Godfrey Edition Old Ordnance Survey Maps of Rotherhithe, 1868, 1864 and 1914

For those interested in the local history of Rotherhithe, three indispensable maps are the 1868, 1894 and 1914 Old Ordnance Survey Maps of Rotherhithe (London Sheet 78).  All three maps show the same part of Rotherhithe peninsula, and for those interested in neighbouring areas, maps of Bermondsey and Deptford North (London Sheet 91) are available Bermondsey and Wapping (London Sheet 77).  

Together the three Rotherhithe sheets, at a scale of approximately 1:4340 (or about 15 inches to a mile), show how the are evolved over this period of time, with all the foreshore wharves and dry docks around the perimeter of the peninsula, the docks in the middle and other commercial building and housing between the two.  Dock offices, industrial works and churches are all marked, and road names are clearly shown.  From one map to the next you can see how things changed, and how various features were sacrificed to make way for dock expansion and the establishment of new facilities, such as St Olave's Infirmary.  Curiously, the detail is slightly different from one year to the next, with the 1968map, for example, being far more helpful for identifying the buildings and businesses that ran around the Thames banks.

On the reverse side of each of the maps are some other useful features.  Brilliantly, they each have a road gazetteer to tell you which businesses or individuals occupied which number of each road.  So on the 1894 map, for example, 19 Rotherhithe Street was Platform Wharf and was  the premises of Groves, Ths. and Sons Wharfingers, whilst 238 Cope Street was occupied by one Eaddy Isaac, lighterman, who lived next door to Oliver John, plumber.  

Also on the reverse side is a short history of Rotherhithe during each of the years, and there is some useful knowledge in these short pieces that doesn't appear in other local histories of the area. 

A schematic on the maps available is also produced, so that if you want to order maps of the surrounding areas as well, you can see very easily which sheet number you will need to acquire. 

If you are interested in the local history of the area, I most sincerely recommend these maps.  Mine are so well used that they look as though they have been mauled.

Short book review: A.G. Linney's "Peepshow of the Port of London"

Peepshow of the Port of London
A.G. Linney
Sampson Low, Marston and Co. Ltd. 1929
244 pages

There are a dozen things that I ought to have been getting on with, but when A.G. Linney's book Peepshow of the Port of London turned up a few weeks ago, I just had to dive straight in.  I had been looking for this book for ages, because it is frequently quoted as a good source of information about the Thames in the 1920s, when Linney was investigating every nook and cranny along the river and writing about his experiences.  It proved to be elusive, but it eventually turned up on my Amazon wishlist.

Published in 1929, between the First and Second World Wars, Linney wrote Peepshow when London's docks were all still operational. Linney could see signs of decline at that time, and it clearly concerned him.  Through Linney's eyes, the Port of London as a shipping destination was a vivid, vibrant world of ships, their cargoes, Thames-side buildings and a wide spectrum of the people who worked at the docks and wharves.

Linney's writing is full of energy and enthusiasm.  He saw romance and drama in the docks and their activities, and this comes over unmistakably in the way he writes about the world he was exploring, even down to the poetry of their names:  "To my thinking it is in the names of the stairs and the causeways and the ferries and the draw docks that the romance of the waterside is most quickly to be discerned.  On maps and charts there are names that catch the eye and grip the imagination so that one feels a spurt of interest."

Unlike his later book Lure and Lore of London's Rivers, this is not a geographical tour from one end of the tidal Thames to another.  Nor has he taken a historical approach, although he does give some accounts of the past of some of the sites he describes.  Instead, Linney has picked topics that attracted him, and has woven a travelogue around them.  The result is an elaborate and engaging mosaic of narrative descriptions, supported by a lot of black and white photographs most of which are from the author's own collection.  It's more lyrical than empirical, but it reads so smoothly and shares a huge amount of knowledge with the reader.

