Riverside south of the river and east of the Tower
Stone Marshes

Desolate area which once was home to several cement works and is now all modern office blocks plus a new port area.

Post to the east Greenhithe
Post to the north Dartford Crossing
Post to the south Stone

Anchor Boulevard
Laing O’Rourke. Head office of international engineering and construction company. This is a family owned company dating to 1848.
Clipper Boulevard
Hotel Campanile

Crossways Business Park
Reclamation of the land used by the cement works and their railways began in 1979. In 1985 roads were built to access the new ferry terminal. In 1988 Masthead, was completed and in 1988/9 the ASDA warehouse was finished. There are now five business areas :- Masthead, Newtons Court, Edisons Park, Admirals Park and Charles Park               
Galleon Boulevard
ASDA Distribution Centre.
The Wharf. Shepherd Neame pub


Stone Marshes
Area of marshland which was used for a number of cement works in the late 19th and early 20th and since redeveloped as a business park and port area.
Albion Portland Cement Works. The Albion works was operational: 1879-1914, 1919-1922. It was initially owned from 1879 to 1890 by Williams Fry and Co. Ltd, then 1890-1903 Albion Portland Cement Co. Ltd, and following a mer4ge 1903-1911 it was Artillery and Albion Cement Co. Later, between 1911 and 1922, it was part of Blue Circle. The initial installation was for 6 chamber kilns, to which in 1889 a pair of Dietzsch kilns added and a further 13 chamber kilns 1902-1909. It was merged with the Artillery works in 1903. There was a standard gauge rail link which ran under the South Eastern Railway and Cotton Lane to a pit but the product was shipped from Stone Court pier. The site was entirely cleared and is now part of a container terminal
Artillery Cement Works. The Artillery Cement Works was operational 1890-1903 by Rosher & East, and then following a merger became between 1903-1911 Artillery and Albion Cement Co.  Later between 1911-1922 it was part of Blue Circle. There were 14 chamber kilns in 1897-1900 and a further 7 chamber kilns were installed around 1904. There was a standard gauge rail link which ran under the South Eastern Railway and Cotton Lane to a pit. This was extended in 1908 to an exchange siding with the South Eastern Railway main line. Cement was shipped from Stone Court pier. The area was completely cleared and Meridian House, Crossways, is on the site.
Greenhithe Portland Cement Works. The Greenhithe Company works was operational between 1889-1914 having been opened by the Gillingham Portland Cement Co. Ltd. From 1893 to 1900 it was run by  J. B. White & Brothers Ltd and then 1900-1914 it was part of Blue Circle. There were 14 chamber kilns here in 1900 and  aa further 10 chamber kilns were added 1902-1909. There was a standard gauge rail link which ran under the South Eastern Railway and Cotton Lane to a pit but the cement itself was shipped from Stone Court pier. The site was entirely cleared: and is now part of the container terminal.
Kent Cement Works This was operational 1922-1970 using a quarry at which was initially worked by the Stone Court Chalk Land and Pier Co., and subsequently acquired by APCM.  The works was set up in 1919 by the Kent Portland Cement Works which had beenwas launched to buy and install a large, modern, plant, and failed before the plant was complete, because of over-spend. APCM bought it from the liquidator. Subsequently, the FLS-designed plant became an APCM showpiece and influenced the development of subsequent Blue Circle/Vickers designs. Kilns A1 and A2 were the largest in Britain until 1926 when they were overtaken by Bevan’s A1-A3. The plant was operated by Blue Circle together with nearby Johnsons. Four rotary kilns were installed. Clay was washmilled separately and from 1938 delivered as slurry by barge from Cliffe, chalk was brought from the quarry by rail. Rail links were via an exchange siding on the South Eastern Railway main line. In 1963 the line was connected to Johnsons although there was a prexisting line between the two works along the riverbank. . The works closed in 1970 and was demolished.  A few fragments of the wharf remain but the plant site is covered by part of the Crossways industrial park.
Sewage works.Dartford Rural District Council works. Now closed
Shield Portland Cement Works. Shield works was operational from 1880 when it was set up by Wilders and Cary but from 1900 to 1914 it was part of Blue Circle. There were 7 chamber kilns here in 1900. The site was entirely cleared and is now part of the container terminal.
Stone Court Pier. This was taken over by the Stone Court Company in 1885. It was an existing pier from about 1873. Near the pier were the Albion, the Artillery, the Shield and the Greenhithe cement works. A rail line ran from here under the South Eastern Main Line to a pit south of this and Cotton Lane. When the Kent Works was built a connection was made to the Stone Court Line via a cutting alongside the main line just north of the Cottons Lane Tunnel. Another cutting south of the line allowed Stone Court trains to access pits to the west. From, 1935 the Stone Court Company worked gravel pits near the river. The works was abandoned in 1949 and eventually became part of APCM.  All four of the Stone Court Cement Works closed in 1930. The pier is used as part of Thames Europort
Thames Europort.  This is a Roll-on/roll-off port facility which port is used only for freight, both trailer and container based. There is a large pontoon berth which can take two ships at a time for loading and discharging. The terminal has regular freight links with Zeebrugge, Dunkirk and Vlissingen
Dartford International Ferry Terminal. DIFT – this is all freight transport
Sources
Cement kilns. Web site
Dartford Borough Council. Web site
Port of London Authority. Web site
Porteus. Dartford Country
Stoyel and Kidner. The Cement Railways of Kent.

Riverside east of the Tower on the south bank
Littlebroo

This posting only covers sites on the south bank. The section north of the river is Purfleet jetties

Old marshland area dominated by the QE Bridge and largely consisting of a business park in defunct power station buildings

Post to the east Dartford crossings
Post to the north Purfleet Unilever

Dartford Crossing
Tunnel Ventilation shaft
Dartford tunnel works. The tunnel was begun in the 1930s and the works buildings remained in situ until work could recommence in the 1950s.

Littlebrook
The Littlebrook is a stream which flows through the marshes to the river. It is now contained in man-made drainage ditches on the marsh. The name is used in Saxon charters

Littlebrook Manor Way
This once ran from Overy Street in Dartford to the river
Littlebrook power station A, This was the first power station on the site. It was coal fired and opened by the Kent Electric Power Company in 1939.  It was later converted to burn oil over coal, and was closed in 1973. The steam from the boilers supplied three steam turbine generators. The boiler house has now been converted to house a reactor simulator,
Littlebrook power station B. This opened in 1949 and originally burned coal, but was later converted to oil. It remained in use until 1975. Its boilers directly supplied steam to a turbine-generator. The building is now offices
Littlebrook power station C was opened between 1952 and 1956 by the Central Electricity Generating Board and like the two earlier plants, it was originally coal-fired, but was converted to oil. It was replaced by D Station. Part of the station remains and is now offices
Littlebrook D, was to the west of this square
Jetty– this is the original 'A' station coal jetty and it was used for the smaller sea bourne oil cargoes.
The original 132kV substation, built for the 'A' station, has kept although modified
Littlebrook Business Park. Offices in power station and other buildings

Sources
Dartford Council. Web site
RWE, Web site

Riverside east of the Tower, south bank
Long Reach

Riverside area of marshland now being 'regenerated' with housing following the closure of Joyce Green Hospital. Mainly taken up with the sewage works and defunct power station.

Post to the east Littlebrook
Post to the north (north bank only) Purfleet Board Mills
Post to the north (south bank only), Long Reach Hospital

Birdwood Avenue
New build housing on the site of a development area mainly to the west of this square, on the site of Joyce Green Hospital.

Littlebrook D, Power Station
Littlebrook D was an oil-fired power station built by Cleveland Bridge Company for the Central Electricity Generating Board, opening in 1981. It was seen as a robust station to have a pivotal role if the bomb dropped. Five fuel oil storage tanks stored the heavy fuel oil which was delivered by tanker to one of two jetties. This generating capacity was enough to power the needs of over 2 million people. During the miners’ strike of the 1980s all three units of the station operated simultaneously and continuously throughout exceeding what it was designed to do and led to one unit being moth balled. . The remaining two units remained operational, having been refurbished to increase efficiency and improve the quality of emissions from the chimney - which was the fourth tallest in the UK. The station could start generating without an external power supply and played a vital role in restoring power supplies following the 1987 hurricane. It had three open-cycle gas turbines which included Rolls Royce Olympus derived from those on Concorde which can be turned up to full load in less than five minutes so they can deal with short-term peaks in demand.  After privatisation in 1991, the station was owned by National Power and its subs division Innogy and later bit RWE Power owned by the Gern utility company, RWE. They decided that it would "opt-out" under the EU Large Combustion Plant Directive aimed at dealing with air pollution. It therefore closed in 2015
Long Reach
Thames Water Authority works –West Kent Outfall works.  Long Reach Treatment and Sewage Works. This Opened in 1877 and was under the West Kent Authority before being taken over by the Thames Water Authority in 1974. It serves an area including Dartford, Crayford and Sevenoaks. The works was upgraded in 1979 and this is currently being done again as part of the Thames Tideway Project.
Connecting road from the hospital built 1902

Sources
Dartford Council Web site
GO-Fasttrack. Web site
Littlebrook Power Station. Wikipedia. Web site
RWE AG. Web site
Thames Water. Web site

