shipwright's palace

HMS Diptford

2011-11-16T06:02:00.001-08:00

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=5607

Kiss the Past Hello-Deptford 2021

2011-11-01T06:35:00.000-07:00

The restoration of Sayes Court Garden has proved to be an international success.

For local people especially,

since it had been decided that it made no sense whatsoever to provide a primary school on site when there was an empty one at Charlotte Turner Gardens a few minutes away, sheltered accommodation has been provided surrounding the restored garden. This means of course that the elderly people spend time outdoors and act as guardians for the garden at the same time. Many of them are also involved in maintenance and planting which adds to their quality of life.

But it isn't just the elderly who benefit, the garden provides training and jobs for local youth who often stay around even after the working day is over.

Some of the young trainees add touches of their own to John Evelyn's original plan that are highly regarded in the world of garden design.

The garden offers so much beyond a place to be. It's a source of learning as well. Evelyn had collected and planted many specimen trees.

that prove to delight so many people interested in their origins.

As the garden had been laid out in the 17th century, 19th century, again in the 20th century and after the restoration in the 21st century, with contemporary additions, this means that Deptford is able to boast four centuries of English landscape gardening which excited the heritage agencies who poured money into such a unique project which in turn attracts visitors from all over the world, as many visitors as there are leaves on a tree,

in all seasons,

Space for everyone.

Visitors are also impressed by the sunken garden in the site of the basin. Whatever the weather it's a popular place to meet and spend time.

The residents though seem to prefer the smaller more intimate garden in the old mast dock.

Of course, it's not surprising that so many visitors come to Deptford now, something that at one time was almost unimaginable for some people. It took a while to convince people of the benefits but it soon became clear that there were once in a lifetime opportunities not to be missed and the powers that be soon came to realise the economic benefits for the area, the health, employment and training opportunities that could be derived from a development that focused on the intrinsic historic character of the place.
But Deptford was never going to be a place where the magnificent history alone dominated the scene, the whole purpose of starting from the historical fabric was in order to generate world class places for the future, somewhere that locals, Lewisham borough and London as a whole could be proud of. The Seven Bridges across the historic openings in the river wall have certainly done that. People come from all over the world now, especially from Australia, New Zealand, America and Canada to acknowledge the origin of their ancestors.

They do this by placing padlocks on the bridges.

They tend to do this on the bridge that was sponsored by their nation to recognise and celebrate the historic links with Deptford.

One of the most stunning bridges is of course is the bridge of light that recognises that not all of Deptford's history is glorious. Its role in the slave trade is acknowledged by the bridge of light where candles are permanently lit to witness the suffering that is also part of Deptford's history.

Finally i just wanted to mention the success of the opening of the dry dock. Doesn't it look fantastic. There were so many opportunities for green spaces elsewhere in the site, that it really made no sense to lose the chance to repair whatever was necessary and open the dry dock. There had been a dry dock in the same place since at least 1517 so it was pretty significant for the whole of London that this was effectively demonstrated. Thank goodness the little landscaped area first proposed was shelved in favour of a much mor e dynamic solution.

The dock is protected for most of the year by an ephemeral structure that echoes the original dry dock cover. Now the dock can be used for all kinds of events throughout the year. An ice-skating rink is installed in the winter from Nov to Feb, there are two periods of art installations one in the spring from March to May which is the international event, we've had Richard Serra and Jeff Koons recently and another in September and October that is a showcase for local artists. During the summer the dock is used as a performance space for National Youth Theatre and visiting international companies. Last year there was an incredible performance of a Japanese Romeo and Juliet.

Let's just go to the floating cafe in the 18th century mast dock,

its where the Lenox is now moored that has just returned from a visit to the royal dockyards in Malta, Bermuda and Antigua.

Coming back to the present, if you want to see some of these opportunities realised then please visit www.deptfordis.org.uk and consider signing the petition for a richer future for Deptford's history and Kiss the Past Hello.......

All Hands on Deck! Deptford- Centre of Maritime Industries

2011-10-30T11:34:00.000-07:00

We have all heard of the Golden Hind. Currently the replica ship is moored further up river at St. Mary Ovaries, another Golden Hind lies in the harbour at Brixham, Devon.

Then there is the Endeavour, Cook's famous ship that left the dockyard's Great Basin in 1768.

We have all heard of the Bounty, famous for the on board mutiny,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCEgQTxV-VQ

but have you heard of the Sultana?

or the Lady Nelson?

All of these ships were originally built or refitted in Deptford.

All of these ships have been rebuilt. What are we waiting for? The time for Deptford to build its own ship is now. Where? Slipway No.5 looked like a good place to start, the repaired dry dock another, the slipways off the basin?
If there are more replica ships with Deptford connections currently riding the oceans I'd be glad to hear about them. Deptford as a centre of maritime industries? Where's the problem?

Hutchison Whampoa

2011-10-30T02:45:00.000-07:00

How the Olympia shed will not

be seen from the river according to Hutchison Whampoa

Heart of Deptford: a site of collaborative genius

2011-10-22T06:40:00.000-07:00

Developer Hutchison Whampoa have boldly declared their thorough disregard for the nation's maritime history in their proposals for the site of the former King's Yard at Deptford. Even before archaeology has begun on the John Rennie works to the basin
Hutchison Whampoa's recently submitted master plan to Lewisham Council shows their intention to destroy the opportunity of reintegrating the listed Olympia building with the area of the dockyard's great basin, also preventing the river related building from even being seen from the river.

Hutchison Whampoa have completely disregarded English Heritage guidelines on Maritime and Naval Buildings (2011) that marks out works by John Rennie for a high grade of protection and describes sites such as the basin, basin slipways, basin slipway covers and caisson gate infrastructure, all works by eminent Georgian and early Victorian engineers, as "sites of collaborative genius." The developer's design team have also ignored English Heritage London Area Committee comments from 2003 and 2005 requesting that the Olympia building be viewable for the river. Hutchison Whampoa have dispensed with the Richard Rogers proposal which was to make a public plaza on the site of the basin.
The basin is where the Mary Rose was harboured in 1517.

Deptford is the first of the royal naval dockyards to have a wet dock or basin. This technology was exported to the outlying dockyards such as Chatham c.1650. Under the administration of Sir George Carteret, Deptford's skilled workmen and naval dockyard officers built the wet dock at Chatham.

The basin is also where John Evelyn carried out the first diving bell experiments,

where Cook hoisted the pennant on board the Endeavour in 1768,

where Bentham built the dry dock in 1802 with Edward Holl,

where in 1814 John Rennie rebuilt the basin entrance with the latest technology of a caisson gate,

where Capt. Sir William Denison built the slipways to the basin

and George Baker &Sons built the slipway covers (Olympia Building)

and George Biddel Airey tested the effects of ships magnetism on navigation instruments.

where in WWI and WWII supplies were sent out to troops stationed across the world.

thanks to War Relics Forum for use of the image

The basin is the heart of the dockyard, the dockyard is the heart of Deptford. It is most likely the reason that Henry VIII established the dockyard here in 1513 as the basin provided shelter for his ships from the tides and dangers of the river.

Hutchison Whampoa would rather you didn't even know it was there. The proposed buildings cut right across this most important of London's maritime heritage assets. If you don't like the l

ook and the sound of this attempt to erase the nation's maritime history and would prefer to see Deptford's history treated with more respect then you can write to Lewisham Planning emma.talbot@lewisham.gov.uk malcolm.woods@english-heritage .org.uk and mark.stevenson@english-heritage.org.uk and visit the blog deptfordis.org.uk to sign the petition for a better future for Deptford, for London and for the nation's maritime history.

Sold Down The River

2011-10-13T04:33:00.000-07:00

Deptford Master Plans……they come and go!

For centuries Deptford has been the subject of over ambitious master plans
Following the opening of London’s first railway from Deptford to London Bridge in 1836, the Deptford Pier Company proposed a rail spur from the Deptford station to a Thames-side steam boat terminal for disembarking passengers who could then be whisked into the city in fifteen minutes avoiding the densly packed Pool of London. (Yes, even in 1836 there were four trains an hour.) The bold plan was to demolish several Thames waterfront buildings and houses along the High Street and King Street (now Watergate Street) and several buildings that formed the courts adjacent to King Street.

The project failed due to local resistance based on the detrimental effect on scores of people’s homes and partly due to it being pipped to the post by Brunswick Wharf a short distance down river on the north bank of the Thames. The legacy we are left with today are the grand arches of Paynes Wharf reminiscent of Cubitt’s King’s Cross station, and a detailed plan and description of the use and occupation of every building along the west side of the High Street and the buildings along and either side of the former King Street.

A final legacy worth mentioning is the rare survival of a c.1838 cast-iron wharf wall in front of Payne’s Wharf.

Another ambitious master plan to colonise vast swathes of Deptford was proposed by the Great Steam Dock Company. Their proposal was to build a 55-acre dock that required the wholesale demolition of all the buildings from the Creek, back towards what is now Albury Street (formerly Union Street, up to what is now Watergate Street and back towards the river. The most extraordinary aspect of this doomed proposal was that St. Nicholas Church tower would sit marooned on an island in the middle of the dock.

Have you ever wondered why Deptford Church Street is a dual carriageway?
Late nineteenth century plans proposed a road tunnel under the Thames from the top of Deptford Church Street where it meets Creek Road tunneling under Deptford Green (Charlotte Turner Gardens) This proposal like the others, ran aground.

Another monolithic master plan that hits the buffers and never sees the light of day is by the famous late eighteenth century architect George Dance and was sited at Crossfield Street. A grand terrace stretching from the High Street to Deptford Church was proposed, but failed to get off the ground.

Master plans come and go. The most recent from Hutchison Whampoa is entirely unsuited to a site that holds Lewisham’s and Deptford’s greatest concentration of heritage assets of international significance.

The developer proposes preservation in situ for the monumental naval dockyard infrastructure, however buried more deeply in the proposals is the data that the development will have severe adverse impacts on the areas water table that risks drying out both the vertical timber piling supporting the foundations of the docks, slipways basin and mast ponds and the horizontal timber ties impairing the structural integrity of the walls of the dockyard’s defining structures. On one hand we are told by the archaeologist that the monumental engineering structures are too delicate to work with in some form of presentation or exposure and yet on the other hand we are asked to believe that the sheer density and extensive piling required to support this development can be achieved without any further harm coming to the heritage assets. It has also been indicated that the entire stretch of river wall that testifies to the entrances to the docks, slips, basin, mast pond and landing place stairs, itself not a buried structure but visible from the foreshore, and currently structurally sound, will require wholesale rebuilding, thereby erasing from view any trace of its historic fabric. It is simply the case that this development is wholly unsuited to a site of unparalleled national historic importance on the London Thames. Let's not be sold down the river by accepting these current development proposals to the detriment of the future enjoyment of one of London's most internationally historically significant sites.

Entrenched Positions: An Archaeological Dig to Reveal?

2011-10-09T13:50:00.000-07:00

Entrenched Positions: An Archaeological Dig to Reveal?
Chris Mazeika October 2011

Whilst archaeological explorations serve a number of varied and sometimes opposing interests I pose the question, “Is the developer led and developer funded exploration taking place at the former King’s Yard at Deptford, Henry VIII’s royal dockyard, 1513 and the site of John Evelyn’s house and garden at Sayes Court achieving its declared goals, namely that the archaeology will assist in the formation of the Hutchison Whampoa Masterplan?

In 2010 the writer of Londonslostgarden claimed that trenches targeted on the area of John Evelyn’s house and garden at Sayes Court appeared to miss some of the most significant areas that would yield data. The writer, a qualified archaeologist, demonstrates her claim using overlays of a series of maps from the sequence of changes to the site. The site visit of October 8th 2011 followed by on-site debate with the lead archaeologist Duncan Hawkins was inconclusive in assuaging the conviction that trenches are not well placed to encounter the most significant data. This work has been re-considered by a landscape architect who also raises questions regarding the intention of the trial trenching. It is not yet clear what garden archaeology expertise was applied to this site of international interest. If there are published reports of expert garden archaeology taking place at the site of Sayes Court, such as is demanded by PPS5, or expert evaluation even, of the works carried out by CgMs, we have been unable to source these important documents. If Lewisham has a nominated specialist garden archaeologist we are not aware of any published results of that expert’s evaluation of the CgMs excavations. We are aware that during and after the completion of trial trenching on the Sayes Court site that English heritage nominated garden archaeology expert when contacted to determine his opinion of the published results was entirely unaware of the excavations that had taken place.

i. Trial trench plan and overlay of modern warehousing
ii. Trial trench plan and overlay of modern warehousing and Evelyn’s garden plan of 1653
(Courtesy Londonslostgarden)

Given the questions posed above concerning the trial trenching of Sayes Court, I decided to examine the trench plan targeting the dockyard Officers’ Terrace. This terrace may be the earliest palace front terrace in Europe, and therefore a major contribution in the development of European architecture, data that would be significant in helping to identify the site of the former dockyard as a whole of international importance.

In relation to the development of royal dockyard officers’ housing, Lake and Douet for English Heritage depending on Jonathan Coad’s work The Royal Dockyards 1690-1850: Architecture and Engineering Works of the Sailing Navy (1989), claim “The earliest (palace front terrace) was the former Devonport Officer's Terrace, (now part of South Yard and largely destroyed by bombing), which was built between 1692 and 1696 under the direction of the Surveyor, Edward Dummer.” However, had Lake and Douet fully consulted King’s MS 43, Dummer’s renowned survey of the royal dockyards of 1698, the plans of Deptford would have shown that the principal Officers’ Terrace there was in place by 1688.

Dummer’s Survey of the dockyard at Deptford 1688 plan from Kings Ms. 43 1698
Showing the Officers’ Terrace to the upper far eastern boundary of the site (courtesy of the British Library)

The modest palace front terrace at Deptford is clearly evidenced as being built prior to Devonport and as such Deptford not Devonport, as Lake and Douet have claimed, “shows the earliest instance in Britain of a palace front terrace.”

The terrace at Deptford accommodated the Master Attendant, Clerk of the Survey, Clerk of the Cheque, Builder’s Assistant, Storekeeper, and Surgeon. The total value ascribed to the terrace by Dummer in 1698 was £3,662. The most expensive house was the corner house occupied by the Clerk of the Cheque valued at more than £950.

Dummer’s survey of the Officers’ Terrace at Deptford shown here in the 1698 Kings Ms. 43 (Courtesy of the British Library)

In relation to the Devonport terrace Lake and Douet continue, “Furthermore it predates Mansart's Place Vendome in Paris, finished in 1698 and usually credited as the first full development of the palace front in Europe.” (Lake and Douet 1998:82) This accolade too must be credited to Deptford where the regular fenestration pattern and rhythm of the terrace together with centralized and rhythmical door placement form the simple but clear palace front on the west elevation particularly. Lake and Douet state “the development of palace-front terraces within the dockyards is of considerable significance in the evolution of English architecture. This form of unified planning was widely used during the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is considered one the country's particular contributions to European architectural history.” (Lake and Douet 1998:87) I suggest that it is therefore Deptford dockyard that makes the contribution of considerable significance as the earliest palace front terrace in Europe.

Given that Dummer became the Surveyor of the Navy in 1692 having joined the navy in 1668, unless sufficient scrutiny is given to the similarities and differences of the Deptford and Plymouth terraces such as to support the possibility of a Dummer authorship at Deptford even prior to his role as surveyor, (since as an extra clerk in the office of the Surveyor from 1678 he had responsibility for drawing), we must look elsewhere to ascribe authorship of Deptford’s early palatial terrace. Celia Fox’s 2007 paper for the British Library, “The Ingenious Mr Dummer: Rationalizing the Royal Navy in Late Seventeenth-Century England” also misses the Deptford officers’ terrace.

From Coad in 1989, Lake and Douet in 1998, to Celia Fox in 2007 the plan, elevations and valuations of the Deptford terrace found in Dummer’s 1698 survey were not included in the authors’ deliberations on early dockyard officers’ housing. This makes the opportunity that the archaeological explorations presents all the more
vital.

Thorough archaeological investigations the earlier Deptford terrace may offer further data, such as brick and mortar dating, timber dating and chimney design and positioning to establish the architectural authorship and date. The Deptford Officer’s terrace may well be one of England’s earliest examples of uniform palatial terracing in the country. The Plymouth and Deptford terraces are related in period design to the Navy Board Office at Seething Lane, Crutched Friars, arguably a Wren and Hooke collaboration and dated to c.1674. (Fox 2007:51) Deptford Master Shipwright Jonas Shish writes to the Navy Commissioner’s on June 22nd 1665 on account of repairs needed to the Clerk of the Survey’s House amounting to £12. (ADM 106/ 28- June 22nd 1665) Further archive based research alongside archaeological data are therefore required to establish beyond doubt the history of the Officers’ Terrace at Deptford, here proposed as dated to c.1660.

In the archaeological reports the stated aim of trenches 43, 44 and 46 was to determine the level of survival of the former officers’ quarters, their form and fabric. No archaeological structures were identified in Trench 46. Trench 40 was targeted on horticultural land, the aim to identify the nature of land use. A modern building occupied the trench.

Trench 46 was placed in the road between the great dock and a green space in front of the terrace. Trench 43 was placed in a parcel of land that was never within the dockyard and only became part of the site during the tenure of the Foreign Cattle market. Trench 44 was placed in the garden of the Officers’ Terrace. Only trench 42 is situated in the area of the Officers’ terrace.

This trench reveals very detailed and interesting data. Suggesting the three phases of building from the terrace shown in the Evelyn map 1623, the terrace shown in Edmund Dummer’s survey of 1688-98 and the known 18th century re-facing of the Dummer surveyed terrace.

Concluding the 2010 report archaeological report that accompanies the planning submission documents (relied on by Lewisham Planners to determine their recommendations to committee) it is stated,
“4.3 Significance
Some of the archaeological remains are nationally important – for example the
scheduled Tudor storehouse. Most of the remains uncovered in the evaluation are of
local or regional significance, however.”

This attempt to disaggregate the dockyard infrastructure is in direct opposition to stated English Heritage guidelines that states, “A holistic approach should be taken where several original or near contemporary associated structures survive together or where a group of structures displays the evolution of port facilities in one significant place.”
(Maritime and Naval Buildings Selection Guide 2007:05)

The Deptford dockyard site is made up of its constituent parts as an interrelated whole. The history of the development of the yard begins with the double dock, slips, Great Storehouse and basin, forming the earliest foundation of the yard, c.1513-1517. There is record of royal ships being built, repaired and stored at the Deptford site prior to 1513, when the Thomas de la Tour is brought to Deptford for repairs in 1420.

English Heritage has determined that the site is of national importance. It therefore seems illogical and disingenuous on the part of the lead archaeologist to disaggregate the constituent elements of the site in a way that diminishes the significance of the whole. There is a cumulative value that is determined by the setting and by the context of the intimate interrelated functions of the yard, such as the interrelationship between a dock, its saw pits, capstan housings, penstocks and bridge infrastructure that is harmed by such attempts at disaggregation.

Where trenches have not been well targeted, where the desk based surveys are not well aligned with site based surveys and where permissions are sought prior to a good understanding of the archaeology and a thorough understanding of the impacts of development upon that archaeology there are serious causes for concern. As late as May 2011 Lewisham’s Design Panel advised the Developer’s Design Team that the archaeology was not yet adequately understood. English Heritage has recommended that development proposals should not be adopted by Planning Departments until PPS5 legislation is well articulated. PPS5 is referred to as a consulted source by the Developer’s Design Team but I can find no articulation or direct application or reference to it in their submission. This may be a serious omission.

There clearly has been an oversight in relation to the adoption of this current submission. Whilst archaeological explorations continue (and continue to be questioned based on well-researched accounts), is it not underhand on the part of the developer to submit 2010 archaeological reports that are often absolute in their conclusions such as “there will be no upstanding remains of the Basin” or determinations that the dry dock is structurally unsound when little more than trial trenching has occurred on these buildings of monumental naval dockyard infrastructure?

For an area that is likely to be determined as of international significance the submission of reports based on trial-trenching alone that provide only partial data is an insufficient method to establish a good understanding of the archaeology. To ensure that PPS5 is articulated in the developer’s submissions and to ensure no further damage is wrought by the proposed development, to rely solely on the SARM is a highly questionable and a high risk strategy.

The opportunity exists to delay the determination of the application until the archaeology is complete as English Heritage have advised at Old Gun Wharf in Chatham. This is a far more secure way forward in order to satisfy PPS5.

Coad, J.G., The Royal Dockyards 1690-1850: Architecture and Engineering Works of the Sailing Navy (1989)
Fox, Celia “The Ingenious Mr Dummer: Rationalizing the Royal Navy in Late Seventeenth-Century England” Bl(2007)
Lake, J. and Douet, J., The Naval Dockyards: A Thematic Survey (1998 English Heritage, unpublished report)
Liljenberg, Karen http://londonslostgarden.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/dig-manages-to-miss-elysium/ Acessed Oct 9th 2011
Heritage Protection Department, English Heritage, Maritime and Naval Buildings Selection Guide (March 2007)

Brief Objections to the Proposed Development of Convoys Wharf: Heritage

2011-09-26T14:53:00.000-07:00

Within Hutchison Whampoa's Design Team’s proposals there is no clear strategic vision for the heritage influence or the realisation of its potential contribution to the site. The Design Team has failed to demonstrate design sensitivity to the majority of historic dockyard structures, the basin, mast ponds and slipways. Better solutions can be found based on a heritage led approach, appropriate for an area of archaeological priority and unparalleled historic significance on the London Thames. The Design team is basing its disregard for the history on the suggested condition of the structures alone and whilst this is controversial what I more controversial is the attempt to instill a disaggregated approach to the dockyard as a whole and a wholesale disregard for historic association of eminent architects , engineers and major national figures and nationally significant events.

The Design teams decisions and their proposals currently demonstrate that they have not been guided by specific Government national policy English Heritage on Naval and Maritime sites (EH April 2011), Thames Gateway, London Plan or more recent heritage policy such as PPS5.

A sensitivity to the Tudor dockyard plan, its routes, circulations, access points, its historic open spaces is not apparent in the Design Team’s proposals. An understanding and familiarity of these resources is absent as they have not been utilized by the Design Team to inform their choices and proposals in the location of buildings. These resources should be used to stimulate alternative designs, stimulate dialogue between the new and the old and encourage better solutions than those currently proposed.

Whilst successful design must respond to the market, market forces should never dictate design decisions affecting the historic environment. Fifty years ago, the earliest naval building in the country, Henry VIII’s Great Storehouse of 1513, was demolished for “economic and strategic reasons”. The building that replaced it stood for less than thirty years. Whilst planners need to understand the market and meet its demands, we must ensure that the same mistakes are not repeated by squandering irreplaceable historic resources.

A successful scheme is one that will respond to people’s needs beyond housing and retail. The site is bookended by listed buildings of the Master Shipwright’s House and Payne’s Wharf to the east, the buildings of the Royal Victualling yard to the West and backed up by one of the most significant garden sites in the country, John Evelyn’s Sayes Court Garden. This is the greatest concentration of heritage assets in the borough of Lewisham.
Heritage assets exist across the site, creating the opportunity for the creation of an unparalleled stretch of the Thames Path in London that incorporates the influence of the archaeology and historic assets within the design proposals. The incorporation of the areas of the mast ponds, their entrance gates, of the basin and its entrance gates, of the slipways with their brick and stone entrances have not been utilized to inform the design layout. Whether this is achieved as green space in the form of sunken gardens, or the re-introduction of inland water bodiesas has been achieved at the neighbouring Deptford Wharves site, it is clear that there is no demonstration of any of these possibilities coming to bear within the current proposals.
PPS5 demands that field based assessments are carried out prior to the validation of a proposal. The field-based assessments of some of the most significant historic assets recognized by EH as of national importance in 2003 have not yet been achieved.

London Plan GLA
The GLA has reported that the previous proposals fall short of capitalizing on the heritage resources that the site offers. The GLA recognizes the potential for a series of heritage led responses and heritage spaces across the site. The current proposals concentrate the heritage element at the site of the dry dock alone. Isolating the dry dock in this way may impair the future sustainability of this asset.

Olympia Building
Whilst the Olympia Building is listed, its proposed development erases much of its heritage value and the proposal to build on the basin damages the context, setting and legibility of the listed building.

Sayes Court Garden
Declared an open space in the 2004 development proposals, this key site could fulfill the GLA recommendations and meet PPS5 aspirations for nationally significant historic sites. As a public open space the re-instatement of the garden would contribute to meeting health and environmental policies, especially where the current proposals for green space are limited to the landscaped dry dock.

Dry Dock
The landscaping of the dry dock is an unimaginative response. The Head dock is a vast granite built structure. As a unique feature the Head dock could contribute far more to the distinctive sense of place if it were exposed.

Seven Bridges
The opportunity for the reinstatement of seven bridges across the dock, slipway, basin and mast pond openings to the river should be explored to create an unparalleled stretch of the London Thames Path. The proposed 45ft Thames Path is sufficient width for these bridges to be re-instated.

Basin
The basin is the dockyard’s wet dock. Given that the dry dock is protected it makes sense to protect the wet dock. They were first built around the same time c.1517. Both structures were developed through successive centuries, by the eminent engineers of their time. John Rennie designed the basin as it exists now. Both structures were filled in by the late 19th century and they are both major signifiers of the dockyard. To protect only one diminishes both.
If the basin walls are not in a good condition then they should be repaired.

Mast pond
The 17th century mast pond is a unique feature and reported to be in very good condition. Possibilities should be explored to bring it back as an inland body of water or it could become a sunken garden.

Conclusion
Whilst the Design Team’s statements acknowledge the potential contribution of the heritage assets their current proposals do not fulfill these publicly made assertions. To this extent the Design Team’s publicity and recent consultation documentation seriously misleads the public. By engaging local people in the design process and incorporating local people’s knowledge of the site into design proposals, opposition to the scheme will diminish and the chances of the schemes success will be greatly increased.

Deptford is

2011-09-26T01:04:00.000-07:00

shipwrightspalace blog is read daily by people like you from all over the world.
If you care about the future of the heritage environment of Henry VIII's former royal naval dockyard at Deptford that has inspired the work of this blog then please go to http://www.deptfordis.org.uk/ and sign the petition. Thankyou

Reconnecting Deptford with the Royal Dockyard

2011-09-21T11:40:00.000-07:00

Get to know the historic dockyard structures that still exist immediately below the modern concrete surface. View the Great Dock, the slipways, the Great Basin and mast ponds via this National Maritime Museum link. You'll find this link to the scale model of the yard built in 1774 for George III very useful if you are intending to join the archaeology day on October 8th. If you believe that these structures should inform the redevelopment and not remain filled in and buried (preservation in situ' beneath new apartments then you must write to Lewisham Planning Department before September 27th 2011. The majority of these structures are in brick and stone. They are massive and monumental engineering structures not fragile archaeological remains. Similar docks at Chatham have been retained to enhance the setting of the development, create a sense of place and mark the history of the site.

http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/explore/object.cfm?ID=SLR2906&picture=36

For Richer, for Poorer: Advocacy, Participation and Social Justice in the Redevelopment of Convoys Wharf

2011-09-15T07:37:00.000-07:00

Official advocacy on behalf of heritage environment in Deptford has been and continues to be extremely poor. This lack of official advocacy pitches communities towards adverse relationships with private developers’ interest in financial capital as against communities’ investment in their cultural and social capital. This scenario of official neglect jeopardizes the enjoyment of positive outcomes for extant communities facing new developments.