Linney's interests are broad, so as well as some wonderful descriptions of how things looked, and some lovely descriptions of ships using the docks, he goes into the nuts and bolts of how things operated as well.  There are great descriptions, for example, of the cargoes handled at various docks and how these were processed and sold. His section on ivory at the London Docks is particularly fascinating.

At all times Linney's enthusiasm and imagination draw the reader in to his perception of the docks and warehouses as endlessly intriguing places where produce of the world, everything from spice and ivory to flour and wool converged.  This comes over most strongly in his three chapters on the London Docks:  "Sometimes I stand by the main entrance to the London Docks and watch a wool-laden lorry go out and seek to let my imagination follow its contents from source to finish.  I see the vast sheep-runs of New South Wales, Queensland, and South Australia, with their flocks numbered in millions;  I see the shearers at work in their sheds;  I see the wool wagons and the railway trucks making for tidewater; I see the big steamers headed for London River; I see the tug bringing up her train of lighters."   Elsewhere, some his descriptions are rather more prosaic and underwhelmed, most notably his description of the notoriously difficult launch of Brunel's Great Eastern, a ship that he describes as "this famous monstrosity."

There are also two chapters about Rotherhithe, because Linney was particularly attracted to the commercial shipping and dockland operations of the Surrey Commercial Docks.  They are Chapter XIV, The Fascination of Surrey Docks and Chapter XV, Round the Rim of Rotherhithe.   He was intrigued by the reputed insularity of the residents of the Downtown area of Rotherhithe who, "it is often said, have never ventured as far afield as the 'mainland' (Jamaica Road, Lower Road etc) and have passed all their lives by Surrey Docks.  To them the West End is actually as unknown as Timbuctoo."  Other areas covered in dedicated chapters are London Dock, Blackwall, the Isle of Dogs, Dagenham Reach and West India Dock.  Otherwise his chapters are more generic, with titles like Romance by the Riverside I and II, Over and Under the River, Side Streets and Hidden Rivers and The Wonder Warehouses of London, I, II and III.

This is a real mixture of history, field observation and anecdote.  Linney loved the Port of London, and this comes over clearly in his writing and his photographs.  If you are looking for an engaging and useful account of the Port of London in the 1920s, this book provides the perfect snapshot of the docks, wharves and river at that time. 

DVD Review: London's Lost Docks

London's Lost Docks.  Memories of London's Docks and River Thames
Online Video Productions

55 Minutes

I've had this on my shelves for ages without having carved out a hole in my day to watch it.  I'm a terrible fidget and normally work through any television or DVD that I'm watching, but I knew that this was a sit-down-and-pay-attention job so I finally  pushed the keyboard away and sat in front of the TV for 55 minutes.  Well worth it.

The films included on this DVD span both amateur and professional achievements.  The earliest is black and white footage of the London canal system in the 1920s.  Most of the rest of it dates to the late 40s, 50s and 60s.  The blurb on the back of the cover describes it as recording the "heyday" of the dock system, but it was on its last legs by the end of the 60s.

A lot of the footage is very "noisy" and unclear, some due to its age, but the poor quality of the 1980s aeriel footage seems difficult to explain.

The DVD starts off with an aerial tour of the river and the remains of the docks on the north bank as they were in the 1980s.  This begins with a look at Tower Bridge and traffic passing through the open bridge, including some terrific paddle steamers.  It then goes on to show recordings of Port of London Authority tours into the Royal Docks.  I had no idea that the PLA did pleasure tours of the docks, and they must have been terrific.  Again, it is very fuzzy but it is excellent to see swing and lift bridges in motion, tug boats moving into position, barges and lighters, and the endless lines of commercial ships up against the quays and the vast cranes.  A stunning black and white film from the 30s shot from the paddle steamer Isle of Arran by a cine society shows a hand-operated lighter in action, sailing barges on the Thames, tugs and Thames scenery before moving into the Royal Docks where various ships can be seen.  Next, horse-drawn barges are shown from the 1920s on the Regent's Canal, a locks is shown being filled, a fabulous tram and other 20s vehicles are captured at Whitechapel, tracts of East End housing are glimpsed and scenes from Billingsgate fish market are excellent.  Next, the train systems of the Beckton gasworks, Woolwich and PLA bases are shown.  The Woolwich ferries are then put under the spotlight, with colour footage of the remarkable paddle steamers built between 1920 and 1930.  1959 footage shows trolley buses, in colour, at Woolwich.  Paddle steamer enthusiasts will not be disappointed.  Golden Eagle is shown on a run down to Southend, in black and white, and Medway Queen is shown briefly too, as are the Duke of Devonshire (renamed Consul) and the lovely Queen of the South.  