Riverside south bank, east of the Tower.
Long Reach Hospital

Post to the south Long Reach
Post to the west Darenth meets the Thames
Post to the north Purfleet
Post to the east Purfleet Unilever


This post covers the south bank only. The north bank in this square is Purfleet Board Mills

Bleak riverside stretch where smallpox patients were treated


Long Reach
Long Reach Isolation Hospital. Built in 1903 for smallpox patients who came by river.  It was erected by the Metropolitan Asylums Board at the end of 1901 to provide temporary extra accommodation during a smallpox epidemic. It was on land adjoining the shore base of hospital ships Atlas, Endymion, and Castalia which were full. It was designed by A & C Harston. Up to 300 patients were to be accommodated in a long row of detached single-storey ward pavilions built of wood and iron. Patients came by river by the Metropolitan Board’s river ambulance service which terminated at the Long Reach pier. A tramway was constructed in 1897 to transfer patients between the pier and hospital in horse-drawn tram-cars. It was worked as an auxiliary hospital to the ships with Dr Ricketts as Medical Superintendent with Matron Wacher and Steward Moule. The first patients arrived in February 1902. In 1910, it was decided that Long Reach would be kept in reserve for smallpox and the other local River Hospitals would be used for fevers and convalescence. In 1928 the hospital was rebuilt as a permanent smallpox hospital, It was transferred from Metropolitan Asylums Board to London County Council and later to the NHS.  In 1953 the Thames flooded, and Long Reach was submerged to 6 feet. The Gate Porter was the only member of staff on duty and he waded to Joyce Green. By the 1960’s the hospital had had 50 beds on standby and could be reopened in two hours with staff were on permanent standby. On duty they moved in for 14 days at a time and all their clothing was destroyed when they left.  By 1973 just 30 beds were kept on standby and it was opened for one patient. This was the last patient ever to be treated at Long Reach. The old isolation buildings were deliberately destroyed by fire in 1977 to make sure that no infection remained. The site was then taken over by Thames Water.

Sources
Dartford Hospitals. Web site
Workhouses. Web site

Riverside east of the Tower, south bank.
Crayfordness

Point out into the river with beacons and nearby scrap yards

Post to the south Dartford Marshes
Post to the west Great Coldharbour
Post to the north Purfleet
Post to the east Purfleet

Crayfordness
Lighthouse.  The lighthouse is18 miles from London Bridge and was originally a stone tower established in the 1950s and replaced in 1967 by a red metal structure. It is on the land side of the flood barrier. It was moved in 1982 as part of the Greater London Council Thames Flood defence system.  It was later demolished and then built in a corrugated iron shed on the PLA radar tower.  The light is visible for three miles. There is a connecting walkway to the radio communication tower.
Radar Tower. Port of London authority tower. Monitors between Gravesend and Woolwich. This grey painted 74 feet high metal tower is connected by a walkway to another similar tower,
Radio Communication Tower. Connected to the radar tower but twice the size.
Crayfordness Limit. No vessel which is carrying in bulk either a flammable or toxic substance of Class 2 is allowed to navigate, anchor or moor in the Thames west of the Crayfordness limit.

River Walls
The wall is 17th in origins although eastwards it includes Saxon and Roman work.

Sources
Baldwin. The River and the Downs
Lighthouses Web site
Port of London Authority. Web site

Riverside east of the Tower and south of the river. Erith

Industrial marshland with new roads including the edge of the community of Slade Green

Post to the east Dartford Marshes
Post to the south Slade Green
Post to the west Erith
Post to the north Great Coldharbour

Anchor Bay
This area was previously saltings.
Anchor Bay Dock. This is an open dock 15m wide, cut back into the river bank and which in the 19th served as the main barge dock for Erith Iron Works and Erith Brick Works.  Used by Easton and Anderson and then by Herbert Clarke barge owners.  It was connected to pits by tramways for the export of bricks. It was and renewed in concrete after the Second World War.
Erith Iron Works. This was established in 1864 in Anchor Bay. Easton and Amos had had a works in Southwark since the 1830s making steam engines, pumps and similar machinery. In 1864 William Anderson joined the company and planned a new works at Erith. They made pumping machinery of all kinds, centrifugal pumps, cranes, boilers, and paper and sugar machinery. The new works was considered to be a model of what an engineering works should be.  By 1866 the company was owned by members of the Easton and Amos families along with Anderson and were engineers, ship builders, iron workers and founders. The company then became Easton and Anderson. Among their designs and installations were, in 1871 three large sugar factories in Egypt, In 1874 Ogi Paper Mill in Japan and later mountings for Russian guns. They designed and built many waterworks including, in 1879, one for Antwerp and in 1888 they built lifts for the Chignecto ship railway at New Brunswick. The works closed in 1903.
Herbert Clarke Ltd. This company later used the Erith Iron Works site. They were barge owners and lightermen dealing with the coal trade.
Mayer Parry Recycling Yard. This company was on the site used by the Erith Iron Works. They dealt in scrap.
Anchor Bay Wharf. This is a treatment facility with river access. It is the site for a haulage fleet of 60 vehicles. On site there is work on storage of hazardous waste, crushing, screening and processing of aggregates and dismantling and deconstruction of electrical transformers. Pier of Larsson piling, originally built 1870
Standard Wharf.  Originally built 1908.  Cross braced timber jetty 75m long and 3.75m wide. Some rails intact.  Built as a tramway for bricks from a works to the south. Also called Norris’ Wharf and most recently owned by Bardon Aggregates.

Bilton Road
Trading and light industry units
Long Reach Road
One road on an estate built on the fields of Wallhouse Farm and earlier gravel workings.
Manor Road
The road is relatively new – even in the 1970s the eastern end does not appear on maps.
DVLA Car Pound
National Construction College. This is the Kent centre for construction training
European Metal Recycling.  Erith depot, scrap yard, large firm with international links dating from the 1940s.
MMF Ltd., Chimney building firm founded in Smethwick in 1965.
Erith Sewage Works.  Site of 1898 pumping station for which G.Chatterton was the Engineer.  It was a single storey brick shed with a pedimented central doorway and at the north end was a maintenance workshop.  It was originally powered by 4 Crossley gas engines running on producer gas made on site.  It was designed to raise sewage to a higher level sewer for access to the West Kent Main Sewer.  An Ingersoll Rand was compressor installed to replace the engines in 1930.  It was demolished in 1992.
Ray Lamb Way
The road is said to be owned by the Russell Stonham Estate and to have been built to prevent lorries going through the Slade Green Estate.  It was built by Bellway Homes
Lower Farm
Richmer Road
Private gated road with industrial and trading users.
Slade Green Road
St Augustine Church. Built in 1900.
St. Augustine’s church hall
Vicarage
Slade Green Junior and Infant School. This was originally Slade Green National School established in 1868. This was set up by local landowners, Stoneham. From 1925 the School came under the Parish of Slade Green, but in 1938 it was passed to Kent County Council. The name was changed to Slade Green County Primary School in 1953 and in 1955 a new Infant school was built and opened by Norman Dodds MP, but the old buildings remained in use until the completion of a new Junior School in 1964. In 1965 the school as were transferred to the London Borough of Bexley. Plans
Howbury Centre. This opened in 2014. It was previously in the old school buildings. There is a large hall, outside multi-use games area, a café, a smaller hall, and other rooms
Slade Green Library – this is now at the rear of the Howbury Centre and is a ‘community library’ – i.e. has no staff and relies on local people to run it for free.

The Saltings
There are the remains of a prehistoric forest emerging from the mud.
Erith Yacht Club. Erith Yacht Club was formed in 1900. The Royal Corinthian Yacht Club had its headquarters at Erith and when it moved to Port Victoria local members formed the Erith Yacht Club. They also replaced an earlier Erith Yacht Club. Ladies were admitted to membership for five shillings per annum but were not allowed to enter the clubhouse.  By 1904 membership had grown to over 250 and the there were over a hundred boats  including large steam yachts and over twenty sailing boats. In the 1920s they were joined by officers from the Royal Artillery garrison. By 1929 the building of new wharves restricted available mooring space and the club moved to Anchor Bay a Thames barge Garson used as headquarters  and other vessels followed. In 1977 the club bought their site from Stonham Estates. There is now apparently a shore side club house

Wallhouse Road
This road once went into the marshes and the river. A small section exists in Slade Green with modern housing.
Wheatley Terrace Road
A dead end, the name reminds us of the former estate owners.


Sources
Anchor Bay. Web site
Bexley Civic Society. Walk
Bygone Kent
Erith. Official Handbook.
Erith. Official guide
Erith Yacht Club. Web site
Grace’s Guide. Web site
Hamilton. The Industries of Crayford
London Borough of Bexley. Web site
Spurgeon. Discover Erith and Crayford
South East London Industrial Archaeology

Riverside east of the Tower and the South Bank. Jenningtree Point

Heavily industrialised riverside area

Post to the east Rainham Marshes
Post to the north Hornchurch Marshes
Post to the south Belvedere Marshes
Post to the west Belvedere Marshes

Crabtree Manorway North
The northern end of the road is a footpath to the river on a strip of land. A ditch appears to run along the eastern edge of the strip and there is a shaft linking to a disused former cooling water outfall tunnel in the middle of the strip
Burt’s Wharf. This is now an industrial and trading estate. It was a works for Burt Boulton and Haywood, formerly located at a timber impregnation tar works at Prince Regents Wharf, West Ham where they were the largest tar distillers in the world.   There was a large internal tram and rail system here. They are now in Wales.