Expert disdain for local investment in and appreciation of the heritage environment continues to prevail and compounds hostile relationships with administrative elites. In an area of archaeological priority where the country’s only royal dockyard with its Tudor plan extant comprised of docks, slips basin and mast ponds dating from c.1513 alongside one of the nation’s most significant garden sites at Sayes Court, requires that the official primary goal be the articulation of publicly funded policy specific to that environment.

Policies for the preservation of archaeological remains are a woefully inadequate response to vast industrial naval engineering structures intended to be 'below ground'. Development proposals citing preservation in situ are hostile to direct participative inclusion in the heritage environment. Preservation in situ falls far short of national government aspirations enshrined in PPS5.

Advocacy that gives practical voice to the aspirations of national policy and participative needs of local people can be a most effective engine of social inclusion and should stand as the primary objective in the Planning Strategy of Convoys Wharf. It is precisely the intangible material culture of people’s participative interaction with the heritage environment that should take precedence. A focus on the material environment alone is the reason why many so called community regeneration projects falter and fail.

Whilst this may sound like a new approach the thinking is closely allied to the practice of “joined up thinking” by marrying heritage, health, environmental ecological and planning policy rather than setting these policies at odds with one another and promoting hostile relationships between communities and private developers.

Lewisham Planners decisions for the Convoy’s site has great potential for progressive application, fair treatment and equal access in relation to publicly funded heritage policy. Every other royal dockyard in the country currently enjoys the benefits of publicly funded statutory protection. Should Deptford not receive fair and equal access to these policies and therefore be social excluded from such statutory protection then HRA legislation may apply. Whilst this may seem like an extreme claim, to exclude the local population from participation in its heritage environment is itself a tacit demonstration of hostility towards that community. HRA application to social policy issues, in particular with respect to the built environment, is gaining ground as a legal case study arena. Heritage is increasingly appreciated as a dynamic participative relationship and less as scenarios of ‘preservation in situ’ that preclude the opportunity for participative interaction.

In Deptford, social exclusion from fair and equal access to statutory heritage policy is conspicuous and as such is a political rather than a planning issue. in the case of the development of Convoys Wharf the absolute void of officlal advocacy, or at least a void of any advocacy shared with the community that hosts the heritage environment is a HRA issue.

Failure to implement specifically targeted policy compounds the negative social impacts that result and constitutes a form of direct discrimination. Such maladministration of readily available policy engenders community disempowerment. It is neither civil nor just to blatantly ignore the detrimental impacts of such exclusion. Indeed to ignore such detrimental impacts is to actively promote, systematize and further embed social exclusion in an already socially excluded community.

Heritage officials are perceived as elite, distant and largely middle class with little or no significant interest in the heritage of poorer areas. A comparative audit of expenditure in relation to the scope and significance of the heritage environment of the Tudor Royal Dockyard in comparison with for instance Tudor Hampton Court in an area of prosperity and affluence could prove interesting. Where elite political resolve has been habitually absent, individual and community resolve has grown, matured and mastered an unprecedented confidence.

In the interests of social justice and national obligations in the case of the redevelopment of Henry VIII’s royal dockyard, Lewisham Planners have the opportunity to determine a higher resolve than the seductive rateable values to be harvested from Hutchison Whampoa’s proposals and deliver a fair and equal access to the inherent resources of socio-cultural capital embedded in the heritage environment. The theoretical and illusory notion of “preservation in situ” complicitly denies such fair and equal access.

As a source of inspiration and a demonstration that the immaterial culture of the heritage assets at Deptford, the site of Henry VIII’s royal dockyard has served the nation as a military site through five centuries we are reminded that the European Court of Human Rights has created the right to an equality of arms in legal representation.

The monstrous and greedy Leviathan that is Hutchison Whampoa’s proposal for Henry VIII”S royal dockyard in Deptford will be fought with all the spirit and tenacity that historically characterizes the site that launched ships for the battle of the Spanish Armada, launched countless voyages of discovery of Drake, Frobisher, Cook, Vancouver, and set out ships for Nelson’s battles including Trafalgar.

Sailing, swimming, sunning, sauna, cycling, sculpture at Deptford Basin

2011-09-10T06:46:00.000-07:00

It has recently been said that the Great Basin on the Convoys site cannot be opened as it would be a dead space. It seems that the only dead space is in the imagination of the developer and perhaps even Lewisham's own Design Panel, advisors to the Planners. If you don't have any good ideas of your own then why not borrow successful ideas from elsewhere? For starters, there's the swimming barges in Berlin

Or the sauna and swimming club on the lake in Zurich

If all of this is possible elsewhere in Europe then its possible here in Deptford too.

How amazing to be able to spend the day by the water, on the water even, cycling up to and around water based sculptures, taking a swim or a sauna or just enjoying the fresh air and sunshine. Even if its raining, won't such sculptures look even better, especially after an invigorating swim and a relaxing sauna.

So let's not settle for shopping only, so far it seems that's the idea proposed for the Olympia site. Open the Great Basin, re-instate the impressive caisson gate to the river and the bridge across the Basin mouth, install some remarkable international eye-catching sculpture, float the swimming pools and saunas on the water, and be the first to create waterborne Boris bikes.

Create a unique place for Deptford and satisfy heritage policy, health policy, arts and environmental policy in one stroke.

Key Heritage Zones at Convoys Wharf

2011-09-02T05:02:00.000-07:00

Key Heritage Zones at Convoys Wharf

There are three potential primary, key heritage zones in the Convoys site.

The first potential Key Heritage Zone is in the centre of the site and comprises the area from the existing Sayes Court Park on Grove Street through the remainder of Sayes Court Garden now within the site of Convoys Wharf continuing with the ‘Olympia’ sheds across the Henry VIII’s Great Basin to the riverfront.

The second potential Key Heritage Zone is along the riverfront comprising the potential re-instatement of the openings to the Henry VIII’s double dry dock, the slipways, Henry VIII’s Great Basin, the mast pond and the boathouse slipways.

The third potential Key Heritage Zone comprises the GII Group Value listed perimeter dockyard wall and ancient gateway on Watergate Street through the potential re-instatement Clerk of the Cheque’s Garden passed the protected TPO London Plane trees and culminating with the potential re-opening of the stone-built Head Dock of the double dry dock.

These three key heritage zones combined would provide increased permeability to the development site from surrounding existing communities providing a less hostile stance than the current development proposals allow. Increased legibility of the historic environment can be provided by the critical mass of heritage assets described in the three zones that give the site of Henry VIII's dockyard its unique identity. The realisation of the three heritage zones articulates a ground breaking and world class reading and interpretation of current policy rather than the meagre backwater response indicated in the outline planning proposals recently submitted to Lewisham by Hutchison Whampoa.

Key Heritage Zone 1

The potential to extend the area of the existing park requires the simple act of restitution of part of the remainder of Sayes Court Garden. This re-marriage of the currently divided garden meets the rear elevation of the GII listed ‘Olympia’ sheds, the 1846 slipway covers to the Great Basin. Coherence in planning policy for the historic environment highlights the importance of the setting of listed buildings. What better setting could be afforded to the monumental Great Basin Slipway Covers than that provided by one of the country’s most significant sites of horticultural history to one side and the opening of the original Great Basin to the other? Planning policy for the historic environment also highlights use and stipulates that where possible a building be returned to its original use. The original use may be the optimum use of a building. In order to comment effectively on the development proposals for Convoys Wharf and to ensure that Deptford benefits from the public funds invested in the creation of planning policy and benefits from the funding of the heritage agencies it is vital to familiarize ourselves with PPS5. (See especially HE& and HE9)
http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/planningandbuilding/pdf/1514132.pdf.

Proposed development within the Great Basin substantially harms the significance of the listed slipway covers. By ignoring the potential contribution of the basin as a contemporaneous structure with the double dry dock diminishes the impact and significance of both.

The slipway covers are an appurtenance to the basin. The key element in the evolution of the site is firstly the presence of the basin c.1517, followed by the slipways, and then finally the slipway covers c.1846. The basin is intended to be below ground, this does not make it archaeology. It is a naval and industrial engineering structure with its origins in the Tudor period with re-workings that express developments in naval and civil engineering throughout the Georgian period.

The basin slipway covers do “as it says on the tin” they cover a pair of contemporaneous slipways. The slipways were built to the design of Captain Sir William Thomas Denison of the Royal Engineers in 1845 immediately prior to his dispatch as Governor of Madras. Williams became governor of Van Diemann’s land and Governor of New South Wales Australia where he was responsible for the design of a number of significant civil engineering projects.
The slipways were in use for only twenty-three years before being filled in. As they are beneath the slipway covers no new building has occurred around them and therefore the quality of their condition is likely to be extremely high. In fact it is likely that most of the dockyard structures are in a repairable condition. Archaeology reports have stated clearly that where truncation has occurred its effect has been minimal. Besides, almost all historic buildings require repair and restoration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thomas_Denison

The extension of the existing Sayes Court Park into the area of Sayes Court Garden presently within Convoys Wharf also opens the development site up to the area of the Evelyn Estate. A new planting scheme centered on the park could also extend outward to include Grove Street and the Evelyn Estate, making the gesture of a strong link through planting of the existing estate into the new development.

The opening of the Great Basin with its monumental entrance and floating caisson gate is the final link in a rhythm of three elements, Sayes Court Garden, the Olympia sheds and the Great Basin before arriving at the river itself. This scheme wholeheartedly incorporates the estates to the south of the development site of Convoys Wharf, taking advantage of the opportunities to capitalize on linking the green spaces around these blocks with the new Sayes Court Garden.

Historic Significance of Henry VIII’s Great Basin

The Great Basin of 1517 began its life as a medieval pond and it is likely that shipbuilding in Deptford was made possible due to this naturally occurring harbour-like feature. Naval historian Michael Oppenheim has suggested that the existing pool was enlarged to form the structure that became known as the ‘ponde’ or the wet dock. From the time of Edward I, the people of Deptford were recorded as having put out ships for the King. By 1517, the Mary Rose, the Peter Pomegranite, the Great Bark, the Lesser Bark and the Christopher are recorded as riding in the ‘ponde’ at Deptford. In the 17th century John Evelyn describes experiments for a diving bell taking place in the wet dock.
Experiments would appear to have been made from time to time; at all events, here is the record of one of which Evelyn was an eye-witness. On July 19, 1661, he writes: "We tried our Diving-Bell or Engine in the water-dock at Deptford, in which our Curator continued half an hour under water; it was made of cast lead, let down with a strong cable."

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45272

Captain James Cook hoisted the pennant on board the Endeavour in the basin:
"Having received my commission, which was dated the 25th of May, 1768, I went on board on the 27th, hoisted the pennant, and took charge of the ship, which then lay in the basin in Deptford-yard. She was fitted for sea with all expedition; and stores and provisions being taken on board, sailed down the river on the 30th of July, and on the 13th of August anchored in Plymouth Sound. While we lay here waiting for a wind, the articles of war and the act of Parliament were read to the ship's company, who were paid two months' wages in advance, and told that they were to expect no additional pay for the performance of the voyage". - Captain James Cook.
http://www.pacificislandtravel.com/culture_gallery/explorers/captaincook1.html

These are merely a few of the historic associations of the Great Basin of the royal naval yard. It’s worth repeating that the presence of the basin is probably the reason Henry VIII chose to site his royal dockyard at Deptford, and proudly emblazon the storehouse with his cipher.

This brings us to the second heritage zone.

Key Heritage Zone 2

This is the area of the river wall, the wharf that runs as a ribbon along the riverfront of the site. Here the structures of dock, slips, basin, mast ponds and boathouse are still extant, mostly built of stone and filled in intact c.1895-1950.
http://books.google.fr/books?id=lqvnthcE19cC&pg=PA166&lpg=PA166&dq=%22david+divers%22+archaeology+encyclopaedia&source=bl&ots=bSmOVjFDx_&sig=z4KZqjdL-iTelaZoKwPd4gEcvtA&hl=fr&ei=vlkrTo7xNYnoOd7UncYK&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&sqi=2&ved=0CEMQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false

These structures could be re-opened and repaired. Although this may sound impossible, the structures referred to are built of stone and brick. The proposal, like that of the extension of Sayes Court Garden is simply for re-instatement. The entrance to the Great Basin built by John Rennie in 1814 is a monumental structure using stone blocks some even larger than 7 feet by 7 feet. The basin slipways are built on a bed of concrete, built up in brick and lined with Carline nose stone. At least one slipway entrance to the river was rebuilt in brick and the slipway to the west of the storehouse was extended in c.1859 to accommodate the frigate Ariadne that was built along the lines of the American ship the Merrimak. Given the date of this final work on this slipway it is likely that stone or brick rather than wood has been used.
These re-instated openings would allow for Seven Bridges to be re-instated along the dockyard river wall creating the most dynamic and historically rich stretch of the Thames Path in London.

http://www.portcities.org.uk/london/server/show/conMediaFile.501/The-Buckingham-on-the-stocks-at-Deptford-by-John-Cleveley-the-Elder.html

This brings us to the third heritage zone

Key Heritage Zone 3

This zone has been determined based on heritage policy that requires the setting of a listed building to be given careful consideration when and where new opportunities arise to improve on poor decisions made in the past that may detrimentally affect the setting. However the same principles, guidelines and policy are not being applied to the listed Olympia sheds.

Leaving Twinkle Park crossing Watergate Street through the impressive dockyard wall you will enter a small green space that once formed the formal garden of the Clerk of the Cheque. Passing under the hundred plus year old protected London Planes trees you will reach the site of the double dry dock. Following the 400ft length of the dock to the river will take you to the Landing Place and Look-out stairs of 1720. These watergate stairs were used by the monarch for ceremonial purposes as depicted in paintings of the launching of ships. These are Deptford’s royal stairs.

The GLA has recommended that a series of significant sites is both desirable and possible within the Convoys Wharf development. To only offer one of these sites, currently only Zone 3 is offered, diminishes the significance of the site as a whole. To attempt to disaggregate the contemporaneous dockyard structures all with a Tudor origin harms the heritage assets of the site and is in direct contravention of the spirit of publicly funded heritage policy.

Royal Maritime and Naval Deptford 1513-2013 How will it look?

2011-08-31T06:29:00.000-07:00

In 1954 Henry VIII'S Great Storehouse was demolished "for economic and strategic reasons" The building that replaced the 450 year old structure, one of the earliest on The London Thames, stood for less than 30 years. Deptford now faces the imminent destruction of the remaining structures of Henry VIII's dockyard by what is politely termed 'preservation in situ'.

Of critical significance in the current proposals is the apparent lack of understanding that the site is composed of a number of very early and internationally significant historic assets that are indivisible from each other as an integrated whole. Here is a continuously evolving,inter-related series of structures situated in a single site of considerable antiquity fast approaching its five hundred year anniversary in 2013. How will it look? Will Lewisham Planners and English Heritage, both publicly funded organisations working on behalf of local people who daily pay their wages and expenses maximise the developer's capital or Deptford's cultural capital?

The unique inherited identity that is the dockyard is primarily comprised of the Scheduled Ancient Monument of Henry VIII’s Great Storehouse, Henry VIII’s Double Dry Dock and Henry VIII’s Great Basin, all of which are recorded as extant c.1517 in an Indenture of the site held at the British Library. The early origin of these structures is witnessed in numerous plans such as the Evelyn annotated plan of Deptford 1623, Kings MS 43. 1688. The Charles II era small mast pond should be included as should the slipways that are, in origin, most likely the earliest features of the yard being recorded c.1420, according to Dr. Christopher Phillpotts.

English Heritage Maritime and Naval Building Selection Guide 2007/2011 recommends, “a holistic approach to be taken where several original or near contemporary associated structures survive together or where a group of structures displays the evolution of port facilities in one significant place” (2007:05 republished Feb 2011).

To attempt to disaggregate these historic features is to demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding of the historic and cultural values of the site and their significance to the founding and the history of a number of nations and their populations as well as to the immediate local population of Deptford and to London as a whole. The specifically targeted English Heritage recommendations arise as a result of publicly funded research on behalf of a public service organization. The general public of Deptford and the wider London public do not expect to be excluded from the benefits of this publicly funded and published research and will continue to be vigilant in their scrutiny of heritage and planning decisions related to the site of the former King’s Yard at Deptford.

Destinations are not made of commercial, retail, cafés and restaurants alone
To accept these current development proposals, which fail to take account of established policy, initiates resistance to and actively demonstrates ignorance of current specifically targeted policy and guidelines on the historic maritime and naval environment and its potential contribution to the sustainability of new development through the adaptive re-use of the heritage structures.

The site of Convoys Wharf is rich in historic structures far beyond the single GII Olympia building so far touted. The most relevant policies to be applied to this site are first and foremost those policies concerned with the enhancement of the historic environment, and more specifically those targeted at maritime and naval heritage as well as heritage of the Thames Gateway. Nowhere else on the London Thames is as historically rich in connections with internationally significant events over five centuries and presently has so little to demonstrate this inherent value.

The majority of the heritage structures are indeed below ground. This does not render them archaeological remains. They have simply been filled in intact. The structures are by their nature and function intended to be below ground. Archaeological survey alone is an insufficient means to determine the quality of survival of these structures as buildings. Archaeological policy is insufficient to cover the scope of understanding of these structures and therefore the current archaeological approach is seriously flawed and is therefore exposed and vulnerable to legal challenge in the form of judicial review should decisions be made that fail to implement specific policy targeted at naval and maritime heritage structures.

Respect and integration of these structures into the new development does not necessarily prevent the realization of the developer’s aspirations. Likewise the developer’s aspirations to capitalize on financial capital need not exclude the aspirations of national policy and guidelines to capitalize on historic cultural capital. Indeed, I know of no policy that seeks to ensure the enhancement of a developer’s financial capital to the detriment of the nation’s historic cultural capital.

The site of the former Royal Naval Dockyard at Deptford is Lewisham’s most important historic environment and possibly ranks in the top five most important historic environments on the London Thames alongside the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey and Lambeth Palace. It is galling for the developer to proffer maps showing ‘Historic Greenwich’ whilst riding roughshod over Deptford’s heritage. The development scheme at Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm, a former area of docklands, highlighted in the Government’s World Class Places 2009 provides some principles that Lewisham could apply to the Deptford site. Lewisham now has the responsibility to ensure that this development respects local people’s aspirations and the future enjoyment of the cultural capital held in the historic environment of the former royal dockyard.

Significant sums of public money have already been invested in determining and delivering policy and guidelines for sustaining the maritime and naval historic environment in order to ensure the present and future enjoyment of the cultural capital we all share in these assets. Many of these are listed on page twenty-three of the 2009 document under the heading Government policies to promote better quality of place 1999-2009. It is up to Lewisham planners and up to English Heritage to ensure that Deptford is not subjected to social exclusion from the benefits to be derived from the application of these publicly funded resources.

heritage/social exclusion/participation

2011-08-29T07:30:00.000-07:00

https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:122577&datastreamId=FULL-TEXT.PDF

River Wall at Deptford Royal Naval Yard

2011-08-17T04:05:00.000-07:00

River Wall at Deptford Royal Naval Yard

Information Presented on the River Wall in Response to the CgMs Archaeological Report Jan 2010 River Wall Section.

Archaeology reports in 2000 state, “ “The river wall in its entirety appears to be in relatively good condition and has retained key structural components to phases of construction associated with the 18th and 19th century dockyard. These features are the last in a complex development of slipways and dock entrances that date back to the dockyards initial construction in the early 16th century. The wall should be retained and incorporated in future proposals because of its historic features.” (Lowe 2000:13, 4.8)

It is indisputable that the river wall at Deptford is the point of origin for momentous historic events in the life of the nation. As well as the site of the launching of over three hundred ships many in the presence of the monarch, the river wall at Deptford bears witness as the point of departure for countless journeys of exploration, voyages of discovery and naval battles of immeasurable importance to the cultural life of the nation. The river wall is Deptford’s royal quayside. Henry VIII chose to emblazon the storehouse with his royal arms and cipher along the waterfront here in 1513. The site continued with a royal title until the end of the WWII when operations of His Majesty’s Supply Reserve Depot were concluded.

The site prior to the royal dockyard of 1513

As Geoffrey De Saye, 1135-1214, was Lord of West Greenwich we can safely assume that the parts of the dockyard site that once formed part of Sayes Court pre-date the dockyard by several centuries. Although Henry VIII established the royal dockyard here early in the sixteenth century, records testify to shipbuilding in the area for almost as long as records exist. William Page records that as early the reign of Edward I the men of Deptford were exempt certain taxes and granted fishing rights having out ships for the King.

Michael Oppenheim has stated,

there is some evidence that a pond with an inlet communicating with the river was in existence in the thirteenth century, in which case Hopton only adapted and improved it. The storehouse can be traced back to 1513, but it is possible that the building hired at 'Greenwich' in 1485 by Henry VII was in fact really at Deptford.

Dr. Christopher Phillpott’s writes,

The shipbuilding industry at Deptford Strand is known to have begun in 1420 with the rebuilding and refitting of royal ships, and the digging of a dock for one of them in a former garden belonging to William Ramessy (the precise location has not been traced). There had probably been earlier activity for which the evidence no longer survives. The Thomas had been waiting there on the stocks since 1418. The dock was retained to hold the dilapidated Katerine until March 1425, when she was sold for scrap. By the end of the fifteenth century this activity was well established at this settlement. In the 1460s Sir John Howard, Edward IV's commander at sea, laid up his ships at Deptford. In 1464 William Rose purchased timber from the Bridge House store at Southwark to build a ship at Deptford Strand. Ten years later a tenement was rented from the Bridge House estate there to repair a royal ship called the Antony Camfere. In 1487 Henry VII rented a storehouse for naval gear at Greenwich (possibly West Greenwich) and sent shipwrights and caulkers from Deptford to rig and repair his ships laid up in the Hampshire ports. A shipwright was buried at St. Nicholas church in 1494.

Among the many historic events associated with the site, perhaps the return of Drake, aboard the Golden Hind, his knighting here on board ship in the presence of Elizabeth I, and the laying up of the vessel in a makeshift dock, (most likely, I believe, the creek that became the canal to the mast pond) is the greatest moments of distinction for the dockyard. The wharf wall of Deptford royal naval yard is unparalleled along the London Thames for being closely associated with such a high number of nationally significant events. The occasions when monarchs are present at the waterside for the launching of their ships are too numerous to mention. The scale of these elaborate ceremonies sometimes attended by thousands of onlookers warrants a study of it’s own.

That the earliest plan of the dockyard survives intact from c.1517 marks this site as a rare and possibly unique survival of royal naval shipbuilding facilities on the London Thames.

Where the opportunity arises for the assessment of national heritage assets, in accordance with nationally published guidelines, following this process, a program of conservation and repair is a common response.
It is of course not unusual for heritage assets to be diminished in reports commissioned by developers. Spitalfields in the 1970’s and 1980’s is a good example. The silk weaver’s houses would have been swept away were it not for the perseverance of a handful of individuals determined to pursue a more enlightened approach. I wish to draw attention to a number of concerns regarding the factual accuracy of both English Heritage assessment and archaeology reports on the site.

We can no longer stand by waiting to hear in another ten years time, “If we knew then what we know now”. Thorough primary source research challenges claims made by English Heritage and developer led archaeology that seeks to diminish the historic importance of the Deptford yard. English Heritage first received a proposal to list the features of the yard in 2002, following the omission of the Deptford yard from the Alan Howard review of military establishments that was carried out in 1999. This first listing proposal was thoroughly updated in December 2009 with new information and highlighted the correspondence of this new information with publicly funded heritage policy published in 1998, 2005 and 2007 specifically aimed at maritime and naval sites. English Heritage has refused the invitation extended to the authors and counter signees of the now discredited English Heritage report. After a lengthy twenty-month process conducted by English Heritage, there is still no decision on the fate of the assets at Deptford.

The Problem with the Application of Archaeology Policy on purpose built below ground structures

In relation to the dockyard, where there are extant docks, slips, basins and mast ponds, it is simply neither accurate nor sufficient to speak of archaeology when these structures, such as the river wall, the massive stone construction of the double dry dock and John Rennie’s monumental basin mouth are extant structures, with evidence of their positions clearly visible from the foreshore. Since it is the nature of docks, slips, basins and mast ponds to be situated below ground, their presence below ground does not characterize the structures as archaeology nor warrant archaeological survey alone, but building survey also, in order to determine the full extent of survival and potential for conservation and repair, as is generally afforded to any structure of national and international historical significance.

A precedent for this has been established at Rochefort on the River Charente in France, where docks and basins silted up for a hundred years have been cleared and repaired for re-use. The English Heritage site at Sherborne Castle uses soil and turf as a conservation method.

Consideration of Historic Associations

The yard at Deptford witnessed the labours of Henry VIII’s Master Shipwrights Matthew and James Baker. In the period of Elizabeth I, Deptford laid up Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind and put out ships for the Armada. In the Hanoverian period, voyages of discovery by James Cook, Martin Frobisher and George Vancouver began at Deptford. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Deptford launched several ships for Nelson’s battles, including launching several ships for the Battle of Trafalgar. The yard also served as a military base during the twentieth century as His Majesty’s Army Supply Reserve Depot and Transport Depot in WWI and WWII. The site served as U.S. Advance Amphibious Vehicle Base during which time 14 U.S naval personnel lost their lives in a single V-1 rocket attack on the dockyard. The area of land in question, far from being a mere brown-field site, has served the Nation as a military installation through a period of five centuries. It would be difficult to propose a more historic stretch of the Thames in London.
The place has outstanding heritage value to the nation because of the place’s potential to yield information that will contribute to an understanding of the cultural history of the nation.

Fair and Reasonable Application of Policy

The English Heritage document Maritime and Naval Buildings Selection Guide 2007, published more fully February 2011, states that works by Samuel Bentham and John Rennie warrant special consideration. Under subheading, Special Interest, it states, “Docks and harbour walls pre-dating 1840 generally form the most impressive engineering structures of their date and even where they have received alteration, as nearly all have, will normally merit designation, with those displaying technical innovation or association with major developments in shipbuilding, warranting a high grade. Examples would be key developments in modern dock construction such as those pioneered by Smeaton and Rennie or Samuel Bentham’s development c.1800 of caisson gates.”

The presently blocked penetrations to the docks, stairs, slipways and basin and the length of the extant river wall are the material evidence of their predecessors of the previous five centuries. The current penetrations were designed and constructed by the leading engineers of their day, including in the late Georgian period works by John Rennie and George Ledwell Taylor. These works predate the 1840 EH guideline by several decades, in one case by as much as twenty-five years.

The place has outstanding heritage value to the nation because of its association with the works of a person, or group of persons, of importance to the nation’s maritime engineering history.

Nowhere else on the Thames in London can a complex of docks, slips and basin entrances be found that directly relates to the nation’s greatest maritime journey’s, discoveries and battles through five centuries. It was, in part, this technology that gave rise to Britain’s centuries of maritime supremacy.