The DVD wraps up with the film by Lewis Coles. Lewis Coles was a Kodak cameraman and a film that he shot in the late 1950s is the longest of the pieces on the DVD, starting at Westminster and recording dock scenes along the way, as far as Tilbury. It is also the best record of the docks on the DVD.  The quality of the film is fairly good, and the scenes shown are terrific, capturing the everyday scenes of life in the docks, ships moving in and out of the docks and at berth, some being loaded and unloaded, steam blowing in the wind, empty barges nudged out of the way by the ubiquitous tugs, timber on quays, bridges opening, cranes and trains, and smoke everywhere.  It is truly fascinating to see all the shapes and sizes of barges, boats and ships that were still using the Thames in the late 50s.

For those with a specific interest in Rotherhithe and the Surrey Commercial Docks, the Lewis Coles footage has some general shots, and particularly features ships and other vessels in Canada Dock and Greenland Dock.   Those include California Star, Baltic Express, Pallas, the dredger Gallion's Reach, the miniature tug Velox and various Sun tugs.  There are very few dock features to make out, although the stacks of timber were typical of the Surrey Commercial Docks.  The one feature that I could make out was the brilliant lattice swing bridge over Greenland Dock's lock, in the open position and flanked by two ships. 

The narration provides top-level information about what the footage records, including ship names, ship functions and key landmarks.  However, for the Lewis Coles film, no commentary is provided as the DVD makers decided to allow the film to speak for itself. Sadly the quality isn't quite good enough for me to make out the names of some of the ships, so a bit of narration (or opt-out subtitles) might have helped with that.    

The emphasis is less on the docks than on the Thames, but apart from a brief look at pleasure steamers, the emphasis is squarely on commercial traffic.  For those expecting to see a variety of docks, the Royal Docks are most heavily represented and others, like the Surrey Commercial Docks, are only shown in the Lewis Coles film. 

The quality of the film generally isn't very good, but the fact that it exists at all is great, and it is well worth viewing. For someone who only moved into the area 20 years ago, this is all sadly long gone.  The Surrey Commercial Docks were closed only a few years after I was born. Although I have many books about the area, there is nothing like seeing what something is like in motion. It's the next best thing to a time machine. I enjoyed it enormously, although not without regrets for things lost.

Stuart Rankin's Rotherhithe Local History Papers to go online

Stuart Rankin's booklets
(image from mclarensbooks.com)

As anyone who follows the blog will know, I am a big fan of local historian Stuart Rankin who wrote a series of local history walks and, most importantly, a set of six booklets called the Rotherhithe Local History Papers.  His Local History Papers are about to be republished online by the Docklands History Group on their Archive page.  See details in the poster below.  The first of the booklets is not yet available, but I will post again when it is - which should be some time this month (September 2013).

This is really great news, an excellent opportunity to own your own copies of a research project that has been out of print for several years. With lots of images, including paintings, engravings, photographs and maps in black and white, each booklet in the series is written in a digestible and enjoyable style.  Stuart Rankin worked mainly from primary resources, consulting with other experts, making his work of particular interest and value for those interested in understanding the maritime, industrial and social past of Rotherhithe.

Short book review: Bermondsey and Rotherhithe Through Time

Bermondsey and Rotherhithe Through Time

By Debra Gosling (photographs by David Toogood)

Amberley Publishing 
2012, 96 pages.