Fishers Way
Lidl. This is the chain’s distribution warehouse.
Belvedere Industrial Estate. Trading and industry area
River Wharf Business Park. Trading and industry area

Mulberry Wharf.
Mulberry Wharf. The wharf was built 1920 on the site of the Powder Magazine Jetty.  Low concrete jetty of T plan. 30m from bank. T section 58.7m long. 12.5m wide. Crane on `T section.  It is a Safeguarded Wharf which can handle ships of 4.0m draught.
Lafarge. Aggregates co and predecessors have operated Mulberry Wharf since 1955.
Hall’s Magazine explosion. In 1864 two gunpowder magazines exploded with the shock felt as much as 50 miles away. This was in a depot belonging to John Hall, and Sons, and also a magazine used by the Low Wood Gunpowder Company ex. Daye and Barker. Three cottages were destroyed along with the works jetties and barges. All that was left of the works was a crater and a resulting breach in the sea wall.  Army units and workers from Woolwich Arsenal were drafted in to prevent the river flooding into the marshes at the next high tide
Price's Oil Refinery. This was south of the magazine and was set up in the 1860s by Sir Charles Price. This company had had an oil refinery in Millwall since the late 18th.   The works is assumed to have been taken over by Price's Candles.

Riverside Path
Jenningtree Point.  This marks the transition from Erith Reach into Halfway Reach
The origins of the name are not clear -  a Jenning tree was a type of apple. It was also known as Julian Point.
Jenningtree Point lighthouse was set up in 1901. It stood below the level of the river bank . It was 44 feet high and operated by a sun valve controlling the acetylene gas which was recharged every six months. It was demolished before 1990 – probably in 1976.
Ferry. A ferry service ran from Jenningtree Point to Rainham. In the middle ages this was controlled by Lesnes Abbey.
Sources
Arthur Pewty’s Maggot Sandwich, Web site
Ballard .Report  on nuisance on the Lower Thames
Bygone Kent
Erith. Official Handbook.
Erith. Official guide
Grace’s Guide. Web site
London Borough of Bexley. Web site
Tucker. Ferries of the Lower Thames
Where Thames Smooth Waters Glide. Web site

Riverside, south bank east of the Tower. Belvedere Marshes

Heavily industrialised riverside and marshland

Post to the east Jenningtree
View to the north Dagenham marshes
Post to the south Belvedere
Post to the west Crossness Sewage works

Norman Road
Belvedere power station. This was a. ‘crisp, no nonsense’ building by Farmer & Dark and the British Electricity Authority.  It was an oil-fired power station with two 420 ft chimneys. The turbine house was rectangular and considered an outstanding industrial monument. 53 acres had been bought here by the West Kent Electric Co in 1919 and the station was built by the Central Electrical Generating Board in 1954, the official opening being undertaken by the Mayor of Erith in 1962. The station was built in two halves with unitised plant where the generators each have a dedicated boiler. The first half was originally designed to burn coal but always ran on oil. Cooling water came from the Thames. The total capacity of the station was 480,000 kilowatts. A line from the nearby grid station went to the power lines over the Thames as the Belvedere-Barking/Crowlands circuit.  The station was decommissioned in the 1980s and demolished in 1993.   It is now the Isis Reach Industrial Park.
Belvedere Sub-Station. a long rectangular building, remained after the Power Station demolition but has now gone.
Borax refinery. The chemical manufacturer Borax Consolidated opened a factory here in 1899.  It was built on the site of a fish guano factory.  The Borax came by river to be processed there.  The works had its own power generation plant from 1926. Production ended in 1990.  .
Borax Cottage. This was made completely of wood, and had been built in 1870
Crossness Nature Reserve. A network of ditches and open water, scrub and rough grassland. There are water voles and over 130 different species of bird. An artificial sand martin wall, a bat cave, a boardwalk through the reed beds and a pond with a pond-dipping platform.
New Marsh Tavern. This was on the riverside and was a pub for Russell’s Gravesend Brewery,


Picardy Manorway
This road once came from Belvedere village and led to the river and Manor wharf. The road was a typical medieval ‘manor way’, a raised trackway that provided access across the marshes from the settlement on the higher ground, and which probably also served as a flood defence and possibly as a land division.  It is now known as Norman Road,

Riverside
Halfway Reach Bay.A large inlet was originally the mouth of large creek before reclamation.  This may be part of the Great Breach which was an incursion into the marshes by the river in 1531
Sea wall.  In 1230 and 1240, the abbot and convent of Lesnes Abbey built sea walls and by the end of the 13th had reclaimed land in the marsh. The modern sea wall is a 5m high earth embankment with a 1m high concrete wall on the seaward side.
Pigou and Wilkes powder magazine.  Rebuilt and incorporated into the Borax Works.  The explosion of 1864 was not here magazines but at Mulberry Wharf to the east of this square.
Curtis and Harvey powder magazine. Also noted on this riverside.
Manor Wharf.  This is an L shaped jetty running 22.5m from bank and reached by a bridge. It is of a Timber cross braced construction.  It originally for the Belvedere Fish Guano Works and was Built in 1908 and rebuilt in 1946.
Belvedere Fish Guano Works.  Processed imported guano for fertilizer. Absorbed by Borax 1899.
Bevington’s Manure Works, This was a large L-shaped building beside the river wall, with outbuildings to the west, south and east, and two piers to the north. Thos was have established ‘several years’ before 1870, Bevingtons being the Bermondsey based leather works. . They used scutch -which is the refuse left fed with sulphric acid. The residue was run into trenches and later dug and used as manure, after being dried out. The smell was very offensive
Brown's Glue and Manure Works,  This adjoined Bevington's and had been set up many years before 1870 and were said to be a constant source of nuisance to people on the river. They made glue from the clippings of hides used left by tanners, horses' hoofs, etc which arrived here in a putrid state leading to an offensive vapour when they were boiled. They also made scutch which could be smelt in Woolwich Barracks, four miles away.
There were two piers here in the 1870s. Both have gone.
Car park and jetty owned by the Ford Motor Works Company, for people using their ferry serving the plant at Dagenham. The ferry dated from 1933 to get south London workers to work.  It was free and timed to coincide with the starter and end of shifts. It consisted of three catamarans and carried 2000 passengers a week. When the ford works stopped making cars and only made engines the ferry service was withdrawn from 2004.
Four disused timber jetties. With a disused high conveyor/piperack connecting to the foreshore.
Borax Wharf.  Wharf to serve Borax plant. 50m.
River Wharf. Built 1895. Timber river bank wharf replaced in 1950 by steel piling and concrete deck 102.5m long extending into the river 18.75m.
Renton’s jetty. This was a timber importing business. Sheds etc remained on site
Belvedere Sewage Sludge Incinerator.  This was built to replace the transport of sewage sludge from the Crossness sewage works to the North Sea. In 1994, the local authorities gave approval for an incinerator to be built operated by Thames Water. It was built by AMEC-Lurgi and opened by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1998. Electricity is also generated as a result of the incineration process. The plant is housed in a metal clad building with an outward curving side and an S-shaped roof. The chimney at the north end has a convex curved side. Two parallel sludge incineration lines produce 6 Mega-Watts of power which is sufficient to drive the entire sewage works. Inside the plant seems is encased in galvanized metal. And are made from an open metal mesh which allows through-floor visibility and good ventilation
Isis Reach warehouse and storage/distribution development.  . 
Riverside Resource Recovery Ltd, this manages waste from the Western Riverside Waste Authority in London. It has a capacity of 575,000 tonnes waste per annum. The facility was given permission by the Department of Trade and Industry for construction in June 2006.   It is a subsidiary of Energy Power Resources Ltd who have an agreement with Cory Environmental Ltd.  The Plant comprises: energy from waste plant, using conventional moving grate technology and processing, on average, 585,000 tonnes per annum of primarily municipal solid waste over the 30 year life of the plant. The main plant building comprising the waste reception hall, waste storage bunker, waste combustion grates, boilers, ash bunker, gas cleaning equipment, turbine house, chimney stack and air-cooled condensers.


Sources
Ballard. Report on nuisance on the lower Thames
Belvedere Power Station, Wikipedia. Web site
Crossrail documentation. Web site
Grace’s Guide. Web site
London Borough of Bexley. Web site
Pevsner and Cherry. South London
Natural England, Web site
Spurgeon, Erith and Crayford
Tucker. Ferries of the Lower Thames
Thames Water, Web site

Riverside east of the Tower, south bank
Crossness Sewage Works.