Composition of the River Wall

In respect of the river wall it would be intellectually incoherent not to include the penetrations of the wharf wall where the Thames has lapped against the walls of these various structures. The immediate landward structures are therefore proposed as part of the structure and character of the river wall per se. Indeed what marks this stretch of the Thames out from any other is the continued presence of these structures, albeit presently filled in intact. As a complex of maritime technology they are an unrivalled testament to the technological development of shipbuilding on the London Thames. The earliest plan of the dockyard is intact. The locations of the Double dry dock,
The Great Storehouse, The Great Basin, all present c.1517, remain in their ancient location.

The river wall has been repaired and altered as have each of the intrinsic structures of the dockyard. Such alterations elsewhere are acknowledged by English Heritage 2007/2011 as contributing to the historic value as expressions of development in naval technology.

The ‘dockyard wall’ can be understood as a single element of dockyard technology that contains all of the landward penetrations. The dockyard river wall is composed in part of the dockyard’s defining structures, its building facilities, the docks, slips, great basin and mast ponds.

The place has outstanding heritage value to the nation because of the place’s importance in demonstrating a high degree of creative or technical achievement at a particular period.

The penetrations under consideration are as follows: from the Upper Watergate moving upstream; the Great Dock c.1517, with its magnificent granite piers evident on the wharf wall and the recently excavated finely engineered massive stone stern dock entrance, most likely dating from the last decade of the eighteenth century to the first decade of the nineteenth century, possibly the only eighteenth century royal yard to survive; the Landing Place and Look out stairs dating from c.1720, in use for over two hundred years prior to being closed c.1930, these stairs maintain a fine early Georgian causeway still present in remarkable condition on the foreshore; Entrances to the pair of slipways depicted in John Cleveley’s several paintings of the yard in the mid eighteenth century such as Buckingham on the Stocks c.1750 ; John Rennie’s 1814 monumental stone worked entrance to the Great Basin evident as an extant penetration in the wharf wall and the Rennie designed wharf wall with its characteristic course of stone banding; According to the account written by M. Chevallier in 1860, the slipway immediately to the west of the storehouse was enlarged c.1858 at a cost of the sterling equivalent of 54,000 French francs in order to accommodate the building of the 26 gun screw frigate Ariadne in 1859. Ariadne was constructed on the model of the American Merrimak. (Chevallier 1860:11) In 1860 the “Ariadne,” commanded by Captain Edward Vanisttart, formed one of the escort to H.M.S. “Hero,” which vessel conveyed His Royal highness the Prince of Wales, afterwards His Majesty King Edward the Seventh, on his memorable visit to Canada and the United States of America.
The final extant penetration of the river wall is George Ledwell Taylor’s canal to the Mast pond constructed c.1828.

Misunderstandings, Errors and Confusions in Official Reports

Although the archaeological report has been revised three times since its publication in September 2009 with the latest revision at 2010, there remain several questions regarding the data contained in the report in the section reporting on the river wall.
Following the serious errors in the recent English Heritage report into the dockyard (Julian Heath/Emily Gee 2010), it is vital that claims made in the archaeological report are accurate as the publicly funded heritage agencies depend on these resources in order to make their own assessments. I have submitted documents earlier to demonstrate that Jonathan Coad’s work The Royal Dockyards 1690-1850 concentrates on a period when Deptford has already been in operation for 175 years. Coad forms conclusions without reference to Deptford’s contribution to the development of the royal yards and many of his claims are now disproved and whilst they have served an important role in the preservation and restoration of Chatham and Portsmouth yards, this work can no longer be relied on as a basis for understanding Deptford’s role and contribution to the development of the royal dockyards as a whole.

I address the queries as they arise in the section on the river wall and give substantive evidence to challenge the accuracy of the current archaeological report.

At 6.2.40 the CgMs archaeological report claims,

No part of the existing river wall predates 1796-1808.

Parts of the existing wall rest on the foundation of the earlier wall. This can be ascertained from low-tide examination of the colour and coursing of brickwork and from comparative examination of historic maps. In the exercise of determining the date for the wall, the plans of the dockyard I have consulted are Milton’s Plan 1753, Plan of the Kings Moorings c.1770’s, Plan of the yard, 1774 Plan of the yard c.1808, Plan of Deptford Dockyard 1870.

On river and dock walls, English Heritage Maritime and Naval Buildings Selection Guide 2007 specifically states,

:05 under Special Interest reads.
“Docks and harbour walls pre-dating 1840 generally form the most impressive
engineering structures of their date and even where they have received alteration, as
nearly all have, will normally merit designation, with those displaying technical innovation or association with major developments in shipbuilding, warranting a high grade.”

Key elements of the dockyard structures used to determine the date of the the river wall include the 1720 steps, the mouth of the dry dock, the distance between the storehouse and wharf wall, the distance between the 17th century mast pond and wharf wall (the anchor wharf) and the c.1838 axonometric drawing showing the boat house slips and wharf wall.

The river wall at Deptford is most substantially altered at the dock mouth and at the basin mouth by John Rennie c.1814 in order to accommodate larger ships in the basin. The caisson gate developed in conjunction with the Master Shipwright was a sufficiently significant development in Rennie’s work for him to specifically record the development in his personal papers. Therefore on a number of counts according to English Heritage recently published documents the works at Deptford, the river wall and basin warrant a high designation. This would seem to be a straightforward affair where policy is satisfied by factual evidence. However this is one area where English Heritage’s own research was woefully inaccurate and its procedures of counter signing and quality assurance pitifully remiss.
According to the archaeological report, no part of the river wall predates 1796-1808. An apparent sleight of hand immediately declares, “that the wall post-dates the dockyard is most vividly illustrated by the fact”, however, what is most vividly illustrated is the sudden transition from 1796 to post date the dockyard i.e. 1870’s. This is both confused and confusing presentation.

The report claims that “the bulk of the river wall appears to have been constructed in the period 1896-1916”. The only evidence cited is that the wall cuts through “probably nineteenth century slipways on the foreshore. However, a more straightforward conclusion is surely that the blocked slipway entrances cut across the timber slipways. The remainder of the river wall is late 18th to early 19th century. This can simply be ascertained by a comparative analysis of the changes from the Milton plan of 1753 to the George Ledwell Taylor plan of 1830. The blocked entrances to the dry dock dates to 1875, the blocked entrance to the Great Basin to 1895. It is likely that the three slipways to the Thames were blocked at the same time as the dry dock. The boat-house slipways were open in 1838 as indicated in the axonometric drawing by W. J. Rivers.

Many of the lower ranges of bricks in front of the Master Shipwright’s House and the Storehouse are plum coloured stocks of the eighteenth century, and the presence of areas of pozzolano cement indicate a late eighteenth early nineteenth century construction. The distance from the north elevation of the storehouse to the river wall remains consistent from c.1750 to 1870 and beyond. This stretch forms approx a third of the river wall. The length of wall constructed by Jolliffe and Banks to Rennie’s design in 1814 and forms approximately another third of the of the river wall. Thus two thirds, therefore the bulk of the river wall is Georgian. As a work of Rennie’s according to English Heritage Maritime and Naval Buildings Selection Guide 2007/2011 the river wall warrants a high grade of protection.

Evidence

Moving west along the wall, we encounter the survival of George Ledwell-Taylor’s 1828 work creating the canal to the mid-eighteenth century mast pond (NMM ADM Y/D/11-D8 1828). Jonathan Coad refers to Ledwell-Taylor as one of the finest dockyard architects. Further west, to the left and right of the Basin mouth, already established as work by Rennie 1813-17, the presence of 150ft length of Craigie stone specified by Rennie during his works to the Basin mouth is extant and clearly visible. (PRO ADM 106/3185 WORK 41/594 signed John Rennie. NMM ADM Y/D/11-D7 16 Nov 1813. See also, A.W. Skempton A Biographical Dictionary of Civil Engineers in Great Britain and Ireland. 2002 and CgMs 3.2.4 / 3.2.1)
The Landing Place and Stairs, that feature in John Cleveley’s eighteenth century paintings of the launching of ship, blocked post-1930, formed the ceremonial and Royal entrance to the yard for more than two hundred years. (See Metropolitan Archives, Thames Flood Defence Survey MBW) The granite quoins to these Royal Stairs align with the granite quoins to the Double Dry Building Dock, as shown on George Ledwell-Taylor’s 1820 plan of the yard and correspond to the 1868 O.S. map. It is therefore established beyond doubt, through on site and archive based study that the harbour wall to the King’s yard is early to mid nineteenth century expressing the work of George Ledwell-Taylor and John Rennie following proposals by Samuel Bentham. (NMM ADM Q/3320-3323 9th Oct 1802, 23rd Aug 1805)
In summary it is highly unlikely that the presentation of data given in the report is sufficiently accurate as to present a correct picture of the river wall.
From the period c.1770 repairs will, of course, have taken place overtime, however, it appears that the length of wall from Upper Watergate at the east end of the yard heading west to the beginning of John Rennie’s works has not altered at least in position. John Rennie’s works are significant in themselves to warrant a high-grade listing. From the basin mouth East the wall is largely constructed of infill, to the most westerly slipway and infill to the early mast pond and infill to the boathouse slipways.

Summary

The river wall is dramatic site of the labours of the Navy’s foremost Master Shipwright’s, naval architects and artificers. As a single entity the river wall expresses the work of George Ledwell Taylor, John Rennie, the filled in Landing Place and Look out steps from 1720, and the granite piers to the double dock. The river wall is the site of countless launches in the presence of monarchs throughout the life of the dockyard, the putting out of ships for the Armada, the voyages of exploration and discovery of Raleigh and Drake and Frobisher in the Tudor period, the knighting of Drake aboard the Golden Hind, of Cook’s voyages of exploration and discovery in the 18th century, of Nelson’s battles including Trafalgar, and of the deaths of 11 U. S. Service men in WWII by VII Rocket. These events mark this stretch of river wall as an important historic elevation that has served the nation as a military base for six centuries, since the first records revealing ships put out for Edward I.
However, the now discredited English Heritage designation report in Overall Conclusions claimed that the river wall is, “a relatively common type of feature with similar examples found elsewhere along the Thames throughout London.” Appearing to blatantly ignore the early origin of this site as a royal dockyard, the English Heritage claim pays no attention whatsoever to the countless associations with historic events and individuals throughout the centuries.

The English Heritage report also claims, “The applicant cites Jon Lowe's report 'Preliminary Assessment of Surviving Historic Fabric Convoy's Wharf, Deptford' (June 2000) 3,2,4 as stating that the bulk of the river wall was thought to date to the re-modeling of the Dockyard during the 1830s, and because of its pre-1840 date should be designated.”

However, English Heritage’s own published documentation Maritime and Naval Buildings Selection Guide Heritage Protection Department
March 2007:05 under Special Interest reads,
“Docks and harbour walls pre-dating 1840 generally form the most impressive
engineering structures of their date and even where they have received alteration, as
nearly all have, will normally merit designation, with those displaying technical innovation or association with major developments in shipbuilding, warranting a high grade.”

The river wall from east to west is a structure containing the work of George Ledwell Taylor’s canal to the 18th century Mast Pond, the John Rennie basin mouth and river wall, the blocked Watergate steps of the Landing Place and Lookout c.1720 and granite piers to the c.1806-8 Georgian dry dock. (See George Ledwell Taylor’s 1831plan). The river wall expresses a unique collection of royal dockyard engineering structures on the London Thames and is far from being “relatively common” and “found elsewhere along the Thames” as the report claims, summarizing reasons not to confer statutory heritage protection (Heath 2010:07).

The now discredited English Heritage designation report goes on to claim, “John Rennie supervised a partial rebuilding in I8|6 on an occasional superintendence basis. However these works had to be replaced some twenty years later in the l840s £800 was spent on dismantling and rebuilding the wharf wall. Some of the 1840’s brickwork survives since a recent archaeological assessment by Jon Lowe and updated by Duncan Hawkins concluded that the 'fabric through out the length of the wall.....was probably constructed during the last major re-modeling of the dockyard in l846.” (Heath 2011:06)

John Lowe’s report for CgMs reads,
“The bulk of river wall thought to date to the final re-modeling of the Dockyard during the 1830’s with the blockings inserted 1869-1894. The Thames frontage of the site was surveyed in detail in both plan and section in 1832-38.” (Lowe 2001:3.2.4)
The survey referred to is the Hydrographic Survey commensurate with the George Ledwell-Taylor’s 1831 plan together indicating that the majority of the river wall predates c.1830 contrary to unsubstantiated claims made in the report. Indeed, Heath’s report appears to mis-quote Lowe who writes, at Lowe 3.2.6. “ The brick fabric throughout the length of the wall is unlikely to have a large date range as it was probably constructed during the last major re-modeling of the dockyard in the 1830’s. The similarity of material both above and below the stone features indicates initially one phase of build.” This detail is very important in determining the date of the wall. The stone feature referred to above is that described in 3.2.1 of Lowe’s report,
“The river wall is mainly brick with a large stone course incorporated intermittently along its length.” This feature is John Rennie’s specification of 1815. "There are to be two courses of stone through the wall, of fifteen inches thick each course; the facing is to be of Dundee or Craigleeth stone, and backing of Roach Portland, and they are to be of like sizes, and done in similar manner as the walls of the entrance; and the whole is to be coped with Dundee or Craigleeth stone, eighteen inches thick, four feet broad in the beds, and in lengths not less than five feet with stone joggles in the joints."
The archaeologists did not consult the Rennie archive at the Institute of Civil Engineers. (ICE REN Tracts Folio Vol.49.) It was therefore not known at the time of writing the reports that this stone feature was the 1814-1815 works by John Rennie. However the inclusion of this detail in these archaeological reports dispels claims that Rennie’s works were “destroyed” in the 20th century or that the bulk of the river wall is post 1840.

The sum of £800 referred to and the occasional superintendence by John Rennie refers solely to the 10ft, small stretch of wharf wall to the east of the Basin mouth and the slip which the Admiralty against John Rennie’s advice in 1814 chose not to replace. The horizontal stone banding and stone toggles are specified by Rennie and shown on his plans of May 8th 1815, 31st August 1814 (ADM 140/1170 Parts1- 2) are still in place.
(Specification of the Masonry, Brick Work, Piling, Planking, &c. of A New Entrance to the Basin at the Royal Dockyard at Deptford, and also for the Building of A River Wall From the said Entrance to the Second Slip on the South. ICE REN Tracts Folio Vol.49).

The length of extant river wall by John Rennie is 160ft, a further 400ft length of wall from the dockyard limit to the west (being the Upper Watergate steps), shown on George Ledwell Taylor’s 1831map, comprises the wall to the fore of the Master Shipwright’s House and the wall to the fore of the 1720’s storehouse, which other than receiving due repair is in line with that shown on the Ledwell-Taylor plan of c.1828. Other than infilling of dock, slipway and basin mouth closures, which according to archaeologists “are the last in a complex development of slipways and dock entrances that date back to the dockyards initial construction in the early 16th century.” The report offers no documentary evidence to substantiate its claims of majority post-1840 construction.

Conclusions reached by archaeologists in 2000 state, “ “The river wall in its entirety appears to be in relatively good condition and has retained key structural components to phases of construction associated with the 18th and 19th century dockyard. These features are the last in a complex development of slipways and dock entrances that date back to the dockyards initial construction in the early 16th century. The wall should be retained and incorporated in future proposals because of its historic features.” (Lowe 2000:13, 4.8)

Recommendations

Recommend assessments to ascertain the potential for the re-opening of the 1720 landing place stairs that were closed in the 1930’s, the re-opening of the stone entrance to the dry dock, the re-opening of John Rennie’s monumental basin entrance and the three slipway entrances in order to vividly express the uniqueness of this internationally historically significant Thames frontage and along with the extant opening of the George Ledwell Taylor canal to the 1760’s Mast Pond this will allow for the re-instatement of seven bridges along the dockyard river frontage creating a historically unrivalled section of the Thames Path in London.

In relation to the river wall and its component docks, slips, basin and mast ponds a no build-line proposal may be drawn from the wharf wall to the extent of the length of the Double dry dock approx 400ft to the far west of the site incorporating the slipways, the Olympia shed and small mast pond in order to avoid any further destruction of the substructures of the historic assets of the dockyard.

Whilst this may at first appear extreme, it is not yet known how the component structures of the yard are constructed and what may remain of earlier structures. In particular damage to timber land-ties, brick and stone ‘foundations’ to the sides of the structures must be avoided. Therefore observing the curtilige or ‘apron’ of the docks and slips where the main capstans and penstocks are housed will ensure the satisfaction of policy guidelines outlined in PPS5.

Until knowledge of the build of the docks, slips and basin is gained any outline permissions will be in contravention of PPS5. Such knowledge has not yet been established by the piecemeal test pits carried out so far. Aside from PPS5, URB20 determines that heritage assets are fully understood.

Conclusion

The river wall at Deptford is an outstanding and unique heritage resource. Among all the royal dockyards, only at Deptford is the early Tudor plan exhibited with the dock and basin still extant in their early locations and the current penetrations are the signifiers of their ancient predecessors. The Carolean and Hanoverian expansions of the yard to the west also remain intact.

The dockyard gave rise to the wider town of Deptford and local people take a pride in the history of the area. The Deptford foreshore as a place to walk and view the river wall is an important cultural resource for local people.
The place has outstanding heritage value to the nation because of the place’s importance in exhibiting particular aesthetic characteristics valued by a community.

Where the construction of openings exist or traces remain, such as the vast granite piers to the dry dock, the visible fletton-blocked opening to the 1720 Landing Place and Lookout stairs with its fine stone causeway extant, the timber slipways on the foreshore marking the entrances to the slipways, where exact measurements of the openings can be read from numerous plan sources, the extant opening of the basin slipway, and the extant opening of the mast pond canal, the 1838 axonometric drawing of the boathouse slipways prior to their infill, all these elements could be re-instated.

Where one or more markings survive along the river wall to testify to the locations of dockyard structures this should be capitalized on to consolidate and contribute to the assets of the dockyard as a whole, in line with English Heritage policy that a holistic approach should be taken where several structures demonstrate the evolution of port facilities in one significant place over a period of time.

We await English Heritage’s recommendation and deliberations.

10 Good Reasons Why

2011-08-07T13:45:00.000-07:00

Ten Good Reasons

1.Deptford is the only royal dockyard with its Tudor plan extant. The undercroft of the storehouse, the dry dock, slipways and great basin are all structures that have their origin in the Tudor period c.1517. Nowhere else in England testifies to the Tudor and Stuart arrangement of a royal naval dockyard. Regardless of the condition of the dockyard’s intrinsic structures, which are incidentally described in archaeological reports as extremely good, the plan of these structures has remained unchanged for five hundred years.
See:
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/deptford/v/largeimage71996.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=lqvnthcE19cC&pg=PA167&lpg=PA167&dq=encyclopedia+of+archaeology+deptford&source=bl&ots=bSmPYgLDy3&sig=N66zTzdVZb7XSoBYjAux86rKQho&hl=en&ei=LdI-TrDqJZCVswbN98TMBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&sqi=2&ved=0CCcQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=deptford&f=false

2.Nowhere else on the Thames in London is as rich with five centuries of historic association with events of national and international significance and has so little at present to visibly demonstrate this.

3.Simply because the docks, slips and basins were filled in intact a hundred years ago it does not mean they should remain filled in. In particular their below ground position does not make them archaeology, they were built ‘below ground’. Building survey is required in order to fairly and fully assess their future potential. At Rochefort in France, docks filled in a hundred years ago have been successfully excavated and repaired.
See:
http://www.hermione.com/

4.Deptford was instrumental in securing and maintaining Britain’s worldwide influence, leading the world in industrial design, naval architecture and military technology. The position of Master Shipwright at Deptford was the highest ranking of all the royal naval yards.

5.Maritime technology including the construction of docks and basins was exported from Deptford to its immediate neighbours on the Thames, to the outlying royal yards such as Chatham and across the world. Expertise from Deptford was employed to create the basin at Chatham, the port of Dover and even as far as Australia, where Capt. Sir William Denison, who had built the basin slipways at Deptford, went on to built Fort Denison in Sydney.

6.The success of the dockyard at Deptford gave rise to the wider establishment of Deptford town, and it has been claimed, to the maritime status of Greenwich.

7. The dockyard at Deptford is a significant site not only for the United Kingdom but especially for countries such as Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Voyages of discovery by Raleigh, Drake, Frobisher, Vancouver and Cook as well as success in numerous naval battles including the Armada and Trafalgar were made possible by the technology and expertise of the infrastructure and dockyard labour at Deptford. As well as the ‘discovery’ of the antipodean nations, the first transports enforced and voluntary departed from Deptford. Deptford’s expertise contributed to the raising of the Russian navy for Peter the Great in the eighteenth century and for Catherine and Potemkin in the nineteenth century.

8. Deptford is yet to receive the benefit of statutory heritage policy formed in relation to naval dockyards, indeed it may be described as socially excluded from specifically targeted maritime and naval policy created by English Heritage in 1998, 2005, 2007 and 2011. Studies show that areas of social deprivation benefit from investment in their heritage environments. Heritage environments contribute significantly to the wider development of local economies.
See:
1998 http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications/thematic-survey-navy/
2005; http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications/conservation-bulletin-48/cb4816naval.pdf
2007/ 2011: http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications/dlsg-maritime-naval-buildings/maritime_and_naval_final.pdf
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications/power-of-place/powerofplace11.pdf

9. A debt is owed to Deptford by the present inheritors of the statutory heritage agencies for multiple failures by the heritage agencies in the past, including the loss of the Great Tudor Storehouse of 1513 in 1954 and the demolition of the last of the c.1712 storehouse in 1984.

10. Deptford deserves the right to fair and equal access to statutory heritage protection applied to royal naval yards elsewhere in order to secure the economic benefits, the social benefits and the enjoyment of the cultural capital of its heritage environment. Research indicating the presence of phenomena such as the persistence of urban deprivation in particular areas of cities, suggests that poverty and social exclusion may be related to properties of the spatial structure of the physical form of the city.
See:
http://www.space.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/projects/exclusion/

Inaugural Sculpture for the Great Basin

2011-08-07T11:52:00.000-07:00

Summer 2017
Following the successful excavation and re-opening of the Henry VIII's Great Basin at Deptford and celebrating its five hundred year anniversary, the first in a series of sculptures has now been installed.

11 U.S. Marines died at Deptford Dockyard

2011-07-28T01:55:00.000-07:00

An interview by David Venditta
Of The Morning Call
May 26, 2003

Edward W. McElduff's ship hit two mines on its way to the Normandy coast early on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

The explosions hurled the 22-year-old Navy ensign from the charthouse to the deck below, smashing his back and neck into a rack of rifles and submachine guns.

He was seriously injured, and would be injured again.

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His experiences led him to become a Catholic priest after the war.

Now 81, retired and living in Palmerton, he will mark the 50th anniversary of his ordination on Friday.

Today, Memorial Day, McElduff remembers his role in World War II and his most traumatic moments. They came several weeks after D- Day, while his damaged LST, or landing ship tank, was moored at a small naval base in England.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * * * * *

They had tied us up at a place called Deptford on the Thames River. It could only accommodate two ships. There was another LST alongside of us, so close you could step across to it.

The Germans were using buzz bombs, V-1 rockets, or "Doodlebugs." They were a frightening thing. You'd hear the engine roar, then it would suddenly stop, and you'd wait a couple of seconds, because that was when it was falling with its ton of explosives.

We were in what was called Doodlebug Alley, one of the bombs' major routes. They were dropping all around us, day and night, coming out of nowhere.

So this one night in July or early August, I was the only officer aboard, because I was the officer of the deck. The crew was in their quarters below.

The officer of the deck on the other ship had been in my Officer Candidate School class at Northwestern University. His name was John something, I can't remember.

It was about 11 and we were talking, and I said, "I'm gonna get a cup of coffee," and he said, "Well, I'm gonna check something," and he went to check it.

I had just left the galley, where I went for the coffee, when a buzz bomb dropped right on the aft part of John's ship. The blast blew me down a passageway about 30 feet, and I was reaching out to try to stop myself from going over the side. My back hit the railing, making my injury from D-Day worse. I grabbed onto the railing.

A fire started over the ammunition. I was badly hurt -- my spinal column is wrecked from that -- but I had to get the fire out. The crew was trapped down below, so I worked while they were freeing themselves. I got the hose unfurled and the water going, and by then the guys had cleared themselves out.

So they took over fighting the fire, and I went over to the other ship to see what I could do about casualties.

The captain was aboard that ship, but his quarters were pretty well blown open. I heard groaning and had to get some debris off him. I tried to pull him back, because I was afraid more debris was going to fall on him.

But I couldn't find any substance to him. The concussion was so much, his bones were shattered into small pieces. When I held him, it was like holding a soft mass.

He looked like a rubber man.

I didn't want him to die without someone there with him.

Within three minutes, he died in my arms.

The next thing I remember, I looked at the life raft on my ship and saw parts of my friend's body on it. I assumed it was John, because he had been standing with me and I hadn't seen anybody else.

I took my utility knife out and scraped his remains off of the life raft into a paper bag. Anything I could find of him, I put in the bag.

I didn't want to leave him on the raft.

Someone came up to help me, and I said, "No I'll do it, I want to do it myself."

What I intended to do with the remains, I don't know, probably drop them over the side. I might have done that. It would have been a logical thing. The rise and fall of the Thames River is rather remarkable, so the remains would have ultimately gone out to sea. That would have been appropriate.

But I had a great deal of pain, and I think it was overwhelming me.

After I got done scraping, I put the knife back in my belt.

And then I blacked out.

World of the man

I was scrappy when I was a kid. I had to be.

My dad was a career Navy man, so we moved around a lot. My mother and younger sister and I followed him all over the world -- Hawaii, the Philippines, Panama, the usual places where Navy families would go.

I went to about 12 or 13 grammar schools. Every year I was the new man on the block, so I was challenged, and I got in a lot of fights. When we lived in Norfolk, Va., at the naval base, one day I beat up the admiral's grandson, and my sister beat up the captain of the yard's daughter.

My dad was an Annapolis grad with a sideline: He wrote music. He sold material to Irving Berlin. Some of his music was recorded by Nelson Eddy. At Naval Academy football games, they still sing one of his numbers, a stirring little fight song.

Dad was loaded with talent. He played piano, he was a pilot, he was a deep-sea diver, he was a New York state gymnastic champion before he followed his brother into the academy, where he couldn't participate in sports because he was already a pro: He had played basketball with the original Celtics.

After he graduated, he met my mother in Philadelphia, where she was in supply work at the Navy Yard. She was in the first group of women ever to be enlisted in the Navy, back during World War I.

I was born in Manhattan. In school I was a fast sprinter -- held records on both coasts. After we moved to Brooklyn, I boxed for the Knights of Columbus.

When I was 15, a sophomore in high school, I wanted to get into the world of the man, so I said I was 17 and joined the New York National Guard. It was a horse outfit, the 101st Cavalry on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. I had to learn to ride, and well.

The horses were big and came from the West half-trained. We had to break them in to cavalry maneuvers, which wasn't easy. And because I was small and light, I jockeyed for I Troop when the various troops had horse races.

My dad used to kid me: "Who was in charge today, you or the horse?"

I've hated horses ever since. I don't want anything to do with them.

Trouble with an eye

After I graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, Calif., in 1940, I went to Long Beach Junior College.

