Local historian Dr Mary Mills explains how her local history books came about
BY DR MARY MILLS
Greenwich Peninsula, Greenwich Marsh: History of an Industrial Heartland
In 1998 we were suddenly faced with the imminent installation of the Millennium Dome on the site of the closed East Greenwich gasworks. All I could see in the press about the site and its background was total rubbish.
I knew the history of the gasworks and a lot about some other sites on what we now call Greenwich Peninsula. So I did the quickest rushed job possible on its background, on the other industries there and the changes in progress and brought out a book I called Greenwich Marsh.
Twenty years later and faced with a solitary lockdown I needed something to do and revising Greenwich Marsh seemed like a good idea. A lot of things had changed on the Peninsula and a new book could include my experiences working for an organisation which monitored Docklands regeneration and my 14 years as the Greenwich councillor for the Peninsula area. The new book was Greenwich Peninsula, Greenwich Marsh: History of an Industrial Heartland.
So, I wanted to pick out here a couple of issues which went into the new book, both of them involving groups of local people concerned about our heritage.
The Enderby Wharf site was up for development for housing. Its history was outstanding. It had been a government gunpowder testing facility in the 17th and 18th centuries, and later the site of a rope and canvas factory owned by the Enderby family. Their ships, which hunted whales in the Southern Oceans, contributed to our knowledge of Antarctica. From the mid-19th century the site was used for the manufacture of underwater cables, including the world-changing Atlantic cable.
Subsequently Greenwich provided the research and the cables for the worldwide telecoms network. It is apparently still the sub-sea cables which push the internet around the world today – a revolution enabled by research and manufacture here in Greenwich.
A group of locals tried very, very hard to get some recognition of this history on site – helped by the very large body of telecoms historians worldwide and including the very influential New York based Atlantic cable web site. We were faced with a developer who just didn’t want to know. The history of the site was overshadowed by a huge public campaign against plans for a cruise liner terminal. Sadly there is very little on site to mark this history – except for an artwork, Laylines, which we have tried, and failed, to get on the lists of local sculptures.
The other thing I wanted to mention was the long campaign against the demolition of the
giant gasholder. It was originally one of two holders – both dramatic structures of revolutionary design. As these structures became redundant, outside the UK alternative uses were being found – everywhere except England. At East Greenwich there were ideas behind their design and size which included economy and religion, form and function… It was for a long time the biggest holder in Europe.
It turned out that there had been a ruling several years previously that the gas industry must demolish all holders except for a few that had been listed. We knew of no publicity or consultation on this ruling. Meanwhile, campaigns continue to spring up all around the country as gas holders come down. East Greenwich No.1 was demolished in due course, a process closely followed by many local residents. The giant holder had been an identifier for the area and provided a link with the past, not just in the drama of its setting but also in its very obvious technological achievement.
There is something about all of this and more in Greenwich Peninsula, Greenwich Marsh:
History of an Industrial Heartland.
Available from Amazon, £10
The Greenwich Riverside: Upper Watergate to Angerstein
In the years after 1998 I had written a lot of local history for small magazines and
newsletters. I had written a blog and a Facebook page for Greenwich Industrial History Society and I had continued to lecture. In 2018 I began to do a weekly article for local newspaper Greenwich Weekender and this was initially about the riverside – site by site, week by week.
Therefore my next book, The Greenwich Riverside: Upper Watergate to Angerstein, was a collection of these articles. It does, of course, cover the Peninsula riverside although I tried very hard not to repeat in detail material from the earlier book.
New areas covered include the long stretch from Upper Watergate, the border with Lewisham, to the banks of Deptford Creek – a terrifically interesting area which I have never seen written about by anyone before.
I tried to avoid writing about touristic Greenwich, but kept in mind that historically the Palace and the Royal Hospital were workplaces which would have involved hundreds of people and that riverside sites would have existed to service the immense effort of keeping the palace and the court in business.
To pick out something outstanding: we have a lot of posh paintings of the Greenwich
Riverside which show the Royal Greenwich – but where is the working world? I knew that some of them show the little crane used to unload supplies for the Royal Hospital; and which Crane Street is named after. However, looking at pictures of slightly further down river – Ballast Quay and Anchor Iron Wharf – a friend commented that there was a little building in many of the pictures that ‘looks like a little foundry. We found this theory was backed up by archeological finds there a few years earlier. On Anchor Iron Wharf had been the distribution depot and warehousing for the Crowley iron business. Their Northumberland ironworks in the 17th and 18th centuries has been described as ‘the greatest ironworks in Europe. So here was a little building, a workplace for repairs and adiustments to iron goods for export – in plain sight and apparently never noticed.
The Greenwich riverside is full of surprises – and it is all such early history, years before anything called ‘the industrial revolution’ got going.
The Greenwich Riverside: Upper Watergate to Angerstein is published by Amazon, £15.