Huge sewage works serving south London

Post to the east Belvedere Marshes
Post to the north, north bank only, Dagenham Dock
Post to the south Yarnton Way
Post to the north Crossness Engines


Belvedere Road
Crossness Sewage Works. The original sewage pumping station was built here for ether Metropolitan Board of Works in 1865. The original buildings remain and are in the square to the north. By the 1830s and '40s London's polluted river water was causing increasing problems for the public's health, and in 1856 the Metropolitan Board of Works appointed Joseph Bazalgette as Chief Engineer. An Act of Parliament in 1858 enabled the Board to construct the new sewage system and work began in 1859. Here at Crossness the major pumping station for the area south of the river was built along with the Southern Outfall sewer to feed sewage to the works., Built on a 37 acre site, the complex included 20 houses built for the workers all demolished by the 1960s.  Later buildings included the Precipitation Works Complex completed in 1892, and the original covered reservoir was extended to hold 25 million gallons. The Works passed to the London County Council’s Public Health Engineer.  In 1956 the old works was closed and a programme of modernisation undertaken. In 1964it was completely rebuilt with the largest mechanized aeration plant in the United Kingdom, capable of producing a nitrified effluent. In1965, when the Greater London Council was formed the works was passed to the Thames Water Authority. The works has been continuingly upgraded to represent the latest in sewage treatment technology and is the second largest such works in Europe. From 1887 to 1998, a fleet of special boats went from Crossness to Barrow Deep beyond the mouth of the Thames the jetty on site having been used by then. Between 1915 and 1967, the nearby Black Deep site was used for dumping sludge.  Since then sludge is burnt in a special incinerator (in the square to the east) and enough electricity is generated to run the rest of the plant. A current programme of works will upgrade the works again and enlarge its capacity.
Screen House. just beyond the entrance gate where large objects are removed before the sewage goes on for treatment
Sludge digestion tanks. The reinforced concrete primary sludge digestion tanks are of impress
Pond near the river the sole survivor of a number of cooling ponds on the site.
Large lake and the administration building for the modern works. The installations of the modern works lie to the east of this building. ive size with valve chambers dramatically corbelled out to span the roadways between the tanks.

Southmere Park. The park was built as part of the New Town development of Thamesmead and one of the earliest built. It is dominated by large-scale moulding, with dense tree-planting along paths and in groups on slopes of mounds.

Riverside
A concrete flood defence wall divides Crossness complex of buildings from the river, which has a riverside path and cycleway along the top. The river wall needed extensive piling work when the works was first built.  160,000 cu yards was evacuated and 82,000 cu yards of mass concrete was used
Jetty - this handled the sludge boats. The original jetty for loading and unloading sludge disposal vessels.  Went out 60m from the shore.  T section 106m long. Built 1880 and demolished 1955

Sources
Crossness Engines Trust. Web site
London Gardens Online. Web site
Thames Water Web site

Riverside.  East of the Tower the south bank. Crossness Engines

This posting covers sites on the south bank only

Preserved 19th sewage pumphouse complex with amazing beam engines, plus a derelict golf course.

Post to the northern section of this square. Dagenham Dock
Post to the north Dagenham Riverside
Post to the east Dagenham Marshes
Post to the south Crossness Sewage Works
Post to the west Crossness and North Thamesmead

Belvedere Road
Crossness Works. This covers the area of the original works. The modern works is to the east and south. The works was originally built 1856 having been commissioned by the Metropolitan Board of Works and finished in 1865. It was designed by Joseph Bazalgette, William Webster was the contractor for much of the work and it was opened by the Prince of Wales.  The original facilities of 1862-5 comprised 6 acres of brick- roofed storage tanks and an engine house for pumping out the sewage on the falling tide. These are now disused.  There were 51 staff under a superintendent and housing and some facilities were provided. The buildings are now a museum run by an independent trust. Prince Consort has been restored after over 20 years work and is working. Work is now going on with Victoria
Engine House. This contains four beam engines by James Watt & Son, laid out on a grand scale. It formerly had a mansard roof with a clock in a gable facing the river placed over the main door – this was replaced with flat concrete in 1927.  The white Gault brick exterior is a rectangular box with polychrome embellishments, with fantastic decorative brickwork and dogtooth ornamentation, corbel blocks, and Portland stone columns. There are monograms of MBW – Metropolitan Board of Works.  Inside all was originally brightly coloured. The Cast-iron galleries have stiff-leaf capitals and an elaborately ornamented central octagon. There is cast iron work of outstanding quality in the galleries and in the pillars and screens of the central octagonal shafts. The triple-expansion cylinders can be seen at an intermediate level and the actual beams at the top level. In the basement are the pumps. The Engines, Victoria, Prince Consort, Albert Edward and Alexandra, were built at James Watt’s & Co.  Soho Birmingham but they were triple compounded in 1901 by Goodfellows of Hyde in Lancashire.  Originally they each had a single cylinder 4ft in diameter with a 9 ft stroke At 11 revolutions per minute, 6 tons of sewage per stroke per engine were pumped up into a 27-million-imperial-gallon reservoir, and was released into the Thames during the ebbing tide.  In 1899 the front was obscured by the erection of the triple engine house.
Triple Engine House. By 1897, additional pumping capacity was needed, and four extra pumps operated by triple-expansion steam engines were installed in an extension, designed to fit in with Bazalgette's main engine house, to the north of the older building. In 1913, the triple expansion steam engines were replaced by diesel engines, which are still to be seen in the triple expansion engine house. In 1913, the triple expansion steam engines were replaced by diesel engines, which are still in the triple expansion engine house,
Boiler house. The steam required to power the engines was raised by 12 Cornish boilers with single "straight-through" flues situated in the Boiler House to the south of the Engine House, and which consumed 5,000 tons of Welsh coal annually. The Crossness Works merely disposed of raw sewage into the river seawards, and in 1882, display the sculptural possibilities of round-arched brickwork. 12 Cornish boilers and built in a Victorian Romanesque style.
Storm Water Pump House. This was the Centrifugal Engine House. Built in 1914 by the London County Council. Contains electric pumps used for storm sewage but these were originally diesel.  The Building is in brick and Portland stone and the style goes with the 1865 ones.
Chimney. The chimney, resembling a separated campanile, topped with an iron cowl, stood some 200ft high to the eastern end of the Boiler House. Since demolished in the 1950s.
Covered reservoir. Originally the Southern Outfall discharged into a 6 ½ acre covered reservoir and was discharged into the Thames according to the tide. Beyond the black palisade fence of the garden to the south, is the top of the reservoir which now holds storm water. The level top of the reservoir has grasses which may contain relics of species undisturbed since the building of the works complex. The old ramps which led down into the reservoirs can be seen at the south end of this area,
There were once 20 houses for workers in a row on each side of the reservoir with a Superintendent's house at the far end. Demolished.
Fitting Shop. This is behind the Boiler House and is matched by another building at the other end of the Garden terrace. The one at the west end was the Valve House, at present a store,
‘Garage’. This was formerly used as a shed for the site tramway, and as an apprentices school.
Precipitation Works, Built in 1891 this is a large building with the boiler house to the north and engine house to the south. They are single storey brick buildings with slated pitch roofs in a style like the 1865 buildings which originally housed the boiler house and steam engines for pumping sewage through the precipitation process.  
Gardens The buildings were set within formal landscaping including a Garden Terrace between two buildings south of the Boiler House. There was also a tree-lined drive. There are a number of mature trees and remnants of the planting scheme of the Garden Terrace. Near the access to the Thames Path a small wildlife garden has been created, supported by a Biffa Award.
Thamesview Golf Course. This was Riverside golf course with nine holes. Now apparently closed.

Sources
Crossness Engines Trust. Web site
London Borough of Bexley. Web site
London Gardens Online. Web site
Spurgeon. Discover Erith and Crayford.
Thames Water. Web site

Riverside east of the tower and on the south bank. Thamesmead North and Crossness

New housing overlying marshland which once contained part of a vast area of military storage and other military uses

Post to the east Crossness Engjnes
Post to the north Barking Levels
Post to the west Thamesmead Pumping Station

Abbey Sluice
Abbey Sluice is a weir under the Thames Embankment between the Butts Canal and the River and with a public footpath on the top. It has a gravity outfall adjacent to Crossway Lake into which the drainage canals from the whole of Thamesmead feed.
The Cascade. This runs south from the Thames path which zigzags downwards in a series of steps to meet the head of a body of water which has come from Crossways Lake.


Copperfield Road
7 Marlborough Court Care Home. Private home specialising in dementia care.
Castilian Primary School. Opened 1985.

Crossness
Crossness, Marked thus on the Ordnance Survey map of 1888, a promontory on the River Thames, from Old English ‘ness’ or ‘ness’- a piece of land round which a river flows to form a headland'. Perhaps there was once a standing cross on the riverbank here.  It was also called Leather Bottle Point
Crossness Lighthouse. Admiralty Light No.2144. Originally operated by Trinity House it is now owned and operated by the Port of London Authority and was at one time in an isolated location.   It is now in front of modern housing It was established in 1895 and today at 41 feet high shows a light visible for 8 miles. The red iron framework tower is an open trestle tapering tower on a mass concrete base and surrounded by a sharp pointed metal fence and topped with razor wire. The compound gate carries a health warning of the dangers of razor wire; the danger of climbing the tower; and other health and security warnings,   Converted from oil to acetylene in 1924 and to electricity in 1971
Old Marsh Farm– this was on the riverside, slightly to the east of Crossness Point
Halfway House. This is shown on 17th and 18th maps. It was probably so called because it marked the halfway point for ships sailing between Gravesend and the Pool of London.
Wogbourne River.  This is said to have flowed to Crossness from Shooters Hill. It is now underground and diverted to the west.