My dad foresaw war with Japan. I don't know why the admirals or the politicians didn't. He told my mom in February of 1941, nine months before Pearl Harbor: "We'll be at war with Japan. So if you want to stay here in California, fine, or you want to go back to your hometown of Philadelphia. But maybe you ought to do it reasonably soon."

Shortly after that, we did move to Upper Darby, outside Philadelphia.

I went to St. Joseph's University for a brief period, studying physics, and then the Naval Academy in the summer of '41. But I had trouble with my left eye. It wasn't 20-20, it was 18-20. That was a big no-no back then. I lasted only about five months because of my eye.

Then I enlisted in the Navy as a white hat, a sailor, and they sent me to Officer Candidate School. I got commissioned in '43 as an ensign. They gave us a preference sheet. I wanted to be in the Atlantic Fleet on a small ship, which means the amphibious force. That's where I wound up.

I was sent to a landing ship tank. LSTs were bigger than a destroyer. You could put a monster amount of material on their tank deck and on the upper deck. They were the kind of ship that won the war, because they provided all the supplies and all the men.

I picked up the ship in Boston, and we went to Little Creek in Virginia for shakedown. The total complement was nine officers and about 110 men.

We went over to Europe early in '43. I was navigator and small boat officer. We got ready for the big event, the invasion of France.

Wandering in Normandy

In the early morning darkness of June 6, 1944, LST 981 was carrying British Royal engineers and some American engineers to the beach. I was in the charthouse, one level up from the upper deck. There was a ladder going down.

The ship hit two mines under the surface, one right after the other. It was literally lifted right out of the water.

I was blown from the charthouse to the bottom of the ladder and into a gun rack with Thompson submachine guns and rifles. I was in excruciating pain.

When you're young, you think nothing is ever going to happen to you. It was always going to happen to the other guy.

I was thinking, "I couldn't believe this happened to me.'

We got towed back to England, and I went into a British naval hospital. The doctor pointed to the floor and said, "That's a spot for you, right there."

I'm seeing these guys without arms or legs or insides, and I said, I can't take this. So I left there.

I had a friend in town, and I stayed there and was nursed.

When I got back on my feet again, I decided I wanted to go over and see what the war looked like.

I had Army clothes and a helmet with "USN" on it. I would have looked exactly as if I was in the Army except for that. I hopped a ride across the channel, then I got on the so-called Red Ball Express, trucks that would run up to the front with supplies.

Nobody said a damn thing to me.

I wandered around Normandy on my own, slept by a hedgerow for three nights.

And I did meet up with some American troops, who viewed me with great suspicion, which I guess they had reason to do: What's a Navy man doing here?

I ran out of food. Some of the infantry guys I met supplied me with rations.

There was a sniper somewhere near where I was, and he fired at me about three times. Maybe it was a French civilian who didn't want to see us there. I fired a burst from a submachine gun, and he took off, or I hit him.

Then I figured, the hell with this, I'm going back. I've seen as much as I want to see.

I got a ride back to the beach in a truck, and I went back to the ship.

Miniature ships at Pearl

After the buzz bomb hit and I was hurt the second time, I went up to London and stopped at an American Army hospital. They gave me a shot and some painkillers.

Our LST was wrecked, it had no power. We were towed back to the States, across the Atlantic in tandem with another LST by a seagoing tug called the Choctaw. It took 37 days.

There were dead rats in our water, so it was contaminated, so we had no water. We got the desalinization machinery working enough to keep body and soul together.

We lived in filth. If you wanted to bathe, you had to throw a bucket over the side and just clean yourself off with sea water.

The British had given us some rations, which were horrible. A lot of it we had to throw over the side because it wasn't edible.

In New York, the ship was repaired. Then we went out to the Pacific, and that was kind of uneventful because the war had wound down.

My dad was in the Pacific, too, as captain of the attack transport USS Pickens. During the invasion of Okinawa, the assault commander's vessel was hit by a kamikaze, so my dad said, "This is no time to worry about who's got date of rank. My God, we've got to get these guys on the beach quick."

He took charge, and the landing was successful, for which he got the combat Legion of Merit, which is quite an award.

I left my ship in Guam because I was reassigned, and went to Pearl Harbor, where I worked in the plotting office at CinCPac -- Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet. It was difficult for me, because of my back injuries. I had to climb up on a plot and crawl across it to move the miniature ships.

But I didn't want to be a wimp. I never wanted to be a wimp.

Giving the Lord a try

When I got back to the States, the war was over, and I didn't know what I was going to do. I volunteered for a cruise up to the Arctic on the Midway, which was a large carrier just built, for test- flight operations.

Up in the Arctic, I had a lot of time to think. It was boring, cold, and the days were long and dark, and I started to reflect.

When that buzz bomb hit, I was the only topside survivor. How come other guys died, and I didn't?

The Lord had saved me for something. He saved me, and he took care of me in so many other ways.

So I decided, I'm going to give the Lord a try. I decided to enter the seminary.

In the spring of '46, I came back and was discharged. My folks were in Upper Darby. My mother was pleased when I told her about my plans. My father thought I was crazy. He knew I wanted a family, a wife and children, and he said, "How are you going to live without them?" I said I'll try.

I went in the seminary, St. Charles Borromeo, within months. On May 30, 1953, I was ordained at the Cathedral of Ss. Peter & Paul in Philadelphia.

As a priest, I haven't moved around a lot. I've only been in about a half-dozen parishes in 50 years. I spent 20 years at St. Nicholas near Walnutport, and before that, 15 years at St. Richard's in Schuylkill County, halfway between Hometown and Mahanoy City.

I don't mind admitting I kind of hid from reality all these years, until I realized there are certain things that happen to you that you have to acknowledge -- good, bad or indifferent -- whether they're war experiences or anything else.

People would talk to me about World War II, and I didn't want to hear about it. That was history.

But I was only fooling myself partially, because I still suffer from a lot of flashbacks, a lot of bad memories. I couldn't escape everything. You can't when you live in a real world.

You can only run so far, so fast.

I've had a full life, I've missed absolutely nothing, and I'm grateful for that. I'm glad I am what I am, because I love this work.

I want the Lord to give me time so I can serve him and his people, as long as he wants. And I will do that. I want to walk with him. I don't want to be selfish. I don't want to hurt anybody.

I just want to walk with him.

Epilogue

McElduff received a long-overdue Purple Heart in 2000.

A shelf in his apartment holds a model of his LST, a model of a V- 1 rocket embedded with a chunk of metal from the buzz bomb that damaged his ship, and the knife he used to scrape his friend's remains off the life raft.

He has tried but had no luck finding John's last name.

His sister is Pat Garrahan.

Though retired and still pained by his war injuries, McElduff continues to "help out where I can" in the Allentown diocese, and helps the needy in Central America.

He is overseeing the work of charitable clinics in Guatemala and construction of an addition to a maternity hospital in Nicaragua. He raises money for these projects.

McElduff will say all of the Masses on Saturday and Sunday at St. Nicholas Church in Lehigh Township. He'll say the Mass marking his 50 years in the priesthood at 1 p.m. June 8, also at St. Nicholas. An informal reception at the church will follow.
Copyright © 2011, The Morning Call

shipwright's palace: they hear, all day long, and never ending, save on Sunday, the sound of hammer and of saw, the whistling of the bo's'ns and foremen, the rolling of casks, the ringing of bells, and all the noise which accompanies the build- ing and the fitting of ships ; and smell perpetually the tar and the pitch (which some love better than the smell of roses and of violets)

2011-07-26T07:22:00.000-07:00

http://www.archive.org/stream/worldwentverywel00besarich/worldwentverywel00besarich_djvu.txt

they hear, all day long, and never ending, save on Sunday, the sound of hammer and of saw, the whistling of the bo's'ns and foremen, the rolling of casks, the ringing of bells, and all the noise which accompanies the build- ing and the fitting of ships ; and smell perpetually the tar and the pitch (which some love better than the smell of roses and of violets)

2011-07-26T02:41:00.000-07:00

From Walter Besant THE WORLD WENT VERY WELL THEN. 23

I suppose that the best place in the world for a boy who is
about to become a sailor, as well as for one who loves to paint
ships, must be Deptford, which seems to many so mean and
despicable a town. Mean and despicable to Jack and to my-
self it would never be, because here our boyhood was spent,
and here we played with Castilla ; here we first learned to sit by
the river-side and watch the craft go up and down, with those
at anchor and those in dock. At Deptford, where the water is
never rough enough to capsize a tilt-boat, we are at the very
gates of London ; we can actually see the pool.: we are, in a
word, on the Thames.

The Thames is not, I believe, the largest river in the world;
the great Oronoco is broader, and, I dare say, longer ; the Nile
is certainly a greater stream. Yet, there is no other river
which is so majestic by reason of its shipping and its trade.
For thither come ships, laden with palm-oil and ivory, from the
Guinea Coast ; from Norway and Riga, with wood and tallow ;
from Holland, with stuffs and spices and provisions of all kinds ;
from the West Indies, with rum and sugar ; from the East
Indies, with rice ; from China, with tea and silk ; from Arabia,
with coffee ; from Newcastle, with coal. There is no kind of
merchandise produced in the world which is not carried up the
Thames to the port of London. And there is no kind of ship
or boat built to swim in the sea, except, I suppose, the Chinese
junk, the Morisco galley, or the piratical craft of the Eastern
Seas, which does not lie at anchor in the Thames, somewhere
between Greenwich Reach and London Bridge. East-Indiamen,
brigs, brigantines, schooners, yachts, sloops, galliots, tenders,
colliers, hoys, barges, smacks, herring-busses, or hog-boats all
are here. And not only these, which are peaceful ships, only
armed with carronades and muskets for defence against pirates,
but also his majesty's men-of-war, frigates, sloops of war, cut-
ters, fire-ships, and every kind of vessel employed to beat off
the enemies of the country, who would prey upon our com-
merce and destroy our merchantmen.

On that very day when
Jack came was there not, lying off Deptford Creek, the Re-
doubtable, having received her stores, provisions, and ammuni-
tion, and now waiting her captain and her crew ? and I warrant
the press-gang were busy at Wapping and at Ratcliffe. Beside
her lay the sloop-of-war Venus, the Pink, and Lively, and off
the dock mouth was the Hector, lying in ordinary, a broad can-
vas tilt or awning rigged up from stem to stern. So that those
who look up and down the river from Deptford Stairs see not
only the outward and visible proofs of England's trade, but also
those of England's greatness.

Or, again which may be useful
to the painter one may see not only at Deptford and at Red-
riff, but above the river, at Wapping, Shadwell, and Blackwall,
every kind of sailor ; they are mostly alike in manners and in
morals and one hopes that to sailors much is pardoned, and
that from them little is expected but they differ in their
speech and in their dress. There is the phlegmatic Hollander,
never without his pipe ; the mild Norwegian ; the fiery Spaniard,
ready with his dagger ; the fierce Italian, equally ready with
his knife ; the treacherous Greek ; and the Frenchman. But
the last we generally see since it is our lot to be often at war
with his nation as a prisoner, when he comes to us half starved,
ragged, and in very evil plight. Yet give these poor French
prisoners only warmth, light, and food, and they will turn out
to be most light-hearted and merry blades, always cheerful and
ready to talk, sing, and dance, and always making ingenious
things with a knife and a piece of wood. Perhaps if we knew
this people better, and they knew us better, we should be less
ready to go to war with each other.

Those who live in such a town as Deptford, and continually
witness this procession of ships, cannot choose but be sensible
of the greatness of the country, and must perforce talk con-
tinually with each other of foreign ports and places beyond the
ocean. Also because they witness the corning and going of the
king's ships (some of them pretty well battered on their return,
I promise you) ; and because they hear, all day long, and never
ending, save on Sunday, the sound of hammer and of saw, the
whistling of the bo's'ns and foremen, the rolling of casks, the
ringing of bells, and all the noise which accompanies the build-
ing and the fitting of ships ; and smell perpetually the tar and
the pitch (which some love better than the smell of roses and
of violets) they cannot refrain from talking continually of
actions at sea, feats of bravery, and the like. All the towns-
people talk of these things, and of little else. And, besides,
in these years there was the more reason for this kind of con-
versation because we were always at war with France and Spain,
fighting, among other things, to drive the French out of America,
and so to enable the ungrateful colonies to make us, shortly
afterwards, follow the lead of the French. Every day there
came fresh news of actions, skirmishes, captures, wrecks, burn-
ings. The Channel and the Bay of Biscay swarmed with French
privateers as thick as wasps in an orchard. There was not a
lugger on the coast of Normandy but stole out of a night to
pick up some English craft ; every fleet of merchantmen sailed
under convoy, and every sailor looked for death or a French
prison unless he would fight it out unto the end.

The people of London are strangely incurious many there
are who know nothing about the very monuments standing in
their midst and so that they can read every day the news
from France and Spain, they care little about their own country.
Therefore Deptford, which lies at their very gates, is as little
known to them as if it were in Wales. Some, it is true, come
every year on St. Luke's Day to join the rabble at Horn Fair,
landing at Rotherhithe, and walking to Charlton with the pro-
cession of mad wags who carry horns on their heads to that
scene of debauchery and riot ; and once a year, on Trinity Mon-
day, the elders of the Trinity House assemble at the Great Hall
behind St. Nicolas's, and after business go to church, and after
church, dinner at the Gun Tavern on the Green. And the ships
of the royal navy come and go at the royal yard almost daily.
Otherwise Deptford hath no visitors.

I do not say that it is
a beautiful city, though, as for streets, we have the Green and
Church Street ; and as for monuments, until late years there were
the great House and gardens of Saye's Court, now lying deso-
late and miserable, partly enclosed in the King's Yard and
partly given over to rank weeds and puddles. Here it was that
the great Peter, Czar of Muscovy, once lived. There are also the
two churches of St. Nicolas and St. Paul, both stately buildings,
and temples fit for worship, the latter especially, which is like
its sister churches, built about the same time, of Limehouse,
St. George's, Ratcliffe, Hoxton, Bethnal Green, Hackney, St.
Martin's-in-the-Fields, Camden Town, and others majestic with
its vast round portico of stone and its commanding terrace.

Then there are the two hospitals or almshouses, both named after
the Holy Trinity, for decayed mariners and their widows. To
my own mind these monuments of benevolence, which stand so
thickly all round London, are fairer than the most magnificent
king's palace of which we can read. Let the great bashaw have
as many gilded palaces as he pleases for himself and his se-
raglio ; let our palaces be those which are worthy of a free
people, namely, homes and places of refuge for the aged and de-
serving poor, and those who are quite spent and now past work.

I suppose there are few places richer and more fortunate
than Deptford and its neighbor, Greenwich, in these founda-
tions. At the latter place there is the great and noble Naval
Hospital, now inhabited by nearly two thousand honest veter-
ans ; they will never, be sure, be turned out of this, their stately
home, until England hath lost her pride in her sailors. There
is Morden College, for decayed merchants ; there is Norfolk, also
called Trinity, College, for the poor of Greenwich, and of Der-
singham, in Norfolk ; and there is Queen Elizabeth's Hospital,
for poor women. So, at Deptford, we have those two noble
foundations, both named after the Holy Trinity, one behind
St. Nicolas's and the other behind St. Paul's, the latter espe-
cially being a goodly structure, with a fair quadrangular court,
a commodious hall, and gardens fitted for quiet meditation and
for rest in the sunshine during the latest trembling years of life.

I do not think that even Morden College itself, with its canal
in front and its stately alleys of trees, or Norfolk College, with
its convenient stone terrace overlooking the river and its spa-
cious garden, is more beautiful than the Hospital of the Holy
Trinity beside St. Paul's Church, Deptford, especially if one
considers the stormy, anxious, and harassed lives to which it
offers rest and repose. They have been lives spent on the sea ;
not in the pursuit of honor won at the cannon's mouth and by
boarding-pike in fighting the king's enemies, but in the gather-
ing of wealth for others to enjoy, none of their gains coming to
themselves. The merchant captain brings home his cargo safe
after perils many and hardships great ; but the cargo is not for
him. His owners, or those who have chartered the ship, re-
ceive the freight ; it is bought with their money and sold for
their profit. For the captain and the crew there is their bare
wage ; and when they can work no longer, perhaps, if they are
fortunate, a room in a hospital or almshouse, with the weekly
dole of loaves and shillings.

The tract of land (it is not great) lying at the back of Trinity
Almshouses and the Stowage, contained by the last bend of the
creek before it runs into the river, is rented by two or three
market-gardeners, and laid out by them for the production of
fruit and vegetables.

As these gardens lay retired and behind the houses, no one
ever came to them except the gardeners themselves, who are
quiet, peaceful folk. About the orchards here, and the beds
of asparagus, pease, endive, skirrett, and the rest of the vegeta-
bles grown for the London market, lies ever an abiding sense
of peace ; and this although one cannot but hear the continual
hammering of the dock-yard, the firing of salutes, and the yo-
hoing and roaring of voices which all day long come up from
the ships upon the river. I know not how we came to know
these gardens, or to find them out. I used to wander in them
with Castilla, when we were little children, with Philadelphy
for nurse ; we took Jack Easterbrook to show him the place as
soon as he came to us ; we thought, I believe as children love
to think of anything that the gardens were our own, though,
of course, we were only there on sufferance, and because the
gardeners knew we should neither destroy nor steal.

Perhaps the chief reason why we sought the place (because
we had gardens of our own at home) was that, just beyond the
last bend of the creek, there stood, on the very edge of the
steep bank here twenty feet above low-water mark an old
summer-house, built of wood. It was octagonal in shape, hav-
ing a pointed roof of shingle, with a gilded weathercock upon
it. Three sides contained windows, all looking upon the river ;
another side consisted of a door ; and a bench ran round the
room, except on the side of the door. It had once been paint-
ed green, but the paint was now for the most part fallen off ;
the shingle roof was leaky, and let in the rain ; the weathercock
was rusty, and stuck at due east ; the planks of the wall had
started ; the door hardly hung upon its hinges ; the glass of the
windows was broken ; and the whole structure was so crazy
that I wonder it kept together, and did not either tumble to
pieces or slip down the steep bank into the ooze of the creek.
In this summer-house the great czar Peter, when he was learn-
ing how to build ships in Deptford Yard, would, it was said,
sometimes come to sit with his princes or heyducs, on a sum-
mer evening, to drink brandy, to look at the ships, and to med
itate how best to convert his enslaved Muscovites into the like-
ness of free and honest English sailors. We had small respect
for the memory of the czar, but as for the old summer-house,
it was all our own, because no one used it except ourselves.
For us it was a fortress or castle where we could play at being
besieged, the ships in the river representing the enemy's fleet.
Jack would sally forth and perform prodigies of valor in bring-
ing in provisions for the garrison. Or it was our ship, in which
we sustained imaginary broadsides, and encountered shipwreck,
and were cast away, Jack being captain and Castilla the pas-
senger, while I was alternately bo's'n, first lieutenant, or cook,
according to the exigencies of the situation. But very soon
Jack grew too big for these games, and left us to ourselves.
Then we fell to more quiet sport.

It was pleasant to watch
the ships go up and down the river, and fine to see how the
tide rushed up the creek below us, making whirlpools and ed-
dies, and setting upright the boats lying on their sides in the
mud, and trying to tear down the bank on which stood our
rickety palace. We seemed to know every craft, from the
great East - Indiaman to the Margate hoys or the Gravesend
tilt-boats, by face, so to speak, just as we knew the faces of the
naval officers who walked about the town. And, thanks to
Jack, we knew the history of every ship of the king's navy
which came to Deptford, and all the engagements and actions
in which she had ever taken part.

like a medieval walled city........

2011-07-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

The dockyard, like a medieval walled city, with its houses, workshops, docks, slips and basin was laid out in the Tudor Period. This Tudor layout is till extant. The streets, roads and ways through the yard will still be present in some form, such as the perpendicular access alongside the docks and slipways and the routes around the basin. Many of the routes of access through the yard have been in existence and use for five hundred years. As many of the buildings and the positions of the major industrial installations such as docks survived from the Tudor period of the yard until the mid 1950's, the early Tudor layout of the routes, roads and railways continued to remain in use.

These routes are as much a characteristic feature of the yard as the dockyard structures themselves. Indeed, they are structures. In 1860 Monsieur Chevallier remarked on and recorded in drawings the granite longitudinal paved roads within Portsmouth yard. He also remarked on and recorded in drawings the early railtracks. The ways through the site at Deptford were fashioned in an identical manner to those in Portsmouth and are shown here in photographs from the 1950's. The tracks that are still present in Portsmouth and railways at Chatham have recently been restored, contributing to the overall historic landscape.

Some of the roads at Deptford have evolved from their Tudor origins and were re-made at the end of the nineteenth century during the tenure of the Foreign Cattle Market. These roads express the evolution of the site. The granite cobbled streets at Deptford yard are currently being unearthed during archaeological excavations.

Current policy highlights the need to preserve and maximise such early characteristics of heritage sites such as these routes, especially where they constitute "spaces between" and contribute to more recognisable assets.

These routes are significant components of the historic environment and the opportunity is there to ensure that their contribution is fully expressed in the new development. It is the responsibilty of English Heritage and of Lewisham Planning to ensure that Deptford is not excluded from the benefits of publicly funded heritage policy.

2020 Vision: An Imaginary Voyage through Deptford

2011-07-23T07:51:00.001-07:00

An Imaginary Voyage Through Deptford 2020

Since we had passed the statue, Jack was convinced he was as tall as Peter the Great, until we got to Twinkle Park and he could no longer see us above the bulrushes. Besides, now Jack was dwarfed by the giant Red Lion. The lion had recently been repainted. I quite liked the graffiti and hoped it would stay but since the lion commemorates the pub that stood on the site of the park it apparently has to be red. It’s been here a long time. The Red Lion was one of the first in a series of sculptures that commemorate the pub names that surrounded the dockyard. There used to be dozens of such pubs. There was also the Red Cow. Along Prince Street near the Dog and Bell there was the Lord Nelson, the Navy Arms that used to be the Rose and Crown, then the Griffin directly opposite, The Peter the Great Tavern was in the dockyard itself, well that’s re-opened so it doesn’t have a sculpture, the Globe that features in Pepys diary is still there on Evelyn Street ….. On Watergate Street, the Bull and Butcher, there was a lot of fuss at first because everyone thought the sculpture of the butcher shouldn’t be a woman, until they learned about the Gut Girls in the Foreign Cattle Market. Anyway the sculptures have added a lot of colour to the area and there were all made by artists that had worked at the Faircharm state when it was largely studios. Then there was the Mansion House and the Three Jolly Sailors right by the Upper Watergate. I can’t remember them all.

The children started to sing “Twinkle twinkle….” They were singing and laughing as they skipped ahead through the old dockyard gate, I discreetly turned one last time to catch a glimpse of the serene Chinese woman we’d been watching, deeply absorbed in her Tai Chi. Her presence seemed to draw together all the elements of the little park, the trees, the rocks and water. The blackness of the moorhens scattering across the pond seemed suddenly more intense amongst the bright yellow iris. I felt hypnotized as the woman moved her arms and hands in meticulous slow motion…….

“Twinkle twinkle little star…..” they shouted at the tops of their voices as they ran into the Clerk of the Cheque’s garden chasing each other around the neat squares of box hedging and around the ‘witches hat’ bay trees and the ‘ice-cream’ twirled yew trees. They were immediately stopped in their tracks and went completely silent as they laid eyes on the brightly coloured Nicki de Saint Phalle moving sculptures in the Head Dock. I knew the children would love them but didn’t say anything to them as I wanted to see their reaction. The brightly coloured sculptures were on loan from the Centre Pompidou in Paris and did look wonderful swirling and dipping close to the water. We stood watching for a while on the bridge that crosses the gates of the head dock. As I looked down at the monumental stone blocks that make up the dock my mind drifted to the now absent noise of the hammering, sawing, calling of the shipwright’s over maybe more than five centuries of labour in this dock. I had almost forgotten that Jane was joining us today because she wanted to see the newly opened dockyard Officer’s gardens that had been restored according to details shown on some early plans. Apparently, Jane said, there was a direct correspondence with the plans and the traces of fountains and pathways that were found during archaeology. In the case of the dockyard gardens Deptford was following the hugely successful restoration of the Officers’ Gardens in the dockyard at Chatham. We had been to see those so Jane was especially interested to see how Deptford’s would compare.