I previously reviewed another book in this series, Geoff Lunn's Port of London Through Time.  That was a look at the Thames and its maritime traffic.  This looks at the inland areas of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, juxtaposing images of the past and images of the present.  There is no map of the area that the book purports to cover, but flipping through the pages, its scope extends from London Bridge and Tower Bridge in the west and extends east to Rotherhithe. There is a good mix of municipal buildings, shops, churches and pubs, but comparatively few residential or industrial scenes.

The comparisons between past and present are shown almost exclusively in photographs, which means that the earliest images of each of these areas is usually only as old as the earliest photographs.  There are no paintings and very few engravings from further back in the past. Most of the "before" photographs date to the early 1900s, with some rather later, dating to the 40s and 50s.  The earlier photographs are mostly sepia or black and white, as you would expect, and the 2011 photographs are all in full colour.  In total, there are around 50 photographs over the 96 pages.

There is a one-page introduction, but unlike the Port of London book in the same series, this book is not divided into chapters, and the book has no obviously visible structure, jumping from area to area and back again.  There is no table of contents or an index and there is no map to show where these buildings are located. Given the absence of any way of navigating the book, the only way of searching for something specific is to start from the beginning and work your way through.

The format is very straight forward.  There are two images on each page, one from the past and one from 2011, with a paragraph of text to explain what is being shown. As you can see in the example below the emphasis is very much on the photographs and far less on the explanatory text.

Most of the "then and now" photos are directly comparable, with shots taken from similar angles showing buildings that remain and those that have been replaced.  As you would expect, many of the before and after photographs represent radical changes and it is fascinating, if sometimes rather demoralizing, to be presented with the change from one state to another. A good example of this is the case of the elegant St John's Church in Horsleydown, which was built in 1736 and destroyed during the war; its foundations were used to build the modern and profoundly ugly London City Mission.  In other cases, however (as in the the cover image above, of the Rotherhithe dock offices, and the Peele Almshouses on Lower Road) it is remarkable, and reassuring, to see how some buildings have been so very well preserved that their appearance has changed very little over the decades, at least on the outside.  In the case of the Brunel Engine House it is a relief to see how well the 1995 restoration resurrected it from its ruinous 1980s condition.  Sometimes all that is left of a building is what was rescued after a building was destroyed, as with the pair of salvaged caryatids that flanked the entrance to the destroyed Rotherhithe Town Hall, now standing alone, but cared for, in Southwark Park. 

Most of the photographs are of Bermondsey, which makes sense as it is by far the bigger of the two areas, and there are far fewer photographs of Rotherhithe. If you are interested in the old wharves and docks along the Thames waterfront in either area, there are virtually none of these (except for a past and a present photograph of Butlers Wharf).  And apart from a photo showing a group of deal porters standing on piles of wood, there are none of the old Surrey Commercial Docks in Rotherhithe, which seems like a major oversight given how much of the interior space of Rotherhithe peninsula the docks occupied, how much employment they provided and how much municipal and residential infrastructure they required.

Although this is primarily a book of buildings, there are some good photographs of people engaged in different activities in the past - Bermondsey Carnival in 1900 is particularly good, but the two women standing in the doorway of the Bermondsey Bookshop in 1921 and the workers on their way in to Lipton's factory in 1928 are also fascinating.  There are only one or two photographs that have captured old modes of transport, like a horse-drawn tram, but these are well worth looking out for.

In summary, there are some fascinating photographs comparing the past and present of both areas, which demonstrate both the survivors and the radical changes that have taken place in Bermondsey and Rotherhithe.  If you are interested in what the area looked like before the 1900s this is probably not the book for you, because this is all about photographic representations and has very few earlier illustrations.   Likewise, if you are interested in Rotherhithe you may feel short-changed, because the emphasis is focused on the much bigger area covered by Bermondsey. Similarly, if you were hoping for some photos of the Thames frontage or the vast network of docks you will certainly be disappointed.  But this is otherwise a valuable resource for anyone interested in the past of  the general area.  The old photographs are really engaging, most of the modern photographs taken by David Toogood in 2011 are suitably clear and the print is quality good. The 2011 photographs will probably provide a useful resource themselves in future decades.