Crossway
Crossway Lake. Owned by Gallions Housing Association. This is a small, reed-fringed lake with a wooded island which is part of an elaborate flood prevention system of lakes and canals which connects Crossway Park with others. It is managed as a nature reserve. Grey herons have been reported nesting, and other breeding birds include reed warbler. There are two islands one of which is Tump 39.
Tump 39. This was used by the Royal Navy Armaments Department for the storage of Cartridges and Bulk Cordite. It is now a heron reserve
Rail Track– this is some remaining rail track on an area which is now an island
Square Magazine. This is marked as ‘depot’ on maps and is now the eastern part of the land around Crossways lake.  Its boundary is defined by the fencing on the north and west edges of an area which extends from Woburn Close.
Crossway Park. This is a late 20th landscape the former Erith marshes. The Park is a large grass area around the Crossway Canal. It is part of the Green Chain.

Eastgate Close
Housing by Phippen Randal and Parkes 1987 supposed to be like an Italian village and has a arch over the Crossway Canal

Crossness Explosives Pier
Pier - This was the pier from which explosives were shipped. It was serviced by two Transporter-type cranes that took their power through cables reeling onto drums on the crane structure


Manor Close
Community centre. Used by various groups including Toddles, a private childcare service. There is also a scout group along with youth and a karate clubs.
Church of Christ. This meets in the community centre
Manorway Green

Rail
The Royal Arsenal Railway was a private military railway. At first there were plate ways and standard gauge lines but from 1871 onwards some of the track was constructed as 18in and comprised some 50 to 60 miles of track.  It finally closed in 1966.  Because this was a military area many maps show it as a blank and it is not easy to follow through year by year.  A map of 1897 shows lines coming from the west parallel to the river and stopping just short of the Bexley/Greenwich border. Lines are shown going into buildings and a riverside line extends eastwards into a building. The 1965 map is much more complex – six very large buildings lie at right angles to the river with lines running into each one


Redbourne Drive
Refuse tip. This area is shown as a tip in the 1960s

Woburn Close
The extension of this road to the east defines the boundaries of the Square Tump


Sources
Castilion School. Web site
From the Murky Depths., Web site
Greenwich Industrial History Society. Web site.
London Borough of Bexley. Web site
London Gardens on line. Web site
London Lights. Web site
Royal Arsenal Magazines. Web site
Spurgeon, Discover Crayford and Erith
Trust Thamesmead. Web site
Wigfall. Thamesmead
World Wide Lighthouses. Web site

Riverside south bank east of the Thames. 
Thamesmead Pumping Station

Riverside path with a pumping station keeping Thamesmead from floods
 
Post to the east Thamesmead and Crossness
Post to the north Barking

This post has sites on the south bank only. The site to the north is Barking Power Stations

Thameside and Riverside Path
Pumping station. The pumping station dates from the early 1970s and was one of the first pieces of infrastructure for the new town of Thamesmead. It was initially operated by the National Rivers Authority. This is Lake 4 or Thamesmere Pumping Station, part of the Marsh Dykes Catchment. The catchment was created in 2013 to bring a catchment-based approach to the waterways of Thamesmead. The pumping station has four Archimedes screw pumps, with associated diesel and electrical motors. Its function is to pre-determine the height of storm water in the holding lake. The pumps automatically start and transfer water to the Thames. The station can pump 8,000 litres of water per second, and has a new electrical control system. More than 700 houses and 16.5 acres of commercial property are protected from flooding by its pumps. It is built on an area of riverside which appears to have been a marshy incursion and unused by the Riyal Arsenal.


Sources
Environment Agency. Web site,
Spurgeon. Discover Crayford and Erith
Wigfall. Thamesmead

Riverside south of the river, east of the tower Tripcock Ness


"Regneration area' on old military manufacturing area, includes an obscure eco-village and a new hill

Post to the north Beckton
Post to the west Gallions and Galleons

Barnham Drive
Barriers at the end and a cycle lane that goes nowhere. This is the route of a proposed new bridge into a new development and the riverside.
There is a structure in the grassed area at the end. It appears to have had a garden round it which is now derelict. There are blue curved walls around a feature which is out of sight.

Battery Road
Discovery Day Nursery and Children’s CentreDiscovery Primary School.  The school opened in 2007
Foxglove Path
This canal-side path leads from Battery Road, towards Gallions Reach Urban Village and a lake.
Margaret or Tripcock Ness
This is a promontory shown as ‘Magott Nesse’ on a chart of 1588 - ‘Maggot’ was once used as a pet name for ‘Margaret, It is also called ‘Tripcotts’ and ‘Tripcott Reoche’, in 1588, alluding to ‘Tripcock Trees’ shown on maps from  1805 - a line of trees by the river.  This may also be because from 1806 sailing vessels heading inland were forbidden to carry anchors cable hung ready to let go from this point – the practice was called "a-cock-bill" or "cock billed",
Lighthouse. This is 11 miles from London Bridge and the nearest lighthouse to London. It is on the river side of the flood defence bank, it is a red iron tower is surrounded by a sharp pointed metal fence and topped with razor wire. The compound gate carries a health warning of the dangers of razor wire; the danger of climbing the tower; and other health and security warnings. The light was established in 1902 shows a light visible for 8 miles
Princess Alice. In 1878: SS Princess Alice was sunk off Tripcock Point in Gallions Reach with 640 fatalities

Open space
A large open space remains between the river and new housing. Some of this, to the east, is due to be used for a development called Tripcock Park by Peabody. The area has most recently been used to dump spoil from infrastructure projects but in the past was used for explosives and other manufactures. There were a number of ‘danger’ buildings here. The area is often not shown on maps but seems to have had many buildings shown as ‘depot’ and some firing ranges.
This is also seen as an important wild life area. Elder bushes dominate the scrubland, although there has been tree planting, there are nanyt grasses, butterfilies, rabbits and hawks. To the east are wetlands with reed beds, drainage dykes and lagoons on what was contaminated soil.  There is marshland flora along with herons and kingfishers
Mugby - part of this area is marked as 'Mugby' on those maps which show detail - including from the 1960s,
East Gate - this is also shown on maps from the 1960s

Riverside
Riverside defence structures. There is a World War Two Pillbox and Observation Post south-west of Tripcock Ness. These were strategically placed to observe and defend the river and bank to the west.
The pillbox is built on a concrete foundation raft with a brick outside and a flat concrete roof. It is unequally hexagonal and has a rear rectangular covered porch protecting the entrance which is on the south-east. Inside is one small room.
The observation post is two storeys and polygonal in shape, of concrete panels with a bitumen cover. At first floor is a raised turret with rifle loopholes on four sides. Steps lead to the ground floor and as curved narrow observation area.
The foreshore is reported littered with material many items – there are 19th and 20th barge hulks, an old barge dock, pottery of all sorts and blast furnace debris.
At a curve is an indentation whi h is probably the result of a breach in the river wall. The land was boggy and had been used for a magazine; and latterly for a latrine, with an outfall drain. Four old boats loaded with stone were grounded here in a line with more stone piled behind. These boats are now accessible at neap tides. The southernmost of them is the only known example of a ballast barge. It had a very basic hull, for local work in calm river waters, with a large hopper in the centre and a crane to dredge ballast from the riverbed. .


Thamesmead Central
This area of shops and local facilities, plus the twin tumps, lies mainly in the square to the east and will be described there.

Thames Gateway Bridge proposal
An area proposed for a possible Thames Gateway Bridge lies through this area. Mainly crossing  the unbuilt and restricted area,  it is planned to start from the roundabout, in the square to the south where eastern, western and central ways meet and then to go north westwards north of the Tor and crossing the river someway south of Tripcock Ness.

Tor
This is now called Gallions Hill. This is a twenty-metre-high hill – in this totally flat marshland landscape. It was built from "recycled excavated material". A spiral footway/cycleway leads to the top where there is a paved area in the form of a compass.

Tor Grove
This is part of the Galleons Eco Park. The  Tor Grove Block A is one of four blocks of sustainable social housing built for the Gallions Housing Association. The houses have timber frames, advanced insulation and double glazing, condensing boilers, solar water heating through panels in the roofs, and waste separation units to encourage recycling, as well as sunspaces in their south-facing elevations.

Sources
Discovery Children’s Centre. Web site
Discovery Primary School. Web site
Greenwich Industrial History. Blog
Pastscape. Web site
Royal Arsenal History. Web site
Thamesmead Trust. Web site
Where Thames Smooth Waters Glide. Web site

Riverside, south bank east of the Tower.  Gallions

A small strip of new housing on an old Arsenal riverside area

This post is only about sites on the south side of the river. Sites on the north part of this square are at
 Galleons

Post to the north Beckton
Post to the east Tripcock Ness

Merbury Road
This area of housing is on what was part of the Arsenal site – left as blank on many maps. It appears to have been the site of a depot of some sort with  roads and possibly some rail lines.

Riverside Path
Gridiron. This appears as a derelict jetty at an angle to the river wall. It was built as a roll-on dock for 100 ton guns to be loaded onto special 'Gog or Magog' barges After manufacture in the Arsenal the gun would be put on a railway wagon, taken to the dock, and rolled (wagon and all) directly onto one of the barges for transport to Shoeburyness or wherever.