I knew that Jane would be meticulous about her visit, she had been looking forward to the opening of the gardens and every time she had come to view the progress of the restoration and the contemporary re-interpretation of John Evelyn’s Sayes Court Garden, she would try to get a peek through the fence to check the progress of the gardens of the Officer’s Terrace, and of course to check that the designs were accurate. Jane had managed to get a copy of an original print of the dockyard from 1753 that showed the officers’ gardens in detail. It was Jane who had told me about Deptford dockyard’s links to Kew Gardens. Every time she visits she always brings Strelizia, bird of paradise flowers and as she puts them in the vase, it’s as if she’s never uttered the words before, she begins to tell the story of Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz being fetched from the Elbe in the Royal Charlotte Yacht to marry George III. She had managed to find a copy of the Scots magazine on Ebay that contained a contemporary account of the events, how the Royal Charlotte yacht was prepared for the voyage in the basin at Deptford. I said it must be copy but she’s convinced it’s an original from 1761. As she arranges the flowers she describes how the crew “were dressed at his majesties private expense in a red uniform with gold laced hats, light grey stockings with buckles and pumps,” Jane can go on forever about the number of nationally significant voyages started in the dockyard at Deptford, Raleigh, Drake, Frobisher, Cook……..Somehow it doesn’t matter what we’re discussing, eventually it all comes back to Deptford, one way or another, the origin of the Bank of England with the East India Company, the origin of the National Trust with Sayes Court, the discovery of Australia, the founding of the first British colonies in America. Just about everything, the first salaried and pensioned workers, I’ve usually stopped paying attention at this stage, and also something to do with dockyard labourers from Deptford erecting the palm house at Kew, and something to do with an entire garden being sent from Kew to the dockyard to be shipped to Catherine the Great and Potemkin who were crazy for English gardens. Everything either started in Deptford or comes back to Deptford, oh including the Golden Hinde that of course did both! I’m not sure where she gets this stuff from but she must be talking some sense.
Jane has now been asked to be a trustee for the Sayes Court Young Peoples’ Program but that’s based on her years of youth work all over London rather than her encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of Deptford. It’s an incredible opportunity for her to be able to bring together her two areas of expertise but she doesn’t see it that way at all, she absolutely believes in the power of planting and gardening, to transform these kids lives. Well at least it gives them a good qualification with real experience and practice behind it and the opportunity of getting a good job. She’s already been involved in the project as a volunteer and even got her sister’s boy a place on the apprenticeship scheme. He’d never done well at school, was always in trouble with the police and on one occasion it was quite serious. Anyway she got him a place on the youth training scheme and he loved it. He’s now working full time in the garden at Great Dixter. They’re one of the partners in the Sayes Court Garden Restoration along with Kew. Of course Jane reminds me she’s only following in the tradition of the McMillan sisters who caused an absolute uproar when they encouraged kids to plant vegetables in St. Nicholas churchyard. Apparently, Jane’s managed to persuade the guys who are constructing the Lenox replica ship that when it eventually launches she is going to strew the slipways with flowers from the Sayes Court gardens.
I know that Jane will want some peace for her visit to the garden, she can sit and walk for hours in Sayes Court, she never tires of it, so I take the children to see the foreshore finds at the Landing Place and Lookout. It’s great, part of the restored Look out building is a little café and you can look through the windows at the other section of the pavilion at a collection of fore-shore finds. It wasn’t difficult to replicate the little pavilion. They had been painted from various angles in several different John Cleveley paintings in the eighteenth century. Funny, he couldn’t possibly have known then what a resource he was leaving behind. But he was clearly a man who loved the dockyard. He must have painted it more than half a dozen times, each time finding some new detail, or new perspective. Jane did tell me either he was born in Deptford or was a shipwright in Deptford or maybe both. I once went to see one of his Deptford paintings up for sale in a gallery on Bond Street, you could get right up close and see the breath in the brushstroke. Someone once told me that an oil painting never fully dries out. Imagine, that moment of applying the paint, still present in the liquid surface. Now all the Cleveley paintings are back here in Deptford. I suppose since he lived here they must have all been painted here. Not all are the originals, the Maritime Museum have permanently loaned theirs and the Science Museum still had one which they gave to the Deptford Lenox Trust which gave them some capital enabling them to raise further funds. The Paul Mellon Foundation loaned theirs from Yale for the exhibition that they sponsored called ‘Mapping Deptford: drawings, paintings and plans from five hundred years 1513-2013’ and after the exhibition they allowed their Cleveley to remain permanently in Deptford. Oh, and one is a copy of one painting still in private hands. So that’s all the John Cleveley Seniors and there are a few John Cleveley Junior’s on display with the 1774 scale model and a number of ships models actually displayed in the model making rooms where they were made. No, actually, that can’t be right because I remember last time we went to the Master Shipwright’s Offices, Jane had told me that the Master Shipwright’s Repository, the Model Making and Drawing Rooms were only added in 1805 and some of the models are much earlier than that. I think I fell asleep when she was telling me about how Brigadier General Sir Samuel Bentham, who had added the top floor range to the Office, had been obscured by his more renowned brother Jeremy Betham, but was in fact the great-unsung hero of the Industrial Revolution. That’s why she sent me several links to websites and articles about him, again, something to do with building a navy for Potemkin and Catherine the Great. Anyway thanks to John Cleveley the Landing Place and Look pavilions could be accurately reconstructed with measurements taken from other plans of the yard. It was a cool idea to use the pavilion for a café and for the permanent finds exhibition. Most of the finds came from the foreshore in front of the dockyard, Lots of the finds have been donated by people who had been collecting pieces for years and wanted them to be where they would be understood and appreciated the most. There is even one piece from the Viking times found in the area of the early mast pond, which even though its tiny, the kids love it and its an easy name for them to remember. It’s called Viking snap and it was a kind of currency worn as jewelry. This is my favourite part of the dockyard because there is a story attached to each find on display and every now and then new finds are displayed so it’s a constantly evolving exhibition that everyone can participate in. One of my favourite pieces is the buckle from a rifle belt that came from a soldier on a ship that was on its way to fight on the royalist side in the American War of Independence, its quite faint but you can make out the writing on it that says, Loyal County Wicklow Rangers. Jack thinks its from a football team, but what actually happened was that the ship had left Ireland with loyalists to fight on behalf of the Crown and as the ship was crossing the Atlantic its mast broke and it had to return to Deptford to be repaired. It must have been dropped by a soldier here and remained on the foreshore all that time. Jane managed to find that out, don’t ask me how. My other favourite piece is a little brass Estee Lauder lipstick from the World War II. It had never been used. I wonder whether it was a marine or a Deptford lass that threw the lipstick in the river? Still it lasted for over fifty years in the Thames! I’m not sure what that says about the lipstick. Attached to this item is the story that 11 U.S. Marines were killed at the quayside of the dockyard when a V2 rocket hit their LSTs moored up here after the Sicily landings. I hadn’t realized, till Jane pointed it out, that the two great steel girders rising up above the tide from the foreshore depict the number eleven at the exact spot where they died. The names of the marines that were killed that day are soldered onto the steel girders above the tide-line. The people behind the memorial had tried to get the then president Barack Obama to open the memorial but his wife came instead.
Its incredible really that there is all this stuff, going back to the Vikings and even WWII and yet most of it is really small stuff but they also hold the keys to such huge stories that are significant moments in history. Georgia is always sure she’s going to find something from the Viking period. She never gives up, even though she mostly only finds clay pipes. She’s got quite a collection already and is so proud that one of her pipes is on display in the Landing Place Pavilion. Apparently it’s a very early pipe from about 1620. So she knows all about Sir Walter Raleigh and tobacco and why Virginia is called Virginia, not the tobacco but the state. She chose to write about it for a school project. It’s a good thing that the finds are displayed because it also helps people to know what to look for and its right by the landing steps that lead right down onto the foreshore so people can check things with the attendant when they come back after their mud-larking. What amazes me is the quality of the causeway leading from the Landing steps onto the foreshore. It was built in 1720 in front of the new storehouse and its still there, not a stone out of place. Keith was making us laugh the other day about the paving on the High Street that hasn’t lasted even ten years and this has been there for nearly three hundred years and how many tides? Two tides a day for 300 years. That’s something like well over 100,000 tides. Anyway, were not going down onto the foreshore today because today is a particularly special day as we’ve managed to get tickets to see the inside of the Lenox. Its so exciting and Jack can’t wait to get inside. We’ve been many times before, we got the residents reduced rate pass for multiple visits. So we’ve been plenty of times and it changes every time. The last time we came we spent time watching the canvas sewing. I thought it might be a bit boring but you got the chance to have a go and when Jack and Georgina realized that they could write their name on the sail, and this would then be sewn over they got really excited. In the end, Jack wrote his grandpa’s name. He used to love to come with us too, even though he knew he wouldn’t live long enough to see the ship afloat. He’d worked in naval dockyards himself where asbestos was rife, nobody thought a thing of it. Mesothelioma. The kids used to have a competition to see who could spell it correctly.
On board the Lenox the officers’ cabins are looking fantastic. Who would have believed that when the keel was laid and the timbers were up, even when the planking was finished, there were still some people who said it would never be finished? At least not even get this far? It’s remarkable how the officers’ cabins resemble the lovely paneled rooms in the Lenox Project house in Albury Street. It was such a stroke of luck for the Lenox project to get that house to use as offices for the duration of the project. It all adds to the overall connection of maritime Deptford, with St. Nicholas Church, The Victualling yard buildings and their ‘Deptford In WWI &WWII’ exhibition of the Supply Reserve Depot and then there’s the musical The Female Shipwright still playing at the Albany after its successful West-End run. Its been amazing to see the transformation of the dockyard after the return of Henry VIII’s foundation stone from 1513 and then the 1720 Clocktower and bell coming back, the opening up of the bright expanse of water in front of the Olympia sheds made complete sense and the number of people who stay to watch the caisson gate go up or down is incredible. It took me a while to see that the giant steel globe in the centre of the basin reflects the image of the Golden Hind, but in miniature. It’s really clever, because as the globe turns, you see this tiny reflection of the Golden Hind, circumventing the globe. As the visitor numbers grew to see the Lenox, the owners of the Golden Hind thought that it would be a good idea to bring the replica from St. Mary Ovary to Deptford where she really belongs. This encouraged the people who run the Endeavour to choose the basin at Deptford for her home in the western hemisphere. When the Lenox is finished she’ll also ride in the basin. It’s all happened quite naturally, it just snowballed. Now Deptford is the home to three replica ships and the Lenox Project are talking to the Maritime Museum about the return of the royal barges apparently the Guild of Shipwrights and some other City guilds that had links to Trinity House of Deptford Stronde are keen on funding this part of the project. Jane was telling me about Trinity Monday when all the great and the good took to their barges in the City of London to come to Deptford to come to elect a new master of the Bretheren of Trinity House of Deptford Stronde and to hear a sermon at St. Nicholas then there was a big knees-up in the Trinity Alms Houses. Of course the City of London has strong links to the dockyard, through Bridge House Estates and also the Corporation of London owned the site for the Foreign Cattle Market until it was requisitioned by the War Office to supply the troops in the field for WWI and WWII. The famous Cadbury’s chocolate bar tins were shipped from Deptford to battlefronts all over the world in 1912. Imagine a single site in London of this size still in one piece even after five hundred years, with so much history,
and yet it could have so easily been completely overlooked and become just another bland property speculation along the river.

Last time we were here, we got talking to a group from the Netherlands who had come straight here on the new ferry from Rotterdam and docked in Deptford just to see the Seven Bridges that cross the openings of the dock, slipways, basin and mast ponds along the waterfront. They had read about the Seven Bridges Project in an article in the Architectural Journal celebrating Deptford’s second Stirling Prize (the first was Laban) but were just as impressed with the environmental and ecological re-use of the mast ponds as a place for bird life on the Thames to nest and feed. I think Jane gave them a link to the eco-project website. Incredible really, one day is not long enough to visit all the sites, the temporary sculpture exhibition in the dry dock, the reconstruction of the Lenox, the gardens of the Officers’ Terrace and the Sayes Court Youth Project, the foreshore finds and the all the maps, plans, paintings and models of the yard no wonder people are ready for a sit down when they get to the Albany for ‘Female Shipwright’, the musical. Its quite incredible how the English language is so full of naval phrases, there’s lots of them in the musical, of course Jack’s favourite is “freezing the balls off a brass monkey” even though he now knows what it really means. The show has been such a success, a few weeks ago we couldn’t even get a table at our favourite Vietnamese restaurant in the High Street, Georgia loves their summer rolls.

Having a royal dockyard so close to London, that attracts so many hundreds of thousands of visitors has, apparently, what with all the publicity around the Lenox, what did the press call it? “a major national heritage enterprise”, ended up increasing the visits to Portsmouth, Chatham, Sheerness, Plymouth and even Pembroke. So now you can get a pass that allows access to all the yards, and it’s partly funded by Network Rail. It has something to do with Deptford being the first urban railway station in London, so Jane said.

The success of the Lenox project has really captured the imagination of the funders and there have been lots of spin off social projects. Now that Deptford has been twinned with all the former dockyard towns of the colonies there’s now an incredible School’s Exchange Program coming up where the youngsters can choose whether they go to Bermuda, Chennai, Malta, Simon’s Town or one of the many former overseas dockyard towns .You see, Deptford was the dockyard responsible for supplying all the overseas yards, so there have been links for centuries, according to Jane, everything from paper and ink to whatever was needed to build or repair a ship. There was even an entire flat-pack building sent to Bermuda in the 1800’s. But unlike the infamous furniture, this building lasted for years and still exists. It’s now pride of place in their dockyard. Anyway, for this school’s exchange, Georgia wants to go to Malta, where apparently the door-cases on the houses in Valetta are even more impressive than the ones in Albury Street. Georgia’s a keen artist and spent days drawing the door-cases on Albury Street. Her favorites were the little naked babies. Jack has plumbed for Simon’s Town in South Africa, he thinks he’ll see tigers and elephants there, not just penguins. Jane and I are off to Bermuda…Just kidding, but I have promised to go with her to see her sister in Yorkshire. I secretly want to go to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Ever since the Henry Moore Foundation decided to be the principal funder for Summer Sculpture on the Jetty it’s got me really interested in sculpture again. That project has recently expanded and now it now includes installations in the gardens at Laban and Jane said there’s talk of a exhibition coming from the Antoine Bourdelle Museum in Paris. I much prefer his work to Rodin. I hope the centaur gets to come along and the archer, they are both remarkable.

Who would have thought that all this potential, what does Jane call it, ‘historic cultural capital’, not the place, the stuff, the stories, was lying buried beneath just a few inches of concrete for a hundred years. Jack says it’s just like Sleeping Beauty, put to sleep by the wicked witch. I remember when someone asked me why do you still live in Deptford, and I remember saying it was the Cape Canaveral of its day that I didn’t know anywhere else in London that had so much history, so much latent potential and yet so little to show for it. It’s compelling. Now there’s all this. The replica of the Lenox is almost complete. Sayes Court garden receives more visitors each year as people come back again and again. Training on the Lenox Youth Project and Sayes Court Garden Project has given young people opportunities they would never had had. The international links that Deptford has re-made with other dockyard towns has broadened the horizons and raised the aspirations of many school pupils. Deptford is now a place where people come to stay in hotels, eat in the restaurants, see major international standard exhibitions of sculpture.
Who would have believed it a few years ago?

As we left the dockyard we passed through Twinkle Park, the Tai Chi woman was sitting by the rock under the birch tree and the Red Lion was now once again emblazoned with a striking black graffiti tag. It looked much better than before.

The Last Launch at Deptford?

2011-07-23T07:47:00.000-07:00

THE LAST LAUNCH AT DEPTFORD.
Loyalty and Lovingly Dedicated by Mr. Punch to H.RH. Princess Louise.
If there's a spirit of the tree, as fair Greek fable tells.
 And the green blood of the Dryad is the sap of acorn-bells,
 Not death, but higher life, befalls the Nymphs of the oak-trees  That are squared and shaped, and set to frame the ships that rule the seas.
And they were not doleful Dryads, but exulting ones that spread  Their unseen wings for shelter of Louise's gracious head,
 As she faced the nipping March wind, like a daughter of the sea,  To christen the last war-ship that from Deptford launched will be.
Lift high the wine, sweet Princess, and with blood-red baptism crown,  The bows, slow creeping streamwards, as the dog-shores are struck
down: And, fit name for last heart of oak that from Deptford-slips shall glide, Bid God speed " to The Druid, as she curtesies to the tide.
Tis the last launch from Deptford: the old yard has had its day;

 Times change and war-ships with them: oak yields to iron's sway:  There are wider slips and statelier sheds, and broader quays elsewhere,  And Wisdom says "concentrate," and Thrift says "save and spare."
Deptford is now a frowsy place, ill-smelling, dank and low,  Where muddy banks are eat away by a foul stream's festering flow:  Where low Vice haunts and flaunts, and flares, fed full on sailors' gains,  And threatening them with surer wreck than all lee-shores or mains.

But the Deptford that we look on, to whose yard we bid good bye,  Was once the Deptford, where, in pride. The Great Harry wont to lie;  Where, lusty King to lordly ship, from his Greenwich palace near,  Bluff King Hal among his shipwrights showed broad breast and face of cheer.
With delicate Anne Boleyn upon his brawny arm—  Lamb and Lion,—monarch's majesty, enhancing woman's charm—  To mark, well-pleased, how in his yard the work sped swift along,  from fair keel to tall top-side of swift pink and carrack strong.
And rapid ran the Ravensboume, a cleanly country stream,  Glassing in its bright bosom, brave attire, and banners' gleam,  When, fene'd in tower of jewelled ruff and tun of pearled robe.  Came good Queen Bess to welcome Cattain Drake from round the globe
'Twas in this very Deptford creek was drawn The Golden Hind,  Fragrant with spices of New Spain, rich with heap'd spoils of Ind,  As to bold Queen bold Buccaneer knelt on his own deck-board  Plain Captain Drake, and rose again Sib Francis from her sword.
Twas in Deptford yard, from reign to reign, the Petts* their credit
won, Handing their craft of ship-builder from famous sire to son; To Deptford smug Sam Pepys took boat, in Charles's thriftless day, To note "how still our debts do grow, and our fleet do decay."
And hither, from the fair-trimmed yews and hollies of Sayes Court,  Came a burly, bull-necked Muscovite, for labour and disport;  Sturdy swinker, lusty drinker; king with king, and tar with tar,  The Northern Demiurgus, Russ Prometheus, Peter Tzar.
Richer in slips and stores and sheds, there be other yards, I trow,  But none more rich in memories. Old Deptford yard, than thou.  It was well done and worthily of a Princess fair and sweet,  To christen the last war-babe, born

of thee into our fleet.
And may The Druid ne'er disgrace the parentage she owns,  Or mar the glorious memories that spring from Deptford stones:  May she bear her worthy England, and the white baud that but now  Has dashed the wine of baptism upon her shapely bow!

• The Petts were the hereditary ship- builder* of the English navy from the days of James The First to those of James The Second.
A Third Co

Foundation Stone 1513

2011-07-10T09:42:00.000-07:00

once upon a time...A vision for Deptford

2011-07-10T09:39:00.001-07:00

worldwide interest in Deptford

2011-03-23T07:23:00.000-07:00

whilst its always fascinating to see where people are reading the blog, and encouraging that so many people in so many places across the world are interested in Deptford's history, from Mexico to Moscow, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia to New Cross, its especially interesting to see that today someone from Baghdad is taking an interest. Perhaps it has something to do with heritage assets at risk?

naval dockyards society Facebook

2011-03-12T12:40:00.000-08:00

For more information on naval dockyards and all subjects related to the Navy please see 'naval dockyards society' facebook page

Heritage Assets At Risk: King’s Yard, Convoy’s Wharf Deptford

2011-03-04T02:45:00.000-08:00

This article follows two extensive pieces of research carried out in response to a recent decision by English Heritage not to recommend statutory protection on the heritage assets at the former Royal Naval Dockyard at Deptford. For the purposes of brevity I have not included all the data contained in those responses. As a result of the submission of the material to English Heritage demonstrating significant errors in their research, the decision that had been ratified by DCMS is currently being reviewed.

Heritage Assets At Risk: King’s Yard, Convoy’s Wharf Deptford
December 2010
Chris Mazeika

The Royal Dockyards are amongst the most long-lived, extensive and coherent monuments to the history of the United Kingdom. Many of the industrial, technological, military and social changes that occurred in the post-modern and modern periods are embedded within their surviving fabric.
Anthony Firth, Wessex Archaeology 2004.

The royal dockyard at Deptford is understudied in comparison with other royal dockyards leading to the oft-repeated statement that little of the dockyard at Deptford survives. However, in The Encyclopedia of Historical Archaeology (Charles Orser 2002), David Divers writes,

“Trial excavations, prior to the redevelopment of the dockyard site, have revealed that most of the main features of the dockyard, the storehouses, dry docks, slipways, ponds and the basin still survive below ground level.”

Whilst more recent developer led archaeology seeks to diminish this statement, it does not contradict this summary view.

In the past, historic assets at Deptford have remained largely disregarded by the elite of heritage officials. In 1954, whilst the dry dock for the Cutty Sark was being constructed in Greenwich, Deptford was witnessing the demolition of Henry VIII’s Great Storehouse of 1513, the earliest naval building in the country. Thirty years later, in 1984, the last of the 1720’s storehouse with its fine early Georgian clock-tower and belfry were swept away. At the present time, some £40 million is being spent rebuilding the Cutty Sark after it was destroyed by fire. By the time Deptford dockyard approaches its quintentenary in 2013, it could remain buried under the development proposed by Hutchison Whampoa. None of the dockyard structures proper, its’ docks, slips, basins or mast ponds are yet to receive statutory heritage protection. This is a state of play that places Deptford outside of the resources expended on statutory protection and may amount to a form of social exclusion. The imminent development of the site of the dockyard seeks to leave no trace of the former dockyard other than the GII listed basin slipway covers, and landscaping over the Tudor double dry dock.

How has this deplorable neglect by the statutory agencies charged and publicly funded to protect heritage assets arisen?

In the 1999/2000 Alan Howarth review of heritage assets in royal dockyards Deptford was omitted form consideration.
Another serious problem lies in the resources that English Heritage has employed to determine the significance of Henry VIII’s royal dockyard at Deptford. To date the secondary source material depended on by English Heritage to assess the significance of Deptford dockyard consists of three sources. These are, Jonathan Coad’s The Royal Dockyards, 1690-1850: Architecture and Engineering Works of the Sailing Navy (Scholar Press 1989), English HeritageThematic Survey of English Naval Dockyards. Summary Report: Thematic Listing Programme (Lake and Douet, 1998) and Heritage Protection Department, English Heritage, Maritime and Naval Buildings Selection Guide (March 2007).

Whilst it is widely recognized that Jonathan Coad is the pre-eminent historian of architecture and engineering in the royal yards, data on Deptford dockyard did not substantially inform Coad’s study. To date, assessment of the significance of the royal dockyards has so far been achieved without the inclusion of data concerning the dockyard at Deptford. Therefore, the whole understanding of the sequential development in all of the yards requires review once data concerning Deptford royal dockyard is incorporated. The opportunity provided by secondary stage archaeology at Deptford may reveal insights to the development of the yards where such archaeology is not presently possible at the other royal dockyards.

Due to the omission of data on Deptford in the studies listed above several conclusions asserted by the authors are incorrect and have impacted negatively on a precise understanding of the heritage assets at Deptford.

This article is developed from a report sent to EH, following their recent decision not to confer statutory heritage protection on the surviving dockyard structures at Deptford. These consist of the double dry dock, the wet dock (basin) slipways deserve attention because, like the 1513 storehouse (SAM), they too have their origin in the Tudor period. The mast ponds, whilst later, dated to c.1650 and c.1765 also deserve further study. Perhaps more crucially, because Deptford has so far remained immured from research agendas, its further study through extensive archaeology will have implications for our understanding of the contribution it makes to the development of royal dockyards as a whole and for its contribution to developments in domestic architecture in Europe, as well of for its contributions to civil engineering in the early nineteenth century.

As one, if not the earliest of royal naval yards, the survival of its earliest plan illuminates the Tudor and Stuart organization of dockyards while its Restoration and Hanoverian expansions remain intact. The presence on the site of two essentially domestic examples of dockyard architecture, the Queen Anne, Master Shipwright’s House of 1708 and the Officers’ Offices of 1720 both testify to earlier eponymous structures built on the same sites. As the site of the first wet dock c.1517, this technology was later exported to the Medway and south coast yards.

The recent designation report relating to Deptford dockyard commissioned by EH in June 2010 and certified by the DCMS, contained several errors. This has been challenged by primary source research leading to the decision being reviewed. The review is currently underway. The detailed information here based on primary archive based research is intended as a positive contribution to the new assessment in November 2010.

Assessment of Secondary Resources

Coad, J.G., The Royal Dockyards 1690-1850: Architecture and Engineering Works of the Sailing Navy (1989)
Lake, J. and Douet, J., The Naval Dockyards: A Thematic Survey (1998 English Heritage, unpublished report)
Heritage Protection Department, English Heritage, Maritime and Naval Buildings Selection Guide (March 2007)

Jonathan Coad’s seminal book, The Royal Dockyards, 1690-1850 did not substantially cover the upper Thames yards of Deptford and Woolwich. The omission of information on Deptford in particular means that many conclusions based on comparison of the yards reached by Coad in 1989 can and should now be revised. Lake and Douet’s 1998 survey in advance of the Alan Howarth review of the listing and scheduling of the royal yards in 2000 depended heavily on Coad’s work, “Jonathan Coad has been involved in the study of naval dockyard facilities for nearly thirty years, and the great bulk of information relating to specific buildings, within this report and in the list descriptions, is indebted to his research.” (Lake and Douet 1998:101) Further EH Maritime and Naval Buildings Selection Guide Heritage Protection Department March 2007, repeats the errors and omissions made by Coad and those made by Lake and Douet.

Coad’s omissions are compounded in the Lake and Douet survey. Lake and Douet’s dependence on Coad’s work shows how errors of omission and definitions of significance have continued to ignore Deptford’s contribution as the earliest Naval dockyard proper. This assertion that Deptford is the earliest naval yard, described as “the cradle of the navy” continues to be a controversial claim due to the commissioning of a double dry dock for Henry VII at Portsmouth. However, the facilities at Portsmouth were not substantially developed until the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Whilst Woolwich can claim the building of Henry Grace a Dieu in 1512, it was at Deptford that Henry VIII chose to erect his cipher in 1513.

Assessing Significance

Current practice at EH singles out individual components of the dockyard for assessment of their heritage significance.
This approach is challenged based on EH’s own recommendations that,

“A holistic approach should be taken where several original or near contemporary associated structures survive together or where a group of structures displays the evolution of port facilities in one significant place.”
Maritime and Naval Buildings Selection Guide 2007:05

The Deptford site, as with any dockyard, is made up of its constituent parts as an interrelated whole. The history of the development of the yard begins with the double dock, slips, Great Storehouse and basin, together forming the earliest foundation of the yard, c.1513-1517. There is record of royal ships being built, repaired and stored at the Deptford site prior to 1513.
The areas occupied by the mast ponds are well-documented expansions of the yard in the 17th and 18th centuries. In terms of dockyard functions and the interdependence of the structures under consideration here, the Navy depended on all of these structures combined for the build, repair and maintenance of its fleet. Therefore to attempt to single out individual structures for historic significance lacks an intellectual rigor and is counter to English Heritage publicly stated policy and guidelines, since the double dry dock and the basin are all extant c.1517, together they form the earliest part of the yard. It seems to make no sense not to confer SAM status on the far greater material survival of the Basin and double dry dock which both also have their origin in the Tudor period.

Further, the royal naval dockyard at Deptford ought not to be reviewed in isolation from the royal naval victualling yard immediately adjacent to the west, the royal naval hospital at Greenwich to the east, St. Nicholas Church, Deptford the “Westminster Abbey of the British Navy” or the GII* listed Albury Street to the south. If a truly holistic approach is sought commensurate with EH Capitalising on the Historic Landscape (October 2009) then it is time to acknowledge and recognize all of the above when considering the listing and scheduling of Deptford dockyard. It is time to recognize that the existent of the World Heritage Site of Historic Maritime Greenwich depends on the royal dockyard at Deptford for its origins.

Significant Data

The 2009, 2010, first stage developer led archaeology by the Museum of London did not place its trenches to find the most significant remains on the site. When questioned on the apparent haphazardness of the placement of trenches, Duncan Hawkins, leading the work, has claimed that maps and plans that cover a period of 1688 to 1939 can be as much as three metres out and are therefore unreliable. However, given that these plans were often drawn up by the leading cartographers of their time and given the correspondence between such maps and plans and further considering the limited space available say between the Master Shipwright’s House and the Double Dry Dock, his response is highly questionable.

The following significant components have so far been omitted from archaeological investigations. These omissions seriously weaken present attempts to assess both heritage and archaeological significance.

1. Head dock and gates to head dock of the double dry dock
2. Gates to the mast pond of the 17th and another gate of the 18th century
3. 18th gates to basin and the John Rennie floating caisson of the 19th century
4. Stone Slipways to boathouses
5. Officers’ Palace front Terrace
6. River Steps 1720

Deptford’s significant contributions to the development of the royal dockyards requiring reassessment:

Officers’ Terrace
Officers’ Offices
Double Dry Dock
Wet Dock/Basin
Iron Slipway Covers
Slipways
Mast Ponds
River wall and King’s Stairs

Specific Amendments and Corrections to Coad (1989) and to Lake and Douet (1998) Heritage Protection Department (2007)

Lake and Douet’s 1998 survey reads,

“At the smaller yards abandoned during the nineteenth century, Deptford, Woolwich and Harwich, no features of interest, apart from those already protected, have survived.” (Lake and Douet 1998:05)

Coad’s book covers the period 1690 -1850 by which time Deptford, as a royal dockyard, has been in existence for almost two hundred years. Henry VII commissioned the building of a double dock at Portsmouth in 1495, however before the middle of the seventeenth century this had fallen into disrepair and its use was discontinued. There is also evidence of a dock at Deptford as early as 1420 when the Katrine came from Greenwich to be put on the stocks in a “dook” at Deptford. (Hasted History of Kent: Maritime History :337)

Archaeology by CgMs and Pre-Construct Archaeology in 2000 (Hawkins) 2000 (Lowe), 2001 (Divers) disproves Lake and Douet’s 1998 assertion that at Deptford “no features of interest, apart from those already protected, have survived.”

