

"Whichever way you look at it, it's linked back to the climate," says Tom Brereton, head of butterfly monitoring at Butterfly Conservation. Climate change, he says, is a particular problem for our butterflies because our countryside is so fragmented. Decades of ploughing up grassland and ripping out hedgerows means that more than half our butterfly species are now confined to small islands of land. When the climate makes the current sites unsuitable, butterflies will no longer be able to fly elsewhere and find new sites. "If you had an intact countryside, butterflies should be going through the roof, but the species can't move through the countryside like they once would have done," says Brereton. "Habitats are too fragmented. There are vacant suitable habitats in parts of the countryside but the butterflies won't necessarily find them."

Our largest and most charismatic native butterfly, the swallowtail, was once found across the fens of East Anglia and beyond until the draining of these wetlands for arable agriculture caused its extinction. It is now confined to the Norfolk Broads. When global warming causes the Broads to be inundated with sea water - widely expected within 100 years - the swallowtail will die unless it is relocated by humans to suitable inland sites. These new sites will have to be meticulously created to cultivate a single, rather neurotic wetland plant used by this notoriously picky species.

Conservationists playing God like this has already happened. The last species to become extinct in Britain was the large blue in 1979. Despite heroic scientific endeavour, the full complexity of this butterfly's weird lifecycle was not understood until it was too late. When tiny, the large blue caterpillar throws itself on to the ground and secretes a tantalising scent which tricks ants into carefully taking it into their underground nests, whereupon the nasty caterpillar devours ant grubs until it is fully grown. Its dependence on ants was known but not that it relied on a very particular species, which in turn needed a very specific kind of rough grassland to survive. So, in the 1980s, conservationists brought stock from Sweden and successfully re-established the butterfly on a small field on the edge of Dartmoor. Dad and I were ticked off by a warden when we found this secret meadow, still known only as Site X. The large blue has since been successfully reintroduced into other areas.

With this kind of ingenuity, could we turn the whole country into a giant butterfly farm? Could we save every species by reintroducing them to tailor-made nature reserves or boosting populations with specimens from abroad? "We might do it for a few species, but it's not the basis for a conservation strategy," says Warren. "What about all the other insects? We want to get the habitats right and butterflies will tell us if we are getting it right, and then we'll be getting it right for biodiversity as a whole."

There is also a section at the end of the article which offers four steps for the public to take in order to help save Britain's butterflies. Three of these are sound and practical, but the fourth ("buy produce from farmers who manage their land to support wildlife)" might be slightly more difficult to achieve in this part of London.

Wind, Rain, and Wales

2009-05-23T11:47:00.005+01:00

Between the wind, the rain and my current visit to Wales I've failed to catch up with the park in the last week and a bit, but there has been some good news.

There are several families of baby hedgehogs in Stave Hill Ecological Park, coot and Great Crested Grebe chicks on the dock and tit chicks in the bird boxes in the Russia Dock Woodland, all very noisy!

The crushed and leaking water pipes have been replaced in the Woodland and the results in the Downtown Ponds have been immediately visible, saving them from drying up completely and restoring them to their former glory.

The new bridge sculpture is in place over the bridge beyond Globe Pond, and looks great. It was vandalized within days of being officially launched but blacksmith Kevin Boys, based at the Surrey Docks Farm, was on hand almost immediately to repair it and it has been left untouched ever since.

Finally the application for Green Flag Award status for the Woodland seems to have gone very well indeed! We won't hear the results until late June or early July, but the response from the judges who came to inspect the park last week was very positive. There are lots of events coming up in Stave Hill Ecological Park, details of which you can find in the calendar on the Recent News page of the Friends of Russia Dock Woodland website.

Downtown Pond before new pipes:

Downtown Pond after new pipes:

(Photos by Steve Cornish, Chairman of the Friends of Russia Dock Woodland)

Last lot from 10th

2009-05-14T07:19:00.000+01:00

Cranesbill
Geranimun
Geraniaceae

Garlic Mustard, with as yet unidentified insect.

Perennial cornflower
Centaurea montana

Albion School Bridge sculpture
Unfortunately I arrived when the sun was in quite the wrong direction so this is a very poor photograph of the new bridge sculpture, but I'll redo it shortly. Details of two of the flowers, the theme of this bridge, are shown below

More from 10th May, Sunday

2009-05-13T07:11:00.001+01:00

Many of the shrubs are still in flower, with white flower clusters and dark green leaves. Much of the hawthorn, which has such a fine aroma, is still in flower, but many of the flowers have gone over and are now brown. The cherry laurel flowers are now completely over but they are coming into fruit. Likewise, the cherry trees which had such wonderful blossom are now producing green and pink fruits, which the birds will undoubtedly raid as soon as they become ripe.

Unripe cherries

Still trying to identify

Guelder rose
Euonymus europaeus

Elder
Sambucus nigra

Aquilegia, a garden escapee