Sources
Greenwich Indujsgtrial History. Blog site.

 

Riverside east of the Tower, south bank
Broadwater

Arsenal lands - some converted to housing as much as thirty years ago, some being converted with heritage buildings.

Post to the south Plumstead
Post to the north Galleons and Gallions

Argyll Road
Building 50.  Building by the A& Q Partnership 2003. Flats in six storeys overlooking the river. This was the area of the east range of the Grand Store built in the early 19th and demolished by 1850 because of subsidence. This was rebuilt in 1855 with an engine house and accumulator towers for the Grand Store hydraulic power system. In 1895 it was redeveloped as an electric power station, rebuilt with turbines in 1903, and oil fired boiler house in 1967.  It was demolished for the current flats in 2000
Building 49. This was part of the Grand Store built from 1808 and completed in 1813. From 1855 this was the Ordnance Store Department and used for the storage of all sorts of items – tools and items for horses, primarily a nail and harness store. Internally mezzanine floors were later inserted and same jiggers and canes survive from the 1850s. The building was converted to flats from 2002.


Armstrong Road
This road has been built through an area which was a timber field but which was built up with industrial buildings in the 1870s.
Boiler house. This had 24 boilers
Rolling Mills.  It was built in 1875 for iron bars which could be forged into coils to make large guns. This was finally demolished in 1998 and its cast iron frame put into store.
South Boring Mill. Built in 1882 and eventually filled all the open ground left. Locomotive parts were built her after the Great War.
South Forge. This included what was said to be the world’s most powerful steam hammer with a falling mass of 40 tons. The anvil was cast on site in 1872 and weighed 103 tons. It was decommissioned in 1914 and is now displayed on the corner of Wellington Avenue and Arsenal Way.
1o Centre. This is part of the Employment Zone and consists of plain steel sheds.
Gun Yard.  This was to the east of the road and south of the riverside and included a shot and shell store.
East Laboratory Composition Establishment. This was to the east of the road. Small arms cartridges were made here.
Railway locomotive shed stood south west of the gas works


Arsenal Way
Shot and Shell Foundry. This is now Foundry House. This was needed in the 1850s to provide ammunition which could not be supplied by the private sector. It was built in 1856. It was made up of three iron framed workshops plus a moulding ground and a turning shed and a 224 foot high chimney. The ornamental gatehouse remains with iron work by Charles Bailey, an antiquarian architect specialising in the history of English ironwork.   The workshops were demolished in the 1960s and the ornamental gates removed, to be returned in 1991. Some electric furnaces were installed here in the 1950s later in the 1960s there were workshops for the Royal Air Force.  The replacement workshops have now themselves been replaced by flats and the gatehouse used as a sales office. Alongside are the bases of the vast steam hammers which were used here.
Gunnery House. This was building 7. These were carriage completing workshops replacing earlier seasoning sheds from the early 1860s and in 1871 a forgers shop. This was ‘the great smithery’ which aimed to be the most complete smiths shop in the world. There were sixty forges, eight steam hammers and a machine to punch holes in iron sheets. Other forgers were added and in the1960wsn it became a tool room. In 2002 it was converted into light industrial units.
Medical Centre. This is in the north and south ranges of the Royal Carriage Mews and was built in 2011. The rest of the building is in the square to the west.
Energy Centre. This dates from 2011 and replicates the former carriage storehouse which it stands next to. It has gas fired plant which provides hot water and electricity for the development.

Broadwater
Broadwater Green the generic name for a low rise mixed council/private estate built 1979-82. It was originally two roads, but since 1999 has become a large estate. There are no tower blocks. It covers the area of some of the buildings used for handling gunpowder with filling and press rooms.
Broadwater Green. Area of parkland adjacent to the estate.  This has a play area from the late 1970s and 1990s. New natural play spaces are now being developed. This includes a carved totem pole, a wildflower maze through long grass, woodland pathways, log stepping stones, planting of a jungle garden and new trees.
Broadwaters Centre. Local shopping centre of 1982 sited by the old Arsenal canal. These shops now appear to have gone.
The Royal Arsenal Canal. This was built by Chief Engineer, Lt.Col. Pilkington in 1812, extended again by 1816 and is a half mile long, 11 feet deep and 45 feet wide.  It had a dual purpose - one was to deliver materials into the heart of the Royal Arsenal military complex and the other was to create a defence boundary to the east. It does not seem that it was intended for the repairs of military vessels. It was used to bring timbers to the Royal Carriage Department and a branch went to the saw mill. Colonel Pilkington appears to have used the Isle of Dogs canal as a design. There is a lock to the river and it was eventually lined with warehouses. On the west bank were the New Army Ordnance Stores and on the east filling factory Danger buildings. The canal was also used for Torpedo testing. It was crossed by three railway swing bridges and another survives at the entrance lock. The Upper part filled in 1926 as far as the swing bridge and the rest of the canal was filled in before the Second World War. A wide slipway built by the Borough leads down from what was the Broadwater’s Centre, and a footpath runs along the east side of the canal to the Lock. . The sides have been widened and concreted. A large mooring bollard remains. These remains are part what was of the northern canal route. The southern canal route continued to what is now the junction of Whinchat Road and Goosander Way, then towards the roundabout at Broadwater and Tom Cribb Roads. This ended near the boundary with Armstrong Road partly encircling an area of the shell filling department. South of this another branch partly encircles at Timber yard with buildings off it including a percussion cap store. This was called Frog Island South of this branch was the cartridge establishment
Rocket Establishment. This was alongside the canal on the north side, and the later site of warehouses. It probably dated from 1855 and was built with hydraulic presses to manufacture Hale’s rockets. All rockets leaving here were painted red. It was relocated to a site to the east before 1914.
Broadwater Lock. This controlled the entrance to the canal and was built in 1814. The old lock gates and the swing bridge of 1876 which carried the Arsenal light railway across the entrance lock remain. The inward seaward gates have gone and the river gates are shut, cutting off the canal and the lock from the river. There is some similarity in the design of the lock and those on the Isle of Dogs Canal. The gates' curved structure is still visible.


Cadogan Road
The western part of the road covers the eastern side of a triangular and moated carriage yard in the early 18th. This later became an orchard and the moat extended into a canal on what was then the Arsenal’s eastern boundary.
Grand Store– the north side of the road runs alongside the back part of the Grand Store which fronts on to Marlborough Road,
25 Cannon House. This was the Cannon Foundry. In 1810 a proof department had been established.  A store was built here in what was Proof Square in 1853. A new cannon foundry was built in 1856 to the west of what was the Lancaster shell foundry. This building survives with some railway type characteristics. The central section included 10 cast iron casting pits and two travelling cranes. Bessemer is said to have trialled the use of steel here and rifled ordnance was also developed here. A Rifled Ordnance factory was built which has since been demolished. Eventually gun manufacture was standardised and here the 35 ton ‘Woolwich Infant’ was made; the building being called ‘the infant school’.  The building was also known as the Armstrong Gun Foundry and guns patented by Armstrong to Blakeley patterns were made here. In 1967 new floors were inserted and the building used by the British Library. It is now flats built by Berkeley Homes.
Buildings on the south side were part of the Shot and Shell foundry which fronts onto Arsenal Wayne
Wellington Park.  This was built on the site of much of the Shot and Shell Foundry in 2004. It is a landscaped roof to an underground car park. There is a pergola and three steam hammer bases and a sandstone engine base from New Laboratory Square,
Statue of the Duke of Wellington. This is in Wellington Park. By Thomas Milnes. It was commissioned by the Board of Ordnance in 1848 and was originally in the Tower of London. It was moved to the Arsenal in 1863 and put outside the Grand Store. In 1974 it became the Wellington Memorial with ironwork from the Royal Laboratory machine shop.

Cornwallis Road
Forge. This was for the radial crane of 1876 in a circular building. The crane could lift hot gun barrels up to 250 tons into oil tanks. The building was demolished in 1966.

Duke of Wellington Avenue
This was previously No.1. Avenue and renamed in 1978.
The Armouries. This was the Royal Carriage Factory. The factory remains as peripheral buildings to tall blocks of flats which replaced carriage sheds on the triangular fort section built in the late 17th.  Following a fire this area was built as a quadrangle of workshops for the Royal Engineers in 1802. The Royal Carriage Department was on the site in the early 19th and built from 1803. It was a large carriage works with an engineering section laid out like ‘a model farm’.  The north front had a clock and bells with a blind arch and side entrances. This was an inner quadrangle of workshops with three smitheries and twelve forges as well as carpenters, wheelwrights and so on.  Steam power was first used in the Arsenal here from 1807 introduced by Henry Maud slay.  To the east was a sawmill. In 1848 a scrap forge on the east side had the first Arsenal steam hammer and more steam powered machinery followed. As carriages grew larger and were less based on wood the factory was altered and enlarged. In 1937 a steel erecting shed was installed and used as an inspection facility from 1967.  On the south side is a 17 bay brick range built in 1893 to store gun carriages. It has been much rebuilt including in the 20th fiord naval X-ray photography. It was joined to the main building in 1895 with fitter's and tinman's shops.  Much of it was rebuilt in 2007 for Berkeley Homes with new blocks inside the original building. The clock tower was rebuilt. Much of this complex lies to the west of this square,
Sawmill. This was at the eastern end of the Royal Carriage Factory. Replacing a Martello Tower. It was originally designed by Marc Brunel and it was steam powered. It was designed to be reached by the canal.