Archaeology has proven that “by far the greater part of the dockyard survives as buried structures filled in intact between 1869 and 1950.” (Divers 2002)

At Rochefort dockyard on the river Charente in France, the
in-filling of docks with mud, that occurred after the closure of the yard, has been proven to have performed a conservation function for almost a hundred years permitting the excavation of the docks and basins providing for their present day re-use.
(See http://www.hermione.com/en/)

Archaeology reports of the Deptford site state, “The structures of the yard proper, the docks, slips, basins, mast ponds landing places and stairs, constitute a substantial architectural fabric that is currently extant, though largely invisible, being covered by superficial accretion or infill.” (David Divers. Jan 2001:12/ 3.5.14).

With regard to the impact of developments subsequent to infill Divers adds, “major dockyard features survive across much of the site and that later activities on the site have had relatively little impact on these remains.” (Divers 2001:69/9.1.4)

Divers concludes, “the evaluation has established that the major features of the dockyard have survived in their predicted locations with little evidence for widespread truncation by later activities on the site.” (Divers 2001:71/9.4.2)

These statements above have not been contested by the 2010 archaeology reports. Where truncation has occurred even at depths of more than 3m, this truncation proves to be isolated given the vast expanse of the majority of structures under consideration.

The majority of above ground dockyard buildings survived into the post WWII period, as evidenced by a series of photographs of the Supply Reserve Depot c.1953. The large and small Smitheries, Joiner’s workshop, Account’s Office, Coach house and stable belonging to the dockyard, were taken down and sold off piece-meal in June 1872. The majority demolition of royal dockyard buildings at Deptford occurs in the thirty-year period 1954 to 1984. Construction phases therefore occur post 1954. Plans of building phases throughout this period in the National Archives and London Metropolitan Archives as well as Local Authority Archives allow for thorough analysis of potential truncation of historic structures by these mid to late twentieth century building phases.
As the majority of buildings constructed post-war were warehouse buildings, these ephemeral structures, as confirmed by archaeology, created little truncation and where this has occurred it is likely to have had minimal impact.

Wet Dock/Basin

The pond at Deptford that becomes the wet dock or basin is a naturally occurring feature that may prove to be the logical reason, alongside established shipbuilding skills in the area, for Henry VIII’s decision to site the dockyard at Deptford in 1513. By 1517 we know that the King’s ships, including the Mary Rose ride safely in the pond there.

In relation to wet docks (basins) Coad credits Dummer with their development as a solution to the risk of damage to ships from storms “The solution, first adopted at the south coast yards in the 1690’s, was the construction of wet docks.’ (Coad1989:89) In Dummer’s survey of 1698 the wet dock is detailed in 1688. By 1690, the date given by Coad for the first provision of wet docks in royal yards, a wet dock had been in operation at Deptford for almost two hundred years. (BL Add.6555)
It is clear from the letter from Chatham to the Navy Commissioners, that the expertise in the construction of wet docks was transmitted from the Deptford Officers and artificers.

Chatham Hill House. Oct. 1, Sir John Mennes, Sir W. Batten and Peter Pett to the Navy Commissioners.

“The making the wet dock is of so great concernment that we desire you to send a warrant and a letter to Capt. Badily, master attendant at Deptford, and Jonas Shish, the assistant, Mr. Johnson, the shipwright at Blackwall, and Mr. Castle at Redruth to repair here by next Friday morning to join two or three able men of the Trinity House and such others as we shall appoint to view where it is to be made, resolve on the manner and estimate the charge, that so we may have full satisfaction while we are here and be better able to give the account when we come to London. We desire also that Mr. Randle, the house carpenter at Deptford that made the dock there, may come down.”

However, EH Maritime and Naval Buildings Selection Guide Heritage Protection Department March 2007 repeats the error of claiming the origin of wet docks with the south coast yards,
“The first wet docks – where lock gates enclosed and maintained artificial expanses of water – were constructed for repairs by the Royal Navy at Portsmouth and Devonport (Plymouth) in the late seventeenth century.” By this time, Deptford’s wet dock had been holding ships for almost two hundred years when it was surveyed and valued by Dummer in 1698 at £2,659.2.7. The gates themselves were valued at £164.

As the first wet dock, the basin at Deptford offered a model of benefits free from tidal shifts, allowing ease of access to ships from the quay. In 1517, at Deptford, the basin held the Monarchs’ ships safe from harm. The Great Basin was an early resource of the King’s Yard, mentioned in an Indenture of 1517 (BL Add.6555), as holding amongst other ships the Mary Rose. The Basin was also the site of testing early diving bells by John Evelyn, (Diary 19 July, 1661). In Charnock's "History of Marine Architecture" it is given,

"A note how many ships the King's Majesty (Henry VIII.) hath in harbour, on the 18th day of September, in the 13th year of his reign (1521); what portage they be of; what estate they be in the same day; also where they ride and be bestowed." From this we are enabled to see what use was made of Deptford as a naval station at that time:—"The Mary Rose, being of the portage of 600 tons, lying in the pond at Deptford beside the storehouse there, &c. The John Baptist, and Barbara, every of them being of the portage of 400 tons, do ryde together in a creke of Deptford Parish, &c. The Great Nicholas, being of portage 400 tons, lyeth in the east end of Deptford Strond, &c. … The Great Barke, being of portage 250 tons, lyeth in the pond at Deptford, &c. The Less Barke, being of the portage of 180 tons, lyeth in the same pond, &c. The twayne Row Barges, every of them of the portage of 60 tons, lye in the said pond, &c. The Great Galley, being of portage 800 tons, lyeth in the said pond, &c." (http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45272)
Also is found,
Oct. 12 Hen. VIII., wages of caulkers caulking the Mary Rose
in the pound at Deptford, 6d. a day. To 7 men who helped to
"plumpe" the Mary Rose for a day and a night, 2s. 8d. Total,
219l. 2s.
The Great Basin continued as the place for the safekeeping of the royal yachts and the royal barges were laid up at Deptford until its closure in 1869.
http://www.mod.uk/defenceinternet/aboutdefence/whatwedo/defenceestateandenvironment/modartcollection/ministryofdefenceartcollectionlaunchofa60gunshipatdeptfordc1720.htm (accessed 22/12/09)

Double Dry Dock

Coad, Lake and Douet omit the c.1517-1869 Double dry dock at Deptford from their studies. Yet nowhere else in England, other than at Deptford, can be witnessed a double dry dock with its origins in the Tudor period that testifies to the transition from timber to stone construction of docks. The unique status of the double dock at Deptford is enhanced by its history of construction and the development phases it expresses.
An account of the visit of the French national, Monsieur V. Chevallier, to the various yards in England published in1860, records that at Deptford in respect of the double dry dock, the head dock is constructed in stone whilst the stern dock is constructed from wood. This is new and vitally important information on the materiality of the double dry dock. The stone used to construct the dry dock may be that referred to in letters dated c.1756 detailing stone to be brought from Weymouth for the rebuilding of the dock.
Stone docks in-filled for almost a hundred years at Rochefort have since been excavated and found to be in good state of preservation. Within fifteen years, by 1875 the dock at Deptford was in-filled.

The double dock at Deptford, is the earliest sole surviving example of a Tudor double dry dock testifying to the transition from timber to stone construction.

Slips

Slips number five in total at Deptford, No.1 is to the west of the basin mouth, no.’s 2 and 3, are found off the basin under the iron sheds (Olympia listed GII) and no.’s 4&5 are located to the east of the basin mouth before the storehouse.

Building slip No.5 immediately to the west of the storehouse was lengthened in c.1858 at the cost of £54,000 to receive the 36 to 40 gun frigate Ariadne constructed on the model of the American Merrimak. (Chevallier 1860:11)
EH Maritime and Naval Buildings Selection Guide 2007 recommends protection for,
“buildings that were innovative in design; are well preserved; or display alterations that illustrate the technology of accommodating larger ships.”

Given the date and cost of the new work, archaeology may discover that the slip was reformed in stone. Considering the closure of the yard within ten years and an imminent infill of the slip, there is a strong potential for high quality survival.

For a rigorous intellectual coherence in listing to be achieved, commensurate with the English Heritage call for “an holistic approach to be taken where several original or near contemporary associated structures survive together or where a group of structures displays the evolution of port facilities in one significant place”, it will be necessary to consider the origin, function and context of the iron slipway covers.

Slips are first shown off the wet dock in Dummer’s survey of 1688. The earliest slips may have been present in the 1500’s and those in the Dummer survey are the direct ancestors of today’s basin slips. The slips beneath the slipway covers are reformed at the time of building the slipway covers shown on a plan signed by George Baker. (NMM ADM/Y/D11 5th Oct 1844) The slips were designed by Royal Engineer Capt. George Denison. Construction drawings detailing the materials used survive.
This makes the present slipways contemporaneous structures integral to the slipway covers in time and in function and part of a series of developments to accommodate larger ships. At most this makes the slipways little more than twenty years old before they were in filled and therefore the likelihood of a good state of preservation is high, especially given that no building has taken place within the slipway covers.

The iron slipway covers at Deptford are the earliest surviving example of their kind. R.J.M Sutherland’s conjectural date of approximately 1846 for the surviving slipway covers at Deptford was made in 1989 and may now need to be reconsidered on further examination of the plan at the National Maritime Museum. The 1844 date of this plan showing the new slipways may suggest an even earlier date for the iron slipway covers than that of 1846 conjectured by Sutherland. Besides, following the demolition of the iron slipway covers at Pembroke and Portsmouth, Deptford maintains the earliest example of their kind.

As a complex of slipways, docks, basin and mast ponds, from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Deptford expresses a rich complex of dockyard structures that bear witness to the technological developments in shipbuilding from the age of sail to the iron-clads of the late nineteenth century.

The c.1846 George Baker slipway covers to the Basin Slipways though somewhat altered, still exhibit corrugated iron to their front and rear elevations. This is an original and early example of the use of corrugated iron and its presence and the fenestration pattern must therefore be recorded in the present listing of the covers to ensure future protection. Photographs c.1871 show the presence of this corrugated iron and the early fenestration pattern.

The 1846 George Baker slipway covers, the 1815 John Rennie basin mouth, The 1845 slipways by Denison are an example of what Lake and Douet, writing for English Heritage, refer to as “collaborative genius” between the private sector and royal engineers and the technological know-how found in the royal dockyards. As the earliest surviving example of iron slipway covers as a first technological advancement and the second technological advancement (considering John Rennie’s personal note indicating a change to his practice of building dock gates based on his collaboration on the Basin caisson-gate with William Stone, Master Shipwright at Deptford), the high potential for good survival of the twin slipways being contemporaneous with the innovative iron slipway covers, it is hoped that the English Heritage review will consider these constituent elements in the light of their own advice for “an holistic approach to be taken where several original or near contemporary associated structures survive together or where a group of structures displays the evolution of port facilities in one significant place”.

The restoration of the basin as an inland body of water allows for an enhancement of the legibility of one of the earliest functional structures of the yard, the basin c.1517. The iron slipway covers being the earliest surviving example of their kind contribute to the significance of the earliest wet dock complex in a royal yard in England recorded as functioning from the early 1500’s to the late nineteenth century, c.1895, indeed for some four centuries.

Officers’ Terrace

In his book, The Royal Dockyards 1690-1850, Coad states that the Plymouth terrace commences building in 1692 and is apparently finished by the end of 1696. (Coad 1989:53 ADM 106/2158 pt.1) Coad’s claim that the Plymouth terrace was “the earliest to be designed and built as a single unit” is challenged by the Deptford Terrace.

In relation to the development of royal dockyard officers’ housing, Lake and Douet claim,
“The earliest was the former Devonport Officer's Terrace, (now part of South Yard and largely destroyed by bombing), which was built between 1692 and 1696 under the direction of the Surveyor, Edward Dummer.”

However had the authors fully consulted King’s MS 43, Dummer’s renowned survey of the royal dockyards of 1698, the plans of Deptford show that the Deptford principal officers’ terrace was in place by 1688, and extraordinarily may even be the same terrace as shown in Evelyn’s annotated map of Deptford c.1623. Deptford Master Shipwright Jonas Shish writes to the Navy Commissioner’s on June 22nd 1665 on account of repairs needed to the Clerk of the Survey’s House amounting to £12. (ADM 106/ 28- June 22nd)
Therefore the modest Deptford palatial terrace is clearly evidenced as being built prior to Devonport and as such Deptford not Devonport as Lake and Douet have claimed “shows the earliest instance in Britain of a palace front terrace.”
The terrace at Deptford accommodated the Master Attendant, Clerk of the Survey, Clerk of the Cheque, Builder’s Assistant, Storekeeper, and Surgeon. The total value ascribed to the terrace by Dummer in 1698 was £3,662. The most expensive house was the corner house occupied by the Clerk of the Cheque valued at more than £950. The Master Shipwright was accommodated in the house alongside the double dry dock valued at a mere £111. In 1705 this causes Master Shipwright Joseph Allin to petition the Navy Board for a new house.

In relation to the Devonport terrace Lake and Douet continue, “Furthermore it predates Mansart's Place Vendome in Paris, finished in 1698 and usually credited as the first full development of the palace front in Europe.” (Lake and Douet 1998:82) This honour too must be credited to Deptford where a regular fenestration pattern and rhythm together with centralized and rhythmical door placement form the simple but clear palace front. Lake and Douet state “the development of palace-front terraces within the dockyards is of considerable significance in the evolution of English architecture. This form of unified planning was widely used during the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth century, and is considered one the country's particular contributions to European architectural history.” (Lake and Douet 1998:87) It is therefore Deptford dockyard that makes the particular contribution of considerable significance as the earliest palace front terrace in Europe.

Given that Dummer became the Surveyor of the Navy in 1692 having joined the navy in 1668, unless sufficient scrutiny is given to the similarities and differences of the Deptford and Plymouth terraces such as to support the possibility of a Dummer authorship at Deptford, prior to his role as surveyor, if this is possible since as an extra clerk in the office of the Surveyor from 1678 he had responsibility for drawing, we must look elsewhere to ascribe authorship of Deptford’s early palatial terrace. Celia Fox’s 2007 paper for the British Library, “The Ingenious Mr Dummer: Rationalizing the Royal Navy in Late Seventeenth-Century England” also misses the Deptford officers’ terrace.
From Coad in 1989, Lake and Douet in 1998, to Celia Fox in 2007 the plan, elevations and valuations of the Deptford terrace found in Dummer’s 1698 survey were not included in any of the authors’ deliberations. For thirty years Deptford’s major contribution to the development of European architecture has been missed.

During the 2010 archaeological dig on the Deptford site a trial trench was placed in the area of the terrace however this was placed in the garden of one of the houses. Though it is claimed by Duncan Hawkins of CgMs Consulting that four archaeological test pits are targeted on the Officers’ Terrace three appear to miss the terrace entirely with just one to the rear of the Master Attendants House.

The significance of the terrace may have been missed for a number of reasons. Firstly, part of the terrace was demolished in 1806. This was the corner house for the Clerk of the Cheque. The demolition of the finest house in the yard was in fact carried out by the superior officers. This extraordinary act was performed in order to prevent a Commissioner taking up residence in the Deptford yard. The officers succeeded in their aims and the Commissioner was forced to take up residence at Woolwich. The east to west section of the terrace was re-faced and given sash windows in the mid-eighteenth century. This part was finally demolished c.1900 leaving the majority of the north to south range of the palatial terrace surviving until after WWII. (NA Works 43/614 no.1)

The foundations of the Deptford terrace should be excavated in order that as much information as possible can be determined about this most important contribution to the development of European architecture. This area of the terrace has subsequently received a single storey rudimentary workers’ rest and washroom and the 1951 London Ferro-Concrete warehouse.
Information on the largely forgotten Navy Treasurer’s house indicated on the 1623 Evelyn map in the yard to the west of the storehouse, once home to James, Duke of York might also be sought.

Officers’ Offices

Lake and Douet follow Coad in claiming the earliest purpose built office at Chatham in 1750.

The Deptford Master Shipwright’s House of 1708, and Deptford Officers’ Offices of 1720 are, in fact, the earliest examples of their kind surviving in the country.
Letters sent to the Navy board in 1720 request a rebuilding of the offices indicate that the yard officers at Deptford were accommodated in the earlier building on the site,
A letter from the Deptford Officers of 27th June 1720 reads,

The Master Attendant, Master Shipwright, Clerk of the Survey and Master Shipwright’s Assistants Offices being very Rotten and Decay’d and the Storekeeper wanting an Office by the Water Gate being to be taken down, We humbly propose to take the Old Offices down, to Erect New Offices two storeys high in which the Store keeper may be accommodated, the Charge of which besides the Old Materialls will Amount to about £350, We humbly submit to your Hons.” (ADM 106/3466)

This request is followed by five sets of initials for the officers concerned. This letter is followed by another of 30th June confirming that the new offices will occupy the place of the old offices between the Master Shipwright’s House and the Porter’s Lodging. (ADM106/3466)
By 15th August 1720, a request is sent for stone to cope the near completed new offices. (ADM 106/3299) Later a map of c1740-50 describing the office building of 1720 on a key as ‘T, V, W’, the Master Attendant’s, Clerk of the Survey and Master Shipwright’s offices respectively. Therefore, in contrast to Lake and Douet’s claim that little is known about how these earliest dockyard offices were used, precise information does indeed tells us that were occupied by the yard’s high status officers. By 1805 we know a considerable amount more about the use of the offices from a twenty-three paged letter and two plans sent to the Navy Board by Samuel Bentham petitioning for his extension and re-organisation to the office building along the centralizing principle of the Panopticon. ((NA WORK 41/585-6 June 26th 1804/4th June 1805,
NMM ADM/ Q 3323 28th Feb 1805) It was in these offices at Deptford that Bentham gave the order for models to be constructed to demonstrate the possibilities for the introduction of iron into shipbuilding. (NMM Q/ADM 3322 15th March 1803)

Lake and Douet’s later assertion in relation to Deptford, “At the smaller yards within reach of the Navy Board in London, Woolwich and Deptford, much more limited accommodation was provided.” (Lake and Douet 1998:84) is entirely incorrect as is theirs and Coad’s assertion that Chatham has the earliest purpose built dockyard offices darting to c.1750. The existing office range at Deptford of 1720 is in fact the earliest purpose built range of Officers’ Offices. The Deptford Master Shipwright’s House of 1708, and Deptford Officers’ Offices of 1720 are now the earliest examples of their kind surviving in the country.

The listing case of the Deptford dockyard offices is detailed here in order to demonstrate that at the time of listing GII in 1993, little early material was thought to remain and the building therefore thought to be unremarkable. However following primary source archive based research, the date of build has been established as 1720 confirming that the building was the earliest surviving purpose built naval office building in the country, the authorship of the 1805 addition to be by Samuel Bentham (incorporating the centralizing principle of the Panopticon) and also the first place to be designated for the building of models to demonstrate the introduction of iron into shipbuilding.

Re-use of ships timbers and the earliest known example of Bentham’s method of timber marking has also been revealed extensively throughout the offices. The case of the re-use of ships’ timbers found in the Wheelwright’s Shop at Chatham has been described as of world significance. What had been officially considered to be of little interest, of local or regional importance only, now stands as the earliest series of buildings to testify to the domestic and office architecture of the Tudor, Stuart and early Georgian dockyards.

Conclusion

Together, omissions in the studies by Coad, by Lake and Douet and other English heritage authors, exacerbated by the lack of an authoritative comprehensive study of Deptford dockyard, have enabled the heritage assets at Deptford to be jeopardized by an over reliance on insubstantial secondary sources.

The information contained in this document is put forward in an effort to end the systematic disregard of Deptford’s historic cultural assets by the statutory agencies and to ensure the future enjoyment of a local and national, even international culturally significant environment, the former royal dockyard at Deptford.

It becomes a political matter of social exclusion from the fair and reasonable comparative application of statutory resources when Deptford's historic cultural assets systematically do not receive the statutory protection afforded to other royal dockyards. Heritage protection at this stage will enable the wealth inherent in the intellectual property of Historic Maritime Deptford to be exploited and enjoyed by its’ constituency which is global.

No part of this document may be cited without reference to the author.
Chris Mazeika 2010

known unknowns

2010-12-28T15:58:00.000-08:00

the Ranger's House in Greenwich was built by the son of the Storekeeper at Deptford dockyard, a Francis Hosier.

though there is a little street in Deptford named after the man, who knew that Trevithick was buried at St. Nicholas, Deptford?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Trevithick

Convoy's Wharf Planning Permission

2010-11-26T07:05:00.000-08:00

It appears that there will be no further public consultation on the permission currently being sought for the Convoy's Wharf site. Anyone preparing a response should be aware of the December 30th deadline and consult the following helpful documents for policy and guidelines on planning and the historic environment. Happy reading!

http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/planningandbuilding/pdf/1514132.pdf

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications/pps-practice-guide/pps5practiceguide.pdf

Sweet Fanny Adams

2010-11-04T05:33:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting connection between

canning and the phrase 'Sweet Fanny Adams'.

In 1867 a sailor from Portsmouth murdered his

girlfriend (Fanny Adams) in Alton in Hamp-

shire and tried to get rid of her body by hacking

it into small pieces. The murderer, Frederick

Baker, was hanged in Winchester jail on Christmas

Eve 1867. The morbid humour of his fellow sailors

at Portsmouth soon suggested a connection

between this murder and canned meat being turned

out by a newly established canning factory at the

Naval Victualling Yard in Deptford. It is one of the

few cases where the victim rather than the murderer

has achieved immortality!

An Old Dockyard, Bedtime reading from Mr.Dickens Jnr's. 'All The Year Round'

2010-10-31T15:40:00.000-07:00

other uses for clocks

2010-10-31T15:03:00.000-07:00

Just below Limehouse Hole, and at a little distance from the eastern shore, lies Limehouse Rock, on which are only four feet. Opposite the Victualling Office at Deptford, on the Isle of Dogs side, a shoal begins, and extends about one-fourth over the River, which makes the channel very narrow between it and the ships at the Red House. You will avoid it by keeping Deptford Spire just open to the westward of the Clock House

in the Royal Dock Yard.

GREENWICH REACH lies winding in a circular direction from S.S.E. to E.N.E. At Deptford Creek a shoal begins and runs down almost to the west end of Greenwich Town; it nearly dries at low water: outside this shoal are 13 or 14 feet. The Clock House on with the two trees in Deptford Yard just clears it……..

……..On the north shore, off Millington’s or Anchor Wharf, and close in shore, is another shoal, which will be avoided going down, by keeping the Storehouse Clock in Deptford Yard open to the southward of the Isle of Dogs Ferry House, until Blackwell Reach comes open.

Excerpt from The New British Channel Pilot 1839.

The clock tower of 1712-20 replaces an earlier tower of the seventeenth century. Imagine Greenwich losing the turret from its seventeenth century Flamstead House, another maritime structure employed to set ships' clocks in the Thames, or another building contemporaneous with the early Eighteenth century Deptford Dockyard clock tower, the Royal Naval College losing its domes.

Putting the clock back in Deptford

2010-10-31T14:17:00.000-07:00

Images 1,2 dockyard model d.1774
Image 3, photograph 1870
Image 4, 5 photograph 1984
with thanks to Marmoset at Crosswhatfields for the title and inspiration.

Cherokees in Deptford

2010-10-31T13:41:00.000-07:00

Deptford Old Town Library

2010-10-31T09:27:00.000-07:00

Description of Library that was demolished with money from Deptford City Challenge.

Source 8 of 8: Flagship of the Queen's navy

2010-10-30T10:16:00.000-07:00

Source 8 of 8: Flagship of the Queen's navy

any old iron

2010-10-26T14:48:00.000-07:00

January 1669

The Officers of the Yard to the Navy Commissioners. Last night William Chandler, servant of George Hipton, shipwright in the yard, was taken by the porter carrying a drine bolt out of the yard, which he alleges he threw out of the London into the dock and hid it till he found an opportunity to carry it out. In confederacy with him was Edward Syms, shipwright. Since the repair of the London several parcels of iron have been stolen out of the yard and, though diligent search has been made, these two are the first apprehended. Chandler is now in the porter's custody and we offer our opinion for his punishment to have him well whipped about the yard for example's sake and then discharged, and Syms to have the like punishment and be discharged.

chips with everything

2010-10-26T04:08:00.000-07:00

Copy letter from the Master Shipwright at Chatham. Received a petition from John Bissenden and Robert Woodriff, Shipwrights, on behalf of the whole body of shipwrights about their carrying out chips from the Yard on their shoulders. The Commissioner read the Board's warrant of May 1753 when the petition was withdrawn. All the Foremen and Quartermen had the Order read to them and each Quarterman was charged to tell his men separately that the Order required the chips to be carried under their arm. Today, 150 workmen came to the gate without chips, then 20 more came and lowered their chips and were followed by John Miller who refused to lower his chips and the main body of men pushed on with their chips on their shoulders and cheered when they left the yard.

ADM 354/153/40

still groovy after all these years

2010-10-18T10:36:00.000-07:00

Imagine......

2010-10-12T15:32:00.000-07:00

The Clock-tower returns.........an archaeological dig reveals the dock can be restored and remain open....

Landing Place and Look Out Stairs

2010-10-12T10:56:00.000-07:00

The set of watergate stairs to the right of the dry dock were created at the same time as the 1720's Store House. Listed on plans as Landing Place and Look Out Stairs, they served as the ceremonial access to the dockyard for the launching of ships. Used by royalty from 1720 to 1869 and depicted in Clevely's series of paintings of the yard, the stairs remained open until the twentieth century. Perhaps they could be re-opened and the lookout building re-instated in a modern idiom to display finds from excavations that will take place during the impending development?

Convoy's Swans

2010-10-12T10:43:00.000-07:00

Congratualtions are in order to the Convoy's Swans for the successful rearing this year of a brood of seven cygnets now almost fully grown and shedding their ugly duckling plumage. Let's hope their number augurs well for the future of the dockyard.

Barratt's Bones

2010-10-12T03:55:00.000-07:00

Could this be the plot that Barratt Homes is about to build on?

Panorama

2010-10-11T11:09:00.001-07:00

Panorama of the former dockyard during the tenure of The Metropolitan Foreign Cattle Market c.1900. From the left, the covered Double Dry Dock, the Great Storehouse and Clock-tower, Covered Twin Sister-Slips, 'Olympia' Sheds and Covered Single Slip.

Storehouse 1720-1984

2010-10-11T10:56:00.000-07:00

After more than ten years of researching the dockyard there are still wonderful gems to be found, such as this photograph showing the Sail and Rigging loft immediately to the south of the 1720's storehouse and clock tower that was demolished in 1984.

Crosswhatfields

2010-10-10T11:02:00.000-07:00

inspired by Crosswhatfields to finally get some of these images of early Deptford to you all.