If you live or work in Bermondsey in particular, or are looking for a present for someone who does, this provides a good view of how the Bermondsey area (and to a lesser extent the Rotherhithe area) has evolved during the 1900s.  It is stuffed full of good quality photographs and it has a lot of charm.

Short book review: Port of London Through Time by Geoff Lunn

Port of London Through Time
Geoff Lunn
Amberley Publishing 2011

There are a lot of books of this sort about London.  Their strength lies in the photographs, which juxtaposition past and present, with only enough text to explain what the reader is looking at on the page. All books of this genre are interesting, because photographs of past heritage never cease to be fascinating.  This one concerns itself exclusively with the maritime past of the Thames.

A thriving port for many centuries, by the 1930s it was the world's largest port, and was only undermined as a thriving destination for ships and cargo by the 1950s invention of the container, specialized container ships and roll-on-roll-off (ro-ro) technology.  This book covers the stretch of the Thames that formed the Port of London, from Gravesend to the Upper Pool, just the other side of Tower Bridge.   

Chapters are as follows:

Introduction
Chapter 1: Gravesend to Gallions

Chapter 2: Royal Docks to Rotherhithe

Chapter 3: Lower Pool to London Bridge

(There is no index)

Although the Port of London existed for many centuries, the comparisons between past and present are doing via photography, so apart from one c.1850 painting, the earliest "before" images are sepia photographs dating from the early 1900s but majority are from the 50s and 60s.  The "after" photographs are all modern, most taken by the author and his daughter.  The photograph on the front page gives a very good impression of what the rest of the book is like.  Photographs from the past are set against photos from the present, but are not always directly comparable (as in the sample page of South Dock, scanned from the book and shown on the left).

The value of this sort of book lies mainly in the quality of the original photographs, and although these are excellent, the majority of the old photos are of ships and few show the surrounding landscape or the old docks. The ship photographs are really lovely, but there are less informative than those of former wharves and docks.  These are certainly available because they appear in other books about docklands and local history, so it is surprising that so few were selected for this book.

Each chapter has a page of introductory text.  On the following pages, the text that accompanies the photographs consists of around a paragraph on each page. Although limited, it provides historical information about architectural features, advances in shipping technology and changes in river usage and river services.  There are a small number of maps dotted throughout the book, most of which show what the docks looked like in the past, which is useful now that so many of the Thames docks have been filled in and are no longer shown on modern maps.

For those interested specifically in Rotherhithe, there are very few photographs of the past docks or Thames frontages, and quite a few of the already familiar present. There is also a fundamental error on page 71, where a photograph that claims to be the entrance to the Surrey Commercial Docks is actually a photograph of Dundee Wharf and entrance inlet to the former Limekiln Dock on the north bank of the river.  One paragraph, over a photograph of Greenland Dock, says that "the locals have fun speeding across the dock waters" (with a picture of the watersports centre's speedboat, used mainly for monitoring sailing classes), which makes it sound as though we all have speedboats moored outside our houses, when in fact we would probably be arrested if we tried anything of the sort -  a shame though, I wouldn't mind giving it a whirl!  On the other hand, there are super photographs of ships that used to moor in Greenland Dock, including the Cunard's Ausonia and the Canadian Pacific Beaverfir. 

In conclusion, there are lovely photographs of ships but, for me at least, not sufficient photographs of the infrastructure that supported them.  Some readers, like me, would undoubtedly prefer fewer photographs of ships and more photographs of the old dockland landscape and Thames frontages, and one does wonder if there are more errors like the one on page 71. The narrative is generally good, but limited. 

There's no information provided about the author, apart from a passing comment that he wrote a column for the Port of London Authority's in-house magazine.