Erebus Drive
This is the spine road for Royal Artillery Quays

Gadwall Way
This is one of a number of roads in the Broadwater estate named after birds.

Gallions Park
These sites are near the site of the Cannon Cartridge Factory. This was very dangerous and many special arrangements were made against explosions. Gunpowder was stored further down river in magazines and tumps
Landscaped park with grass, scrub and wetlands.  There are patches of natural hawthorn and willow scrub.  Planted woodland of alder and birch and lots of birds.  There are water voles and water birds. The park surrounds Gallions Lake and is filled with mature trees, benches, shrub beds and hedgerows
Gallions Lake. A small lake, with a nice setting provided by the promontory of Gallions Park which overlooks it. There is a public footpath round the lake but it is a fishing lake stocked with carp.
Eastgate wall. There is a stretch here from   1870, which marked the east boundary of the Arsenal before its late 19th expansion, has been preserved and is clearly visible from the main road.

Gas Works
This dated from 1857 and had two holders. In the works was a space from which balloons could be launched.
Saxon remains comprising a village and burial ground found in this area during archaeological investigation,

Griffin Manorway
Gateway into the Arsenal – 4th gate.
This is one of the old Manor ways into the river and is the road over Plumstead Marshes. In the late 19th it was said to be like the fen country - Deep ditches of water on either side of the roadway with Broad green grass fields divided by ditches. Horses were turned out; there was whippet racing and, pigeon shooting clubs. The Walls of the Arsenal on were on the west.   It led to Arsenal football ground and the rifle butts for the Arsenal. These are in the square to the east.
In the 1970s the creation of Western Way and Pettman Crescent led to the cutting off of the eastern part of the Arsenal, which was then still functioning and it was known as Royal Arsenal East and approached via Griffin Manorway

Gunnery Terrace
The site between here and what is now Cornwallis Road had been a proof butt which was replaced in 1777 by weather boarded timber sheds. Called the Blue Cross Storehouses they were used to store timber and manufactured wagons. 
Brunel’s saw mill was east of this in 1855
Building 5 was built in 1856 as an iron framed seasoning shed. There was also a pontoon store which later became a fitters shop and by 1867 was a woodworking area – housing wheelwrights, carpenters and so on. These were replaced by steel framed building sued for making navy guns. Demolished in 2001.


Hardinge Square
Blocks of flats and houses from 2001

Hastings Street
Blocks of flats from 2001

Marlborough Road
The eastern end covers roughly the site of proof butts built in the late 18th.  There were also shelters and vegetable plots attached to the convict ships in this area.
Grand Store. This was planned from 1802. This was designed by Lewis Wyatt with a central square and a riverside office block. The inner courtyard was finished by 1808 and the whole thing finished by 1813.  Although the original plans were cut back it was built and finished to a lavish scale. There is a Grand Quadrangle of two and three storey buildings using structural timber internally. They were used to store all sorts of military equipment and some original internal wooden doors remain. There is a western pavilion which was the original offices. It has a grand central staircase inside a large open hall – which contains an original dome headed stove. Posher offices here were the ‘Duke of Wellington Suite’ and bridges originally going to the shot yard were removed or covered. On the wall is a war memorial to men of the Army Ordnance Department. From the start the buildings fire proofing arrangements were not seen as adequate and it soon began to suffer from subsidence. From 1855 it was the headquarters of the Ordnance Store Department. Originally the outer quadrangles contained workshops and sheds most of which have now gone. The quadrangle was roofed in 1855 to provide covering for shot and shells. From 1900 it was rebuilt as a carriage warehouse and this included a water tower and there were also some demolitions. From 1969 it was used by the British Library and there again some alterations. The east quadrangle fronts onto today's Argyll Road. Some parts of the western end were used as s book store by the Science Museum in 1971.  Much was rebuilt again in 2004 as flats by Berkeley Homes and this included some underpinning. Some original features remain.
Cemetery – this was a collection of old guns surrounded by elm trees.  There were burial grounds all around where convicts were buried in unmarked graves.

Pettman Crescent
The southern loops in the Riyal Arsenal canal was known as Frog Island. In 1937 new Chemical Laboratories were built here. After the closure of the Woolwich Royal Ordnance Factories in 1971 they moved into a new building in what was to become the Royal Arsenal East approached via Griffin Manor Way.
Plumstead Bus Garage a relocated Plumstead Bus Garage was built on part of the site of Frog Island. The garage was built in 1981 by the London Transport Department of Architecture and Design, Chief Architect Hardy. It has a space-frame roof over the parking area; diverse elevations of red brick- staff quarters with conservatory and roof gardens. It is now owned by Stagecoach
Wall the relocation of the garage led to breaking down of parts of the 1804 Arsenal brick boundary wall. Part of it near Plumstead Bus station was replaced by iron railings and chain link fencing.

Pier Way
Gallions View. Nursing home.

Princess Alice Way
The Princess Alice was a major riverboat disaster in 1878 when 650 died. It was nearby off Tripcock Point so it is clearly thought appropriate to name a road after it.

Railway
The earliest railway in the Arsenal ran as a tram way between the storehouses to the shot piles.  It grew into a vast system connecting every part of the complex and was the main means of transport. From 1859 the railway system proper were constructed to standard gauge to regularise the ad hoc arrangement of individual plateways built by each department who did not work together in anyway. This had begun in 1824. They later came under the control` of the Royal Engineers. From 1871 onwards some of the track was constructed at 18 inch gauge making up 50 to 60 miles of track five new narrow gauge locomotives were bought in the Second World War and the final one in 1954. The remaining narrow gauge lines finally closed in 1966. Parts of the 18 in gauge track were built as dual gauge track, Some 120 miles of either this or standard gauge track existed by 1918

Riverside Path
The riverside area was reshaped from 1803. This included reclaimed land and a quay of 2,440 feet. To the east was a recessed area shaped for a dock. The construction partly used convict labour and a steam engine; Cranes were installed along the length of it. In 1820 the ground level behind it was raised 9 feet. It was refronted in granite in 1855 and refaced in 1906, 1920 and 1960 – which included new flood defences.
Convict Wharf. This dated from the late 18th and was made of timber.
Pier. This was built in 1869 and extended in 1875 with an 80 ton crane. It was to tranship ship heavy guns. It was later reconstructed to take a 200 ton crane which was eventually sold to Antwerp. The pier remains with some mixed gauge railway track
Coaling pier built of concrete in 1915. This had an overhead delivery system and coal was partly delivered for the Arsenal Gas Works.
Pier near the Grand Store. This was a T pier built in the 1850s and demolished in 1900.  It was built by Royal Engineers of timbers from St. Katharine’s Dock and opened by Queen Victoria. Its T branches were each 100 ft long and it went 150ft into the river. Shipping which used these piers were known as the Woolwich Navy and the headquarters were on the Arsenal site.  War Department vessels and Royal Engineers were in charge of mining defence work since the Navy did not think it was something they should do. War Department vessels had their own special crews and there were a number of sea going vessels as well as barges and smaller boats.
Boat House marked on the 1850s map
Mallets Mortar. This was displayed near the T pier but is now at Fort Nelson. This was a very large, but ultimately unsuccessful, mortar weighing 32 tons. This was one of the prototypes from 1857,
Shaft to the Docklands Light Railway. This is near the end of Argyll Road,
The former entrance to the Royal Arsenal canal, now concreted off from the Thames. The only indication of the canal is one of the capstans used to assist vessels into the lock chamber.

Royal Artillery Quays
A riverside housing development which is part of a 2000 home-building programme on undeveloped land started in the year 2000 by Barratt.  This is on part of the Royal Arsenal site south and west of the canal entrance and on the riverside north of the Arsenal gas works. There were a number of buildings on this site.
Examining House
Fuse Store
Mortar Store

Western Way
Main  road into Thamesmead
Whinchat Road
Heronsgate School. Th4 School opened in 1982 when you could see all the way from the school across the marshland to Erith. In 2011 the school opened a new site on Burrage Grove near the Royal Arsenal development although children attend only one of the sites
Heronsgate Health Centre

Sources
Bird. Geography of the Port of London
Cocroft. Dangerous Energy
Heronsgate School. Web site
London Borough of Greenwich. Web site
London Canals. Web site
Mercury, Connections,
Masters. The Royal Arsenal, Woolwich.
Spurgeon.  Discover Greenwich and Charlton
Spurgeon. Discover Erith and Crayford
Survey of London, Woolwich
Trees for Cities, Web site
Trust Thamesmead. Web site
Vincent. Warlike Woolwich

Riverside east of the Tower, south bank. Woolwich

The old heart of this riverside town. The riverfront with old wharves and thee Free Ferry, and the heart of the Royal Arsenal, all regenerated to death.