Bomb Damage

2010-10-10T10:50:00.000-07:00

Dispelling Myths

Its often said that the dockyard was heavily bombed during WWII. In fact most of the destruction occurred post-war. This map of bomb damage to the area of the dockyard shows how little damage was actually done. The black colouring shows irreparable damage, the orange colour minor reparable damage. The circle covering the landing stage may be the bomb that killed the U.S. marines stationed in Deptford during WWII. They were killed when a V2 rocket hit their amphibious landing vehicles, LST's that were moored alongside the jetty.

Response to London's Lost Garden

2010-07-11T16:40:00.000-07:00

http://s909.photobucket.com/albums/ac293/mastershipwright/versailles%20demesne%20de%20Marie%20Antoinette/

The model of garden archaeology and restoration that is offered by the work shown in the link above, is one that might lead us to question current methodology, approach, attitude and aspirations in relation to statutory agencies' consideration of Sayes Court Gardens to date. I am not aware of there being much if any considered interest by the statutory agencies in the opportunity this site provides, such as the commissioning of a special study, which surely the site warrants? So if anyone is aware of public agencies expressions of considered interest to date it would be great to hear about it. This is not meant as a cynical criticism of agencies who are publicly charged and publicly funded to enhance and promote heritage but more of an invitation for there to be more openness to, or even to share existing openness to other approaches and assessments with the general public. Despite numerous assertions of community participation there is still a tendency towards hostility to the participation of the "general public", still very much a "top down", "we know best" "what we say goes" attitude towards what is, rightfully, everyone's heritage and cultural capital that everyone holds a stake in. We can however take heart from the publication of PPS5 http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/planningandbuilding/pdf/1514132.pdf in light of which Convoy's Wharf development will serve as a case study of the efficacy and integrity of the agencies who have formulated and define their public stance through the release of such policy. Another model of practice that may be applicable to Convoy's Wharf is the current project for the Hoo peninsula being led by Sarah.Newsome@english-heritage.org.uk. Finally, it would be interesting to know what percentage of Heritage funds are deployed in areas of social deprivation and what the positive benefits of such spending are. Albury street was a very successful scheme of restoration, where some of the houses had been gutted and remained roofless for years. Now all of these buildings are listed grade II*, and providing employment opportunities for young people working on heritage tours of Deptford. http://www.culturesnap.com/ There seems to be no limit to what can be achieved where the creative and political will exists. Perhaps what may help is the independent scrutiny/study by an academic body perhaps one that has a Europe wide experience and perspective (and taste!) and that is also free of the emotion that besets those of us who live and feel that we belong to this extraordinary part of London and that we tend to express in relation to outside perception and attitudes to the place. There was a good study done by Ricky Burdett that was commissioned by Lewisham. It may be a little out of date but there were some very good ideas there and given that it was paid for by Lewisham Borough it ought to still be an active document and therefore "on the table' when it comes to determining this current proposal by Hutchison Whampoa. Enough already!

Open House 1774

2010-04-16T07:29:00.000-07:00

A Visit with George III to His Majesty's Dockyard at Deptford 1774

Those of you who have enjoyed the visits to John Evelyn's garden through the portal http://londonslostgarden.wordpress.com/ may have noticed a gateway in the dockyard wall from Mr. Evelyn's land to the dockyard. Although the day is a little hazy come through the gate, and we will take a tour of the King's Yard as it was in 1774, and walk from London's lost garden to London's forgotten dockyard. So many feet have walked the paths through the yard, many of them illustrious. Lets leave the royals aside and say that in their time they each visited at least once to witness the launching of their ships. The names of the greatest are easily remembered, Elizabeth's great mariners, slave traders and pirates, Drake, Frobisher, Hawkins. Captains Cook and Bligh, Nelson (and some say Lady Hamilton) the roll call is long, so follow closely, its easy to get lost, to slip through time and space when there are five hundred years of history to recount. Remember it is now 1774, the yard has already served the nation for 261 years. It is now in its Hanoverian prime, and the layout will hardly change at all for the next 236 years or so.

Our guide http://www.british-history.ac.uk tells us,
that Deptford is described in the "Ambulator," in 1774, as 'a large and populous town, divided into Upper and Lower Deptford, and containing two churches." The place was of old famous for its naval shipbuilding yard, "Deptford is most remarkable for its noble dock, where the royal navy was formerly built and repaired, the yard is enlarged to more than double its former dimensions, and a vast number of hands are constantly employed. It has a wet dock of two acres for ships, and another with an acre and a half, with last quantities of timber and other stores, and extensive buildings as storehouses and offices for the use of the place, besides dwelling-houses for the use of those officers who are obliged to live upon the spot in order to superintend the works. Here the royal yachts of our Tudor and Stuart sovereigns were generally kept.

this view from the river shows the landing place in front of the storehouse. The landing place, was open until the 1930's. The storehouse was begun in 1712 by Joseph Allin, Master Shipwright, responsible for the rebuilding of the Master Shipwright's House in 1708. Imagine walking up these stairs from the Deptford foreshore, following in the footsteps of the Georgian monarchs, navy dignitaries, and so many of the work force. The fine stone causeway is there if you care to notice, and doubtless the steps too, just bricked up.

At the top of the stair there is a fine gate to greet the monarchs at the launching of their ships and look closely and see the great flagpole, perhaps once it was a ship's mast.

The Royal Dock, or "King's Yard," as it was locally called in former times, was esteemed one of the most complete repositories for naval stores in Europe. It covered not less than thirty acres of ground, and contained every convenience for building, repairing, and fitting out ships-of-the-line—those veritable "wooden walls of Old England" with which we were familiar before the introduction of armour-plated vessels.

If we had come here and stood on this spot 200 years ago, in 1574, we would still find the double dry dock, crossed by two bridges, with its capstans as tall as a man (and some female shipwrights!) close by the Master Shipwright's House where it has stood since Tudor times. In another 200 years time after launching ships for the Armada, ships for the establishing of the colonies in America and Australia ships for Captain James Cook and after that ships for Nelson's battles including Trafalgar ,the dock will still be here quietly sleeping under a temporary warehouse structure just waiting to be discovered and excavated.

Artificers in wood and in iron had here large ranges of workshops and storehouses; and here the hammer and the axe were scarcely ever idle, even in times of peace; but where, during the prevalence of war, they were plied incessantly "in the construction of those floating bulwarks for which England is, or rather was, renowned, and which carry a hundred and twenty guns and a thousand men to guard her shores from the invader, or to bear her fame with her victories to the remotest seas of the ocean."

Looking across the roofs of the Master Shipwright's House to the storehouse, "better than anything at Chatham". Be careful not to blink because between the powers that will be, the heritage experts and planning officials, will see fit to permit this magnificent building to be partly demolished in 1954 and completely demolished in 1984. 20,000 bricks from the Tudor storehouse will be taken to repair Hampton Court. The early 18th century plum stocks will go to repair Tilbury Fort. Enjoy the storehouse now, one of the finest edifices to grace the London Thames. Oddly fifty years after demolishing Henry VIII's Great Storehouse, the remains will be scheduled as an Ancient Monument.

The yard was occupied by various buildings, such as two wet docks (one double and the other single), three "slips" for men-of-war, a basin, two mast ponds, a model loft, mast houses, a large smith's shop, together with numerous forges for anchors, sheds for timber, &c., besides houses for the officers who superintended the works.

The okum boys have been chided by the Timber Master for playing the dangerous game of scrambling across the masts recently arrived from Riga and now pickling in the mast pond.

Lets go inside the newly refurbished Officers' Terrace, originally built around 1670 and now refashioned with sash windows and parapets. Through the grand door in the corner of the terrace the wife of the Clerk of the Cheque has lately returned from Spitalfields with silks that she is showing to the Master Attendant's wife. They are having tea, lately brought from Seurat, with some of the women who have contracts to supply the navy with canvas, nails and other requisites. They are telling old dockyard tales about Samuel Pepys' visits to the dockyard and his philandering with Mrs Bagwell. The Master Shipwright's Assistant's wife has arrived from next door and suggested they walk in the garden and play "I love my love with an A because......" just like Lady Castlemaine, KIng Charles II's favourite mistress and her friends would play whilst staying at the Navy treasurer's house in the dockyard.

The finest machinery in the world is said to have been employed in Deptford Dockyard for spinning hemp and manufacturing ropes and cables for the service of the navy. The large storehouse on the north side of the quadrangle was erected in the year 1513. This may be said to have been the commencement of the works at Deptford, which under successive sovereigns gradually grew up and extended.

The ladies are now walking in the gardens and the Storekeeper's wife is showing some plants to the Surgeon's wife that she insists have been growing there since the time John Evelyn had his famous garden at Sayes Court. (the Clerk of the Survey's wife whispered that next she'll be telling us that the plants came from Evelyn's garden, or that they were planted by Charles II himself!) They've now gone inside the banqueting house at the foot of the garden and lots of laughter is coming from there, so lets continue our tour of the yard.

The old storehouse, which was a quadrangular pile, appears to have consisted originally only of a range on the north side, where, on what was formerly the front of the building, is the date 1513, together with the initials H R in a cipher, and the letters A X for Anno Christi.

Let me show this drawing I have with me. It will be done by the kind gentlemen who, in 1954, will demolish the earliest naval building in the country, "for economic and strategic reasons" it has a ring, a certain echo to it that phrase. Anyway, the drawing shows Henry VIII's cipher HR and the date 1513. It is set below this flame headed gothic arch in hand wrought Tudor brickwork. As it is being demolished one fellow by the name of J. H. W. Haywood will be moved to write "it may eventually be regarded as the work of an artist craftsman having very few equals" In fact, eventually it will end up in a lobby being used as a notice board and no one will even remember what it is or why it is even there.

The buildings on the east, west, and south sides of the quadrangle were erected at different times; and a double front, towards the north, was added in 1721.

Another storehouse, parallel to the above, and of the same length, having sail and rigging lofts, was completed towards the close of the last century; and a long range of smaller storehouses was built under the direction of Sir Charles Middleton, afterwards Lord Barham, about the year 1780.

Look there! the ghost of John Cleveley, raising his brush in devotion, to record for perpetuity the magnificence of Deptford!

In Charnock's "History of Marine Architecture" is given "A note how many ships the King's Majesty (Henry VIII.) hath in harbour, on the 18th day of September, in the 13th year of his reign (1521); what portage they be of; what estate they be in the same day; also where they ride and be bestowed." From this we are enabled to see what use was made of Deptford as a naval station at that time:—"The Mary Rose, being of the portage of 600 tons, lying in the pond at Deptford beside the storehouse there, &c.

The John Baptist, and Barbara, every of them being of the portage of 400 tons, do ryde together in a creke of Deptford Parish, &c. The Great Nicholas, being of portage 400 tons, lyeth in the east end of Deptford Strond, &c. … The Great Barke, being of portage 250 tons, lyeth in the pond at Deptford, &c.
The Less Barke, being of the portage of 180 tons, lyeth in the same pond, &c. The twayne Row Barges, every of them of the portage of 60 tons, lye in the said pond, &c. The Great Galley, being of portage 800 tons, lyeth in the said pond, &c."

We are accustomed in the yard to Royal visits, indeed the Duke of York resided here for a while in the Navy Treasurer's house.

Deptford dockyard, in its time, received many royal and distinguished visitors; the earliest of whom we have any record was Edward VI., who thus tells us of the provision made for his reception:—"June 19th, 1549. I went to Deptford, being bedden to supper by the Lord Clinton, where before souper i saw certaine [men] stand upon a bote without hold of anything, and rane one at another til one was cast into the water. At supper Mons. Vieedam and Henadey supped with me. After supper was ober a fort [was] made upon a great lighter on the Temps [Thames] which had three walles and a Watch Towre, in the meddes of wich Mr. Winter was Captain with forty or fifty other soldiours in yellow and blake. To the fort also apperteined a galery of yelow color with men and municion in it for defence of the castel; wherfor ther cam 4 pinesses [pinnaces] with other men in wight ansomely dressed, wich entending to give assault to the castil, first droue away the yelow piness and aftir with clods, scuibs, canes of fire, darts made for the nonce, and bombardes assaunted the castill, beating them of the castel into the second ward, who after issued out and droue away the pinesses, sinking one of them, out of wich al the men in it being more than twenty leaped out and swamme in the Temps. Then came th' Admiral of the nauy with three other pinesses, and wanne the castel by assault, and burst the top of it doune, and toke the captain and under captain. Then the Admiral went forth to take the yelow ship, and at length clasped with her, toke her, and assaulted also her toppe and wane it by compulcion, and so returned home." This royal record of a mimic naval engagement on the Thames appears in the Cotton MSS. in the British Museum, and is quoted by Cruden in his "History of Gravesend."

Walk with us now across the bridge at the mouth of the dry dock. As we cross in time and space, you will witness Sir Samuel Bentham, younger brother of Jeremy, pointing out alterations to be carried out to the dock gates and entrance. Samuel raised a navy for Potempkin and Catherine the Great, taking many artificers from the Deptford yard, in a long tradition of co-operation between Russia and England since Peter the Great's visit here in 1698.

Arriving in front of the Master Shipwright's House through the shimmering haze coming off the river, ascending the early dockyard watergate stairs is Elizabeth,

"On the 4th of April, 1581," writes Lysons in his "Environs of London," "Queen Elizabeth visited Captain Drake's ship, called the Golden Hind. Her Majesty dined on board, and after dinner conferred the honour of knighthood on the captain. A prodigious concourse of people assembled on the occasion, and a wooden bridge, on which were a hundred persons, broke down, but no lives were lost. Sir Francis Drake's ship, when it became unfit for service, was laid up in this yard, where it remained many years, the cabin being, as it seems, turned into a banqueting-house: 'We'll have our supper,' says Sir Petronel Flash, in a comedy called Eastward-hoe, written by Ben Jonson and others, 'on board Sir Francis Drake's ship, that hath compassed the world!' It was at length broken up, and a chair made out of it for John Davis, Esq., who presented it to the University of Oxford." It is recorded that Queen Elizabeth not only partook of a collation on board Drake's ship, and afterwards knighted him, but that she also consented to share the golden fruits of his succeeding adventures. Miss Strickland observes, with reference to this record, that "as some of Drake's enterprises were of a decidedly piratical character, and attended with circumstances of plunder and cruelty to the infant colonies of Spain, the policy of Elizabeth, in sanctioning his deeds, is doubtful."

She gave orders that his ship, the Golden Hind, should be preserved here as a memorial of the national glory and of her great captain's enterprise. For long years, accordingly, in obedience to her royal command, the vessel was kept in Deptford dockyard until it fell into decay, when all that remained sound of her was converted into a chair, which was presented to the University of Oxford, and is still kept in the Bodleian library. The chair was thus characteristically apostrophised by Cowley:—

"To this great ship, which round the world has run,
And match'd, in race, the chariot of the sun,
This Pythagorean ship (for it may claim,
Without presumption, so deserved a name,
By knowledge once, and transformation now),
In her new shape this sacred port allow.
Drake and his ship could not have wished from fate
A happier station, or more bless'd estate!
For lo! a seat of endless rest is given
To her in Oxford, and to him in heaven."

Not now but in a future time, a different boat will come alongside the yard wall, and carry away the storehouse bell and clock tower that had measured so many thousand dockyard hours and chimed at the launching of so many ships, downriver to stand, marooned in the car park at Thamesmead and hear only the rattle of shopping trolleys.

And in another future time a different boat may fetch the bell and clock tower back to where it belongs carrying with it, the will and imagination to make of Deptford what it deserves, what it is owed even, given the five centuries of service to the nation this small stretch of the Thames will achieve. The twentieth century will prove to be unkind to the dockyard. United States marines returning from service in WWII Europe will die here when their amphibious landing craft are hit by German buzz bombs. Whilst a majority of buildings will survive into the 1950's, some more than four hundred years in existence, the following thirty years will see the loss of the Tudor Great Storehouse and the magnificent storehouse begun by Joseph Allin in 1712. The remainder of the Officers'Terrace from the 1600's will be demolished after WWII, ancillary buildings such as stables, timber seasoning sheds, mold lofts, boat houses, smithies and anchor forges will all be swept away. The great civil engineering works by Sir Samuel Bentham, John Rennie and George Ledwell-Taylor will remain, awaiting discovery just immediately below the modern concrete and tarmac surfaces. Until that time we hope you enjoy your 1774 walk through the dockyard of George III, courtesy of the National Maritime Museum. You can continue your journey around the dockyard and Deptford's history by following the link below,

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45272.
Coming soon............A walk through the King's Yard 2013............

Henry VIII's Ships in the pond at Deptford c.1513

2010-04-06T10:26:00.000-07:00

Some of the ships listed as riding in the Great Basin of Henry VIII's Royal Dockyard at Deptford in the Indenture of c.1513. From the Anthony Roll, Pepys Library.

Peter Pomegranite

Great Bark

Lesser Bark

Christopher

Mary Rose

John Penn Marine Engineers, Deptford and Payne's Wharf

2010-03-09T09:42:00.000-08:00

A new understanding is emerging on the origin of the building occupied by John Penn Marine Engineers on the Thames at Deptford. It has always been thought and asserted that the building was constructed specially for John Penn's company. However other projects occurring prior to Penn's occupation may shed light on a different story. Richard Hartree's volume on John Penn's Works states that the company moved to Deptford in the mid 1840's. This date corresponds with the understanding currently emerging based on new research into the site and building of Payne's Wharf.

It is just possible to discern a series of high arches and a parapet
on the river elevation of this 1841 water-colour of Deptford Pier.

This research begins with the Deptford Pier and Improvement Company constituted in 1836. Preparatory survey work in the area by Horton Ledger occurred in 1835. In 1836 Deptford Pier is described as "now in progress'. In 1839 the Civil Engineer and Architect's Journal reads "to alter and amend the act to provide additional property" suggesting that property has already been acquired. The act referred to was a Local Act passed in Parliament giving permission to purchase land in order to build a railway spur that was intended to take Steam Boat passengers from the river to Deptford Station,
"from the Deptford end of the road, a branch is to extend to the the new Deptford Pier, now in progress; so that passengers, on landing at Deptford, may at once be carried into the heart of London, with all their luggage, at a comparatively trifling expense, and free from all the dangers and vexatious delays of the Pool of the Thames." (Percy and Timbs 1836)

The incredible scheme for Deptford Pier, drawn by Horton Ledger, showing the Royal Dockyard to the right of the image.

The cast iron wharf wall is a construction of 1838 and described in detailed plans of the period by Colonel George Landmann, the chief architect/engineer on the Deptford/Greenwich railway. If the cat iron wharf wall is contemporaneous with the Italianate arches then Colonel George Landsmann would be the most likely candidate as architect of Payne's Wharf. However, Cubitt is also known to have used sheet iron wharfing at Brunswick Wharf.

William Tite built the Brunswick Wharf buildings for a steam boat to railway terminal serving the same function as the proposed Deptford Pier Project at the time the Deptford Pier was being proposed. Tite's Gosport Station is shown opposite. There is a marked similarity between Lewis Cubitt's King's Cross terminal and Payne's Wharf. Cubitt was surveyor to Deptford Parsh of St. Nicholas. It is also remarkable that Cubitt used laminated timber to construct the first roof spans, these were later replaced by iron. Payne's Wharf's original Diocletian windows were also in vast arched laminated timber frames. These original frames, cited in English Heritage's Grade II listing of Payne's Wharf, were removed and destroyed by the present developer Lane Castle. We were able to salvage parts of the frames for safe keeping and these were studied by the industrial archaeologist Malcolm Tucker of Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society.

John Penn and the Cubitt Family
The relationship between the Cubitt family and Penns is complex. William Cubitt's design for a prison treadmill was constructed by John Penn's in 1823 (Centre for Kentish Studies Q/AGw/16/3 1823). Benjamin Cubitt became foreman of works for Penn's company. Benjamin also proposed a railway from Cold Blow Farm over Trundley's Lane and across the Grand Surrey Canal through Grove Street to Deptford Wharf ending at the west of the Wet Dock at Deptford Strand. The Journal of Transport History 1995 Vol 2-3 page 48 refers to a wharf at Deptford on the Thames being built by 1852 for the Brighton and South Coast Railway. Joseph Cubitt worked for SER in 1846 on the Ashford Canterbury Ramsgate and Margate line. The history of the emerging railways is far too complex to cover here, suffice it to say that there is considerable evidence of the Cubitt family's involvement in the early railways in the area of Deptford, New Cross and the Thames, in particular Brunswick Wharf where identical cast iron sheet piling was used to construct an identical wharf wall. A good source for disentangling the Cubitt's and the railway companies involvement is the wikipedia entry on London Bridge Station. William Cubitt participated in the creation of Deptford Pumping Station with Bazalgette. It has been said that what William Cubitt ordered Bazalgette carried out.

Map showing Benjamin Cubitt's railway to Deptford Wharf

William Cubitt's Ipswich Steam Navigation Company ordered steam engines from John Penn's for two ships. When the company collapsed Penn was still owed money for the engines and a court case ensued. Could it have been the case that the works commenced at Deptford Pier, comprising the six grand italiante arches, reminiscent of the railway architecture of the period, Blackwall, Gosport, King's Cross, were offered to or purchased by John Penn's in settlement of debt owing to them? The direct correspondence between the 1828 cast iron pier of Brunswick and the extant pier at Deptford suggests a strong link between the two projects. Architectural similarities between the Cubitt project of Hayes Galleria Wharf and Payne's Wharf, a stable block at Buckingham Palace where Edward Blore fashioned the south eastern elevation, requires further consideration before definitive conclusions as to exactly who the architect of Payne's Wharf was can be drawn. Perhaps more striking in similarity to Payne's Wharf is the image of the disused railway station at Gosport by William Tite. If Paynes Wharf is the work of Thomas Cubitt, architect of the east front of Buckingham Palace, given his death in 1855 this would place the construction of Payne's Wharf within the prospective period of the Deptford Pier Junction Railway 1835 to the mid 1840's coinciding with any number of events, including the extension of Deptford Pier to include the Bridge House Estates land abutting Upper Watergate, the takeover of the London and Greenwich Railway by SER in 1844, Benjamin Cubitt's construction of the railway to Deptford Wharf. Perhaps the collapse of William Cubitt's Ipswich Steam Navigation Company, and the competition exerted by William Bush and Henry C Bingham's ambitious plan for Deptford Steam Ship Docks, provided Penn with the opportunity to expand his works to Deptford and accrue some return from what was owed him?

From John Herapath November 28th 1836,
"In consequence of the number of persons going to the Steam vessels and back again we have a little railway of 750 yards at our terminus in Deptford to the Deptford Pier which is now in execution..." (Herapath 1836:271) The same magazine reports the passing of a bill in the Lords for the railway to convey passengers from London Bridge to Deptford Pier in fifteen minutes "and the pool and its dangers and delays avoided." (Herapath 1836:192) "The first iron pile was driven in the presence of all the directors and it was hoped the whole would be complete in eight months.(Herapath 1836:238)

Premises formerly known as the Three Tuns Public House in Butcher Row, St. Nicholas, Deptford were purchased by John Penn from Thomas Norfolk on 21 November 1859 ( ACC/1712) These premises may have been leased to John Penn as early as 1841. See also, Lease Trustees of the Holwell Charity to John Penn (ACC/1712/16 1 Oct 1841) Authority of the Trustees of the Holwell Charity to John Penn to pay purchase money to their solicitors, John and William Hawkins of Hitchen with Messrs Hawkins receipt for purchase money (ACC/1712/22 22 Feb 1862-14 Mar 1862) Plan showing boundary line between the freehold and leasehold properties at Greenwich (ACC/1712/44 Jun 1876)

In 1843, a legal case is lodged against the Deptford Pier and Improvement Company.

In a list of steam boat piers below London Bridge published in 1863, Deptford Pier is still listed. Yet by 1846 the Deptford Pier Improvement company were in Court again over calls to pay interest on shares. By 1846 after some ten years of efforts Deptford Pier Junction is abandoned.

It would seem that given the material evidence of the cast iron wharf wall, and the vast italianate arches with their timber laminated diocletian windows, and the statement that teh first piling for the Pier was driven into the ground in the presence of the Company directors, it is very likely that Payne's Wharf is a relic of the efforts by the Deptford Pier Junction Railway to establish the railway terminus for the purpose of transporting Steam Boat passengers swiftly into London Bridge station from the newly built railway at Deptford. Whether the architect was a member of the Cubitt family, or even George Landsmann himself, who had built the London and Greenwich railway, it is yet to be determined. What is undeniable is that the facade of Payne's Wharf allows us to embark on a journey into the ambitious minds of the early Victorian entrepreneurs.

Transpontine: Linkage

2010-01-27T08:17:00.000-08:00

Transpontine: Linkage

Hortus Conclusus: The Garden of James Butler Morn, Clerk of the Cheque in His Majesty's Yard at Deptford

2010-01-27T07:39:00.000-08:00

The Clerk of the Cheque, also called Clerk of the Prick and Cheque, maintained the muster roll of everybody who worked in the yard, looked after expenses and kept accounts of earnings. In 1776, the Clerk of the Cheque, was James Butler Morn. He earned £200 per annum.

As a high ranking officer in the dockyard, the Clerk of the Cheque was handsomely accommodated. In 1698, the Clerk of the Cheque's house was the finest in the dockyard. From 1669, the Surveyor of the King's Works with the responsibility of signing off building projects was Sir Christopher Wren. The houses depicted in the image above are post-Restoration and likely to have been constructed in or around 1670. This terrace is identical to a terrace of dwellings for dockyard officers in Plymouth and thought by the late Giles Worsley to be by the hand of Robert Hooke, according to a superb article by Celina Fox, "The ingenious Mr Dummer : Rationalizing the Royal Navy in Late Seventeenth Century England" for the British Library. According to Professor Doctor K.A.Ottenheym "English classical architecture was transformed in the 1670's and 1680's by taking inspiration from Dutch houses." Ottenheym also records that Hooke was inspired by French architecture. (Ottenheym 2007:137) The ground plan of the Deptford officers' terrace expresses the double and single cube rooms characteristic of the work of Inigo Jones and his nephew John Webb. The Clerk of the Cheque's house, situated in the corner of a fine uniform terrace, that would have been familiar to Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, was valued at £946.10. The imposing brick built house boasted eight bays and two staircases. Celina Fox writes about the corresponding terrace in the Plymouth yard stating, "The dwelling houses of the officers built to a French or Dutch influenced design as a single terrace, are the model of orderliness compared with those of other dockyards." (Fox 2007:43) However the Deptford Officer's terrace may be of an earlier date than Plymouth which dockyard historian Jonathan Coad dates to 1692. The Deptford terrace is shown as extant in 1688. The Navy Board Office at Seething Lane, Crutched Friars, is dated to 1674-5, arguably by Christopher Wren and/or Robert Hooke and of similar style. Whilst the individual houses comprising the Plymouth terrace are identical in scale and internal arrangement such as number of rooms, placing of chimneys and staircases and their number, the houses comprising the Deptford terrace share none of Plymouths's uniformity internally. No two staircases or their positions are identical, just as their is no parity to the number of rooms each officer enjoys. Archaeological investigations may reveal more information of interest not only to Deptford but to Plymouth and possibly to other yards. Further archive based research may established the time of build and even the architect and precisely when the buildings were altered in the eighteenth century. The greater part of the terrace at Deptford was demolished to make way for cattle lairs c.1900 for the Metropolitan Foreign Cattle Market, however the Tapp House a Tudor period building, the Pay Office and Clerk of the Cheque's office, clearly identified on Dummer's survey of 1698 as a building of the same period as the terrace, survived until the 1940's. Below, Clarendon House, by Sir Roger Pratt for the Lord Chancellor 1664-1667.