Note that this post only covers sites on the south bank of the river

Artillery Square
Building 17 (Paper Cartridge Factory or Firepower). In 1853 John Anderson suggested a new process for making seamless conical paper sugar bags for the manufacture of small-arms bag cartridges. A new building for making the bags was proposed in early 1855. Building work, probably the last job for the on-site Engineers’ Department finished in 1856 and the factory was in use by 1857. It is a two-storey block, iron-framed with two-colour brick walls which has considerable structural interest  and reflects developments in textile mills and dockyard buildings, Advanced technology and intense child labour co- existed here side by side. On Saturday evenings the upper storey was used for penny lectures to artisans and labourers. Percussion-cap making had been introduced by 1864 and later Rolling mills and annealing furnaces were introduced. In the late 1920s the building was adapted for use as an RAF bomb shop. And in the Second World War, for electroplating small gun barrels. In 1986 the building was in use as a Quality Assurance Directorate metrology laboratory. It was once again adapted in 1999–2000 to the Royal Artillery Museum (Firepower)
Building 18. Royal Laboratory Offices or James Clavell Library. An office building for the Royal Laboratory was part of the Paper Cartridge Factory development of 1855–6. Inside is an original staircase with stone treads a wreathed rail and an ornamental cast-iron balustrade. It was converted in 1999–2000 to house museum offices and the Royal Artillery Historical Trust’s collection, from what was the Royal Artillery Institution Library.

Barnard Close
This was once part of Eleanor Road and ran up to cross the railway. Surviving buildings in the street date from the 1860s when the area was first developed.

Bell Watergate
The Watergate and stairs was the main landing place for the town and is now the last survivor of a number of river stairs. It was repaired by the parish in 1824 and now leads to a paved causeway. It takes its name from Bell Tavern, now gone. The old slipway was also used as a coal wharf in the 19th. In the 19th it is said there were ‘five houses three are public houses, one a beer house and one a coffee house, "a noted brothel".
Bell Inn, This was present on the west side by the mid 17th and was later owned by the Coopers Company. It closed in 1940.
The Marlborough Pub on the east side. Later called the Waterman’s Arms and from the 1830s called the Steam Packet
Foot tunnel attempt. This was the site of an attempt to build a foot tunnel river crossing in 1873. This would have involved a ramped entrance and Henry Greathead was involved, but the scheme ultimately failed.

Beresford Street
The 16th rope walk roughly followed the line now marked by Beresford Street. The ropeyard closed in 1832 and the road laid out thereafter.  It was built by the buyer of the ropeyard and named from the Beresford Gate. The wood and stone of the rope houses used to build houses. It was a tram route from 1881. It was widened and upgraded in the 1960s.  Much of the area is, in 2015, a demolition site awaiting new construction
New Portable Theatre.   This began in 1835 in an iron framed portable building on the north side of the street. It was known as the West Kent Theatre, becoming ‘Royal’ with a permanent building. It was very much enlarged seve4ralm times in the 1880s-90s. In 1913 it began to show films and became known as the Woolwich Empire. For most of its history it showed live of various kinds and by the time it lost its licence in 1958 it only had strippers. Demolished in 1960.
Wesleyan Association Chapel. Built 1840, later used by the Salvation Army and then as a hostel. Demolished 1950s
St.Saviours Mission School Church. Built 1873 and later became an auction rooms. Demolished in 1959,
Woolwich Catholic Club. Built in 1980 this replaced the Baptist Tabernacle 1895.  Demolished 1969. 
Riverside House. This was built in 1962, after much argument, and was the first large scale office development in south east London. It was part let from the start to Thames Polytechnic. Built by A. Swift & Partners
Market Pound, used by traders for carts and so on. This is on the site of a drill hall for the Third West Kent Rifle Volunteers. This was later used as a synagogue and then the YMCA. It was demolished in 1970 except for the south wall.

Bunton Street
This was previously Myrtle Street, preceded by Union Buildings.
Cannon Row
This appears to have been an earlier name for Warren Row
Crown and Mason’s Arms. Rebuilt 1869.

Carriage Street
Building 19, Mounting Ground. This was an area used in the early 19th to mount guns onto their carriages which was eventually roofed over. This was destroyed in a snow storm. It was replaced by the present building in 1887. On the ground floor both standard and narrow gauge rail lines were present – some has been preserved along with the original gantries for travelling cranes.
Building 22. Offices. On this site offices for the Royal Carriage Department stood in 1868. New buildings erected here in 1908 were part of an office complex to centralise Arsenal office functions. The building uses concrete and steel and had a telephone exchange in the basement, which was also used as an air raid shelter. In 1967 it became the head quarters of the Defence Inspectorate. It has been converted into flats by Berkeley Homes.
Building 20. Chemical Laboratory. Frederick Abel, the War Office chemist, came to work at the Arsenal in 1854 having succeeded Faraday as lecturer at the RMA. As the leading authority on explosives he worked here until 1888, developing carrying out his important work on the manufacture of guncotton, among other things, cordite. This was his purpose built headquarters which he designed and which was built in 1864. It was planned with features to disperse noxious fumes. It comprised offices and a double storey laboratory with a gallery walkway at first floor level, which provided a light and airy environment, and a platform that allowed Abel to observe the work going on below. There was a photographic section, offices and a grand stone staircase. It was later extended and from 1936 was used by the Armament Inspection Division. It was converted into flats by Berkeley in 2002.
Building 21. This was built in 1890 for the Naval Ordnance Department. It later became a telephone exchange and was converted into flats in 2002 by Berkeley,

Charles Street
This was an earlier name for part of the road which is now John Wilson Street.
Collingwood Street
Part of the area known as ‘The Dusthole’ - ‘dismal and notorious’.
Creton Street
Part of a block of streets laid out by Powis Estates in the 19th and as such was Union Buildings.
Lidl. this was built as part of Royal Sovereign House in 1980.

Dial Square
1-4. Building 11 This was a barrack block for The two permanent artillery companies from 1716, stationed in Woolwich Warren who worked there but also providing a guard. A barrack block was erected in 1719. The block that survives was built in 1739–40. It was a brick block of three storeys, with barrack rooms for some 200 more soldiers as well as associated housing for officers. About 900 artillerymen were stationed in Woolwich and some wives and children probably lived here. When the Royal Artillery moved to Woolwich Common in 1777 pressure on these buildings was relieved and   In 1786 James Wyatt, prepared a scheme for conversion to houses. By the 1790s coach-houses, stables and servants’ quarters formed a continuous range. The houses were taken over by the Royal Laboratory as official residences for senior staff, including eventually Frederick Abel. From 1915 houses were converted to offices
Woolwich Crossrail Station. Crossrail is being built through central London at Paddington, via Canary Wharf to Woolwich and then on to Abbey Wood. Station platforms will be 250m in length to accommodate 200m trains. Each of the Crossrail stations will have a distinctive but consistent design. A new block flats to be called Armourer’s Court, will stand above the Crossrail station.

Dockyard Rails
An old name for part of Woolwich Church Street as it passes some of the Dockyard site.

Dog Yard
This is a turning off Hare Street, now called Mortgramit Square, which it formerly led to.  It had a brewery here in the mid-18th. In 1849 this became the Lion Brewery belonging to Davisson and Bowman.  It was owned by W.Woodhouse who was bankrupt in 1854
Woolwich Borough Electricity Works substation built 1932– with Woolwich arms remaining on the gates


Duke of Wellington Street
This main street through the Royal Arsenal site is lined with buildings which are described under the road which they mainly front onto.
The Armouries. This was the Royal Carriage Factory. The factory remains as peripheral buildings to tall blocks of flats which replaced carriage sheds on the triangular fort section built in the late 17th.  Following a fire this area was built as a quadrangle of workshops for the Royal Engineers in 1802. The Royal Carriage Department was on the site in the early 19th and built from 1803. It was a large carriage works with an engineering section laid out like ‘a model farm’.  The north front had a clock and bells with a blind arch and side entrances. This was an inner quadrangle of workshops with three smitheries and twelve forges as well as carpenters, wheelwrights and so on.  Steam power was first used in the Arsenal here from 1807 introduced by Henry Maudslay.  As carriages grew larger and were less based on wood the factory was altered and enlarged. In 1937 a steel erecting shed was installed and used as an inspection facility from 1967.  On the south side is a 17 bay brick range built in 1893 to store gun carriages. It has been much rebuilt including in the 20th for naval X-ray photography. It was joined to the main building in 1895 with fitter's and tinman's shops.  Much of it was rebuilt in 2007 for Berkeley Homes with new blocks inside the original building. The clock tower was rebuilt. Much of this complex lies to the east of this square.


Ferry Approach
The ferry approach is the ramp from the bottom of John Wilson Street ion to the ferry boats. It was designed to handle the new rapid end loading diesel ferries which came in 1964. It was built by the Greater London Council. The concrete structure curves so that ferries are loaded in the same place as their side loading predecessors.  There are two tall concrete loading ramps. It opened in 1966.
Marshalling Yard. This is to the west of the approach road and on the site of Tuffs Wharf.
Ferry Maintenance Gridiron and office buildings. Designed by the London County Council Architects Department.  There are also viewing platforms.
Ambulance Station. Built in 1967 with space for three vehicles.
Ferry Place
This was previously called Cock Yard. In the 18th it was the site of stables and of a rope spinning ground.
113 behind this is a large shed built in 1844 as a cow house associated with a slaughter house.
114 house built 1780s


Glass Yard
This