Above internal arrangement of the Officers' Terrace, showing the Clerk of the Cheque's House in the corner.

Perhaps more than any other, the Officers' Terrace resembles the work of Sir Roger Pratt, great friend of John Evelyn who described Clarendon House as "the best contriv'd, the most useful, graceful and magnificent house in England". His work for the Lord Chancellor, Clarendon House 1664-1667 is at the very least influential in the design of the terrace. The Lord Chancellors's daughter married the Duke of York, then resident in the dockyard at the Navy Treasurer's House, adjacent to the Great Storehouse, and overlooking the Basin wherein rode the King's Ships. As little is known of the internal layout of Clarendon House, the archaeology of the Officers' Terrace becomes even more important than previously thought.

At the time of Dummer's survey, the timber framed Tudor house of the Master Shipwright Fisher Harding was valued at a comparatively paltry sum of £100.11.11. Perhaps it was this discrepancy that prompted Master Shipwright Joseph Allin in 1705 to agitate for a new house of equivalent status.

Since Joseph Allin built his new house of eight bays with two staircases, to replace the one shown above in 1698, and overspent his Navy Board approved estimated budget of £525 by some £300, questions were raised in Parliament and Hansard records mention of the "Shipwright's Palace".

These high status dockyard houses would have been incomplete without the corresponding high status gardens. The gardens and their buildings which included privies, wash houses and banqueting houses are depicted in numerous plans of the dockyard throughout the centuries. The officers' stables and hen houses were located elsewhere in the yard. Perhaps the richest historic source of information for the dockyard gardens is found in the dockyard model series of 1774 made for George III. The depiction of the Clerk of the Cheque's garden in a plan of 1774 corresponds with that shown in the 40ft to 1inch scale model made at the same time. Research and archaeology carried out at Chatham dockyard concludes that the modellers drew "as accurate a representation of the gardens as of any other feature of the dockyard." Paths and beds depicted on the model have been rediscovered. A complete pond lined with waterproof cement- terraz or pozzolana, was also discovered. (Hall and Lear 1992:135-6)

The image above shows the officers' gardens in Deptford Dockyard circa 1774. The houses which are shown in Dummer's survey of 1698 are shown here in their mid eighteenth century guise. They were demolished in the early 1900's to make way for cattle lairs for the Metropolitan Foreign Cattle market.

The houses are shown here in a photograph taken shortly before demolition.

The houses with their sash windows, door cases, raised parapets and lead rain goods could easily be mistaken for buildings of the early to mid-eighteenth century rather than 'updated' buildings of the mid-seventeenth century.

Remarkably the area that became the Clerk of the Cheques garden has survived without being substantially built on for nearly four hundred years. First seen in Evelyn's annotated map of 1623 the area of land, assigned to the Clerk of the Cheque as a garden, remains a green space through a series of plans dated consecutively 1698, 1740's, 1753, 1774, 1808, 1830, 1868, 1870, 1898, 1930's, 1960's. The Richard Rogers Partnership master plan designated this area as a public open space providing a green link with Twinkle Park. This plan leaves open the possibility of a re-instatement of the Clerk of the Cheques garden. On the officers' gardens in Chatham, Hall and Lear have stated that "the initial designer from within the Board of Works has not yet been identified but as the plans came from London he could have been associated with the group led by Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor." (Hall and Lear 1992:150)

A glance at Chatham Dockyard on google earth reveals several of the officers' gardens have now been restored according to the historic plans and model of 1774. Todd Longstaffe-Gowan's article "Urban Gardening in England" shows several photographs of the Chatham gardens' derelict and overgrown condition. Based on the evidence present in historic maps and plans and the confirmed evidence of the correspondence

between the garden designs portrayed in the models of 1774 and archaeological surveys carried out in the

Chatham Officers' gardens, in Deptford we can be hopeful of finding sufficient archaeological evidence on the site of

the Clerk of the Cheque's garden to re-instate an important characteristic of the dockyard, as well as a rare

and exciting example of garden design of the eighteenth century. Assuming that the Richard Rogers
Partnership masterplan is adhered to by Hutchison Whampoa and that their current proposal to move the
GLA designated safeguarded working wharf away from the riverfront

to the area covering the Great Georgian Dock, TPO London Plane Trees and the site of the
Clerk of the Cheque's garden is rejected by the GLA and Lewisham Planners

the opportunity for one of the most stimulating stretches of the Thames Path in London remains.

Deptford Docks

2010-01-25T04:55:00.000-08:00

Caroline's Miscellany: Branch line to Deptford Docks

Crossing Bridges, Crossing Continents

2010-01-24T07:39:00.000-08:00

Dry Dock at Chatham

Double Dry Building Dock/Great Georgian Dock/Head and Stern Dock at Deptford
This is the first in a series of blogs related to Convoy's Wharf, the former King's Yard at Deptford.

In 1954 the oldest naval building in the country, Henry VIII's Great Storehouse of 1513, was demolished for "economic and strategic reasons". Fifty years later, in 2004, the foundations were scheduled as an ancient monument. Redevelopment of the site of the former dockyard, now Convoy's Wharf raises the question of how best to respond to the dockyard structures that remain albeit below ground. The dockyard at Deptford served the nation as a military establishment over a period of five hundred years. The history of this stretch of the Thames is unsurpassable, and written about extensively elsewhere. The opportunity now exists to maximize Deptford's most historic cultural assets. Over the coming weeks we will be posting our aspirations for the future of the site.

The photos above show the dry dock at Chatham. It's possible that the double dry building dock at Deptford is of similar construction yet twice as long as the one shown here. When we hear about "archaeological remains" at Convoy's Wharf, we may be talking about structures like this. We already know from previous archaeological test pits that "by far the greater part of the dockyard survives as buried structures filled in intact." Supposing the dry dock is a granite construction and simply filled in intact? It was filled in soon after 1869 for the construction of sheep and cattle pens for the Metropolitan Foreign Cattle Market. In the master plan proposed by Richard Rogers Partnership in 2005 for the redevelopment of Convoy's Wharf, the Great Georgian Dock, as it is called, was singled out for protection and the possibility of excavation. At the time in 2004, statements submitted to Lewisham Planning Authority earmarked the dock for a public open space, maintaining the opportunity for future aspirations to excavate if possible.
In the current proposal this public open space is eliminated and Hutchison Whampoa instead propose moving the GLA designated safeguarded working wharf inland away from the waterfront to include the area occupied by the Great Georgian Dock. This considerable alteration of the RRP master plan obliterates a number of significant opportunities for maximising Deptford's cultural heritage assets and their major contribution to a sense of place in the redevelopment of the former dockyard. The RRP proposals offered a green link with Twinkle Park with pedestrian and cycle access through the ancient dockyard gateway evident in the listed perimeter wall opposite Twinkle Park. This green link offers the further opportunity of a reinstatement of a historic dockyard garden of the 18th century which occupied that part of the site, being the high status garden of the Clerk of the Cheque of the dockyard. The potential green link area also incorporates several TPO protected London Plane trees, the only surviving trees of any considerable age (more than 100 years old) across the site of Convoy's.

Image showing Clerk of the Cheques garden circa 1774 and ancient entrances to the dockyard.

Maintaining the GLA designation for the safeguarded working wharf would maximize the potential of the Great Georgian Dock area. A green link with Twinkle Park offering pedestrian and cyclist access close to the Thames Path to and from Greenwich would be created. This will bring visitors into a new green space of an historic garden within the listed perimeter wall of the dockyard adjacent to a group of established London Plane trees. The route would then lead to the dock and the river.
This second image above shows a plan of the dockyard during the early period of the Metropolitan Foreign Cattle Market. The ancient gateway to the dockyard is shown opposite the Red Lion public house. Imagine the possibility of entering through this gateway, encountering the former garden of the Clerk of the Cheque, with views of the Master Shipwright's House and Offices alongside the Great Dock. To the right of the Great Dock entrance are the Landing Place and Lookout ceremonial watergate stairs in front of the 1712 storehouse, also demolished in the 1950's. These steps to the river, shown in a number of paintings by John Cleveley, remained open until the 1930's. They were topped by an elaborate set of gates, two receiving houses and a flagpole. The stairs could be opened once more for public access to the foreshore.
The bridge across the centre of the dock shown on the plan could also be re-instated. This bridge is one of a possible seven bridges which could potentially cross re-opened docks, slipways, basins and mast ponds, making this section of the Thames Path unique. Recent excavations of the entire peninsular land mass at the mouth of Deptford Creek for Galliard Homes and restoration of inland bodies of water at Canary Wharf suggest what is possible with new developments in relation to the river and inland bodies of water. Where the docks, basin and mast pond entrances are proven to be of granite and brick construction, sensitive restoration could allow for re-opening. The re-opening of these penetrations from the river could provide marginal habitat for Thames water birds marrying heritage and ecologial aspirations. For instance, mast ponds could be excavated and restored to create a London Thames swannery. The next image shows the pair of mast ponds with the stone-flagged slipways running down to the river's edge. These stone flagged slipways could provide direct access for bird-life. with bridges over for pedestrians and cyclists.

The seven bridges comprise, firstly, a bridge over the Great Georgian Dock, with two bridges across the mouths of the twin sister slipways, a fourth bridge crossing the mouth or casson of the John Rennie Basin, a fifth bridge crossing the single slipway, a sixth bridge crossing the early mast pond slipway and a seventh bridge, a re-instatement of the George Ledwell Taylor swing bridge crossing the canal to the eighteenth century mast pond. All of these bridges existed and some remained until the turn of the twentieth century. The seven bridges resonate with the seven continents with which Deptford has profound historic connections. It is up to interested parties now, whether individuals, or the PLA, the Environment Agency, Thames Estuary Partnership, English Heritage and Lewisham Planning not to succumb to the awful irony of fifty years ago, which saw the destruction of the Great Tudor Storehouse for short-term "economic and strategic" reasons only to schedule the remains fifty years years later.

The cultural capital held in Deptford's historic cultural assets belongs to a local and international interest group comprising families whose ancestors worked in the King's Yard, sailed on voyages of discovery, or were transported to the Colonies of America and Australia, to those who understand that the history of Deptford is the history of the making of a nation. It becomes a political matter of social exclusion if Deptford's historic cultural assets do not receive the statutory protection afforded to other Royal Dockyards so that the wealth inherent in the intellectual property of Historic Maritime Deptford can be exploited and enjoyed by a constituency which is global.

King's Yard

2010-01-23T08:47:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the Shipwright's Palace.

Proposal to List Features of King’s Yard (Convoy’s Wharf) at Deptford

December 2009

Introduction

In 1999, Alan Howarth, then Culture Secretary, announced comprehensive statutory protection for Britain’s maritime heritage, principally covering the Royal Dockyards as a result of the Defences of Britain Study. Subsequently English Heritage has published its Maritime and Naval Buildings Selection Guide in 2007.

The King’s Yard, established by Henry VIII in 1513 at Deptford, did not form part of this survey, however, archaeological surveys since carried out by CgMs and Pre-Construct Archaeology in 2000 (Hawkins) 2000 (Lowe), 2001 (Divers), at the former Royal Dockyard at Deptford established, “by far the greater part of the dockyard survives as buried structures filled in intact between 1869 and 1950.”

The structures of the yard proper, the docks, slips, basins, mast ponds landing places and stairs, constitute a substantial architectural fabric that is currently extant, though largely invisible, being covered by superficial accretion or infill. (David Divers. Jan 2001:12/ 3.5.14).

Docks are recognised as being the most significant structures in the operation of the yard as well as a dockyard’s defining characteristics.

Proposal

Based on the new information established from the archaeological surveys and further archive based and site survey based research, the opportunity now exists to ensure that the historic cultural assets of the earliest Royal Naval Dockyard of 1513 benefits from the same statutory protection deployed and enjoyed elsewhere (Defences of Britain Study) and to comply with several English Heritage guideline and policy documents that have been delivered in the intervening period, namely, Sustaining the Historic Environment 1997, An Archaeological Research Framework for the Greater Thames Estuary 1999, Heritage Dividend 2002, A Sense of Place for a New Thames Gateway 2004, Naval Heritage: Managing Change in the Royal Dockyards. Conservation Bulletin 2005 Issue 48, Maritime and Naval Buildings Selection Guide Heritage Protection Department March 2007 and The Tidal Thames Habitat Action Plan (TTHAP).

The opportunity now exists to consider the dockyard landscape with its definitive historic components within the above guidelines and policy. Deptford dockyard is an internationally significant historic site and deserves the opportunity for comparable assessment for listing that has been applied to dockyards elsewhere in the country. Indeed, not to apply such a comprehensive approach would constitute a form of social exclusion from such statutory protection deployed and enjoyed elsewhere.

“We cannot expect these important sites to remain unchanged, but we can expect change and development to occur within the context of informed conservation.”

Maritime and Coastal Heritage. Conservation Bulletin Issue 48, Spring 2005.

The case for listing

The yard at Deptford witnessed the labours of Henry VIII’s Master Shipwrights Matthew and James Baker, laid up Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind, put out ships for the Armada as well as Cook’s, Frobisher’s and Vancouver’s voyages of discovery, as well as for Nelson’s battles including Trafalgar and also served as a military base into the twentieth century as Army Supply Reserve Depot in WWI and WWII as married quarters and served as U.S. Advance Amphibious Vehicle Base for the D. Day landings, Operation Neptune. (On June 6, 1944, D-Day, LSTs brought 41,035 wounded soldiers back across the English Channel to hospital facilities. (PRO WORKS 43/614-6) 14 U.S. Marines lost their lives in a single V-1 bomb strike on the dockyard on July 8th 1944. The area of land in question, far from being a mere brown-field site, has served the Nation as a military installation over a period of five centuries.

New evidence and amendments

There are four important re-assessments and amendments to be made to the archaeological assessments carried out to date which impact on the heritage assessment of the value of Deptford’s historic cultural assets and therefore impact on the proposal to list.

1. The Great Georgian Dock

The Double Dry Building Dock, in use as early as 1517 and featured in the John Evelyn map of Deptford of 1623, underwent remodelling in the intermediate period between Samuel Bentham and John Rennie. (See new information, PRO ADM 1/3501-3503 May 18^th 1815 and NMM ADM Q/3320-3323 9^th Oct 1802, 23 Aug 1805) This work pre-dates work by John Rennie to the listed docks in Chatham, for example, and may constitute some of Rennie’s earliest works in Royal dockyards. Recent EH test site excavations have established that the walls are three metres thick, and coped in granite with articulated works in limestone. It is now widely acknowledged that docks from the earliest date, and the Double Dry Building Dock at Deptford may be one of, if not the earliest surviving dock, subsequently rebuilt, express advancements in the technology of shipbuilding and that these developments enhance rather than detract from the historic merit. In Maritime and Naval Buildings Selection Guide, works by Bentham and Rennie are signalled for special consideration. Under subheading, Special Interest, it states, “Docks and harbour walls pre-dating 1840 generally form the most impressive engineering structures of their date and even where they have received alteration, as nearly all have, will normally merit designation, with those displaying technical innovation or association with major developments in shipbuilding, warranting a high grade. Examples would be key developments in modern dock construction such as those pioneered by Smeaton and Rennie or Samuel Bentham’s development c.1800 of caisson gates.” (2007:05) Also mentioned for special consideration is the use of Roman cement. Divers, writing on the Georgian Great Dock at Deptford, states, “Waterproof ‘Roman’ cement (patented 1796) was used towards the front of the wall.” (Divers, 2000:58/7.17.2 Trench 17 fig.29) For the reasons stated above, further investigation may bring to light that, as the sole surviving double dry building dock from the Tudor period, reworked by Rennie to proposals by Bentham, the structure is unique. These works are unlikely to have undergone alteration due to the closure of the yard in 1869. Indeed the outline of the Great Dock in George Ledwell-Taylor’s plan of 1820 is commensurate with that of the O.S map of1868.

2. The Great Basin

The Great Basin was also an early resource of the King’s Yard, mentioned in an Indenture of 1517 (BL Add.6555), as holding amongst other ships the Mary Rose. The Basin was also the site of testing early diving bells by John Evelyn, (Diary 19 July, 1661). In Charnock's "History of Marine Architecture" it is given "A note how many ships the King's Majesty (Henry VIII.) hath in harbour, on the 18th day of September, in the 13th year of his reign (1521); what portage they be of; what estate they be in the same day; also where they ride and be bestowed." From this we are enabled to see what use was made of Deptford as a naval station at that time:—"The Mary Rose, being of the portage of 600 tons, lying in the pond at Deptford beside the storehouse there, &c. The John Baptist, and Barbara, every of them being of the portage of 400 tons, do ryde together in a creke of Deptford Parish, &c. The Great Nicholas, being of portage 400 tons, lyeth in the east end of Deptford Strond, &c. … The Great Barke, being of portage 250 tons, lyeth in the pond at Deptford, &c. The Less Barke, being of the portage of 180 tons, lyeth in the same pond, &c. The twayne Row Barges, every of them of the portage of 60 tons, lye in the said pond, &c. The Great Galley, being of portage 800 tons, lyeth in the said pond, &c." (http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45272)

Originally a naturally occurring pond in the 14^th century, the Basin underwent several periods of re-modelling. New archive-based assessment has established that the final designs were by John Rennie, and re-workings of earlier proposals by Samuel Bentham. The works were carried out by Jolliffe and Banks. Banks was knighted in 1822 for his works to Southwark and Waterloo bridges on the Thames. Rennie was paid a sum of £4,500 to widen and deepen the Basin and move the Basin mouth to the east. In the Abstract of Contracts, related to works to the Basin, Rennie specifies coping the Basin with Craigie or Dundee stone. The mouth to the Basin is shown as open with an extant Swing bridge in the Thames Flood Defence Survey of 1898. (Metropolitan Archives, MBW 2787)

However no outline of Rennie’s 1814 modification is given in the recent archaeological surveys. It is possible therefore that the archaeological site survey placed its trenches, no.s 7 and 9, outside of the final Rennie works to the Basin, thereby determining that no upstanding remains could be found. (See Buro Happold, Summary of the Main Dock Features and Archaeological Trench Results 001.) The photograph, Plate 9, printed in the archaeological survey of 2000 (Hawkins), said to depict the Basin mouth, is also incorrect as it shows instead a blocked slipway. These errors are critical to the forming of an accurate assessment in line with URB20 point A. To properly assess..”

The Basin contributed to the earliest period of the dockyard and remained open until the advent of the twentieth century. Its final layout is commensurate with works proposed by Samuel Bentham as Inspector General of Naval Works and carried out by Joliffe and Banks under the direction of John Rennie. Listing of the Basin as a Group Value consideration even, offers the opportunity for further archaeological investigations in order to re-assess the outline of the Rennie, Joliffe and Banks works.

3. River wall

There was some discrepancy between the archaeological surveys regarding the age of the river wall, with one archaeological survey of 2000 stating that the river wall is post the life of the dockyard. Statement 0.6.4 “The bulk of the river wall appears to have been constructed in the period 1869 to 1916.” This claim has been subjected to a further detailed site and archive-based assessment. It can now be stated that Lowe (2000) was correct in stating, “The bulk of the river wall thought to date to the final re-modelling of the Dockyard during the 1830’s.” Lowe (2000:/3.2.4)

Moving west along the wall, we encounter the survival of George Ledwell-Taylor’s 1828 work creating the canal to the mid-eighteenth century mast pond (NMM ADM Y/D/11-D8 1828). Jonathan Coad refers to Ledwell-Taylor as one of the finest dockyard architects. Further west, to the left and right of the Basin mouth, already established as work by Rennie 1813-17, the presence of 150ft length of Craigie stone specified by Rennie during his works to the Basin mouth is extant and clearly visible. (PRO ADM 106/3185 WORK 41/594 signed John Rennie. NMM ADM Y/D/11-D7 16 Nov 1813. See also, A.W. Skempton A Biographical Dictionary of Civil Engineers in Great Britain and Ireland. 2002 and CgMs 3.2.4 / 3.2.1)

The Landing Place and Stairs, that feature in John Cleveley’s eighteenth century paintings of the launching of ship, blocked post-1930, formed the ceremonial and Royal entrance to the yard for more than two hundred years. (See Metropolitan Archives, Thames Flood Defence Survey MBW) The granite quoins to these Royal Stairs align with the granite quoins to the Double Dry Building Dock, as shown on George Ledwell-Taylor’s 1820 plan of the yard and correspond to the 1868 O.S. map. It is therefore established beyond doubt, through on site and archive based study that the harbour wall to the King’s yard is early to mid nineteenth century expressing the work of George Ledwell-Taylor and John Rennie following proposals by Samuel Bentham. (NMM ADM Q/3320-3323 9^th Oct 1802, 23^rd Aug 1805) Knight’s Mechanical Encyclopaedia of the nineteenth century states that cast-iron piling has been successfully used in quay walls at Deptford. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:2001.05.0138:chapter=17&highlight=deptford accessed 22/12/09.

4. Small seventeenth century mast pond

The early small mast pond, c.1660, does not form part of the archaeological survey carried out in 2000. The mast pond featured in the surveys and referred to is that from the 1760’s only. This is a serious omission as the early small mast pond expresses the first departure from the extent of the Tudor and Stuart dockyard and marks a expansion of the dockyard into the Hanoverian period. This mast pond may be the earliest extant mast pond in a Royal Dockyard and was constructed in the seventeenth century on land purchased from Sir Denis Gauden, Victualler to the Navy. An early draught design of the mast pond is held in the Evelyn Papers at the British Library. It was in this early mast pond, during the tenure of Master Shipwright Joseph Allin, in the early eighteenth century, that the boat used to bring Charles II back from exile was discovered, refurbished and renamed the Royal Escape, eventually finding its way to Heligoland.

Summary

“by far the greater part of the dockyard survives as buried structures”

The scope of Lowe’s preliminary archaeological assessment in 2000 of surviving historic fabric only covered the following; standing buildings, river wall, perimeter walls and ground surface sections. However, given the evidence established in the surveys carried out by Hawkins and Divers, and further newly uncovered evidence from archive and site based surveys, the comprehensive indication of the majority survival of the dockyard’s distinctive characteristics merits a comprehensive listing to ensure that Deptford’s historic cultural assets of local, national and international significance are not excluded from the statutory protection applied in all other cases of listing of the Royal Dockyards.

Extracts from the recent archaeological surveys carried out at Deptford Dockyard affirm, that “major dockyard features survive across much of the site and that later activities on the site have had relatively little impact on these remains.” (Divers 2001:69/9.1.4)

“The large features targeted by the evaluation trenches have been found in their anticipated locations, often at relatively shallow depths beyond the present ground surface.” (Divers 2001:70/9.1.6)

“The N.E wall of the Georgian Mast Pond was found to survive immediately below the modern concrete ground slab.” (Divers 2001:26/7.2 Trench 2, fig.9)

“The N.W. wall of the Georgian Dock was found just immediately below the modern tarmac surface.” (Divers 2001:58/7.17.1)

Divers concludes, “the evaluation has established that the major features of the dockyard have survived in their predicted locations with little evidence for widespread truncation by later activities on the site.” (Divers 2001:71/9.4.2)

Conclusion

Deptford was the Cape Canaveral of its day, leading the technology of shipbuilding. The position of Master Shipwright at Deptford was the highest and therefore most sought after of the Royal Dockyards. Deptford’s proximity to the Navy Board and Admiralty ensured that advancements in the technology of shipbuilding tended to be carried out there. Due to its closure in 1869 Deptford was not subject to the later remodelling that occurred in other Royal Dockyards. As such, The King’s Yard at Deptford, expresses the early Tudor plan comprising, Master Shipwright’s House and Offices (Grade II), Double Dry Building Dock (proposed) Storehouse (Undercroft, Scheduled Ancient Monument) Great Basin (proposed).

Following the guideline statement in the Maritime and Naval Buildings Selection Guide 2007:05, it is requested that “A holistic approach should be taken where several original or near contemporary associated structures survive together or where a group of structures displays the evolution of port facilities in one significant place.” Statutory recognition of these early manifestations of works by Bentham and Rennie, perhaps expressing some of their earliest works in Royal Dockyards. Such extraordinary conjunction intensifies the significance of each element, further enhancing the Group Value listing of the Master Shipwright’s House and Offices (overlooking the Double Dry Building Dock), the listed perimeter walls and the covered slipways of 1846 (Olympia Sheds).

This early Tudor Dockyard plan, expressed in Evelyn’s annotated map of Deptford of 1623, is altered little by the expansion and developments of the Hanoverian period. The King’s Yard at Deptford remains the sole Royal Dockyard to express its original Tudor and its subsequent expansion into the Hanoverian period. The earliest Master Shipwright’s House and the earliest purpose built naval office building in the country, with additions expressing Bentham’s centric organisational Panopticon principles (Pro Work 41585-6, NMM ADM/ Q 3323 28^th Feb 1805), would be further enhanced by statutory protection of the Double Dry Building Dock, The Great Basin and Harbour Wall, mast ponds and slipways, thus bringing Deptford’s historic maritime heritage in alignment with every other Royal Dockyard in the country.

The Royal Dockyards are amongst the most long-lived, extensive and coherent monuments to the history of the United Kingdom. Many of the industrial, technological, military and social changes that occurred in the post-modern and modern periods are embedded within their surviving fabric. Anthony Firth, Wessex Archaeology 2004.

“The Royal Dock, or "King's Yard," as it was locally called in former times, was esteemed one of the most complete repositories for naval stores in Europe. It covered not less than thirty acres of ground, and contained every convenience for building, repairing, and fitting out ships-of-the-line—those veritable "wooden walls of Old England" with which we were familiar before the introduction of armour-plated vessels. Artificers in wood and in iron had here large ranges of workshops and storehouses; and here the hammer and the axe were scarcely ever idle, even in times of peace; but where, during the prevalence of war, they were plied incessantly "in the construction of those floating bulwarks for which England is, or rather was, renowned, and which carry a hundred and twenty guns and a thousand men to guard her shores from the invader, or to bear her fame with her victories to the remotest seas of the ocean”

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45272

Royal Dockyard at Deptford circa 1739 showing the Great Basin in the foreground.

http://www.mod.uk/defenceinternet/aboutdefence/whatwedo/defenceestateandenvironment/modartcollection/ministryofdefenceartcollectionlaunchofa60gunshipatdeptfordc1720.htm accessed 22/12/09

Publications Consulted

Hawkins, Duncan. BA MIFA. April 2000. CgMs Consulting. Archaeological Desk Based Assessment

Convoy’s Wharf, Deptford SE8

Divers, David. January 2001. CgMs Ltd.Archaeological Evaluation of Land at Convoy’s Wharf, Deptford.

Lowe, Jon. BA. June 2000. Preliminary Assessment of Surviving Historic Fabric Convoy’s Wharf, Deptford.

Archives Consulted

National Archives

National Maritime Museum

British Library

Metropolitan Archives Corporation of London

GoogleBooks

Internet

Chris Mazeika December 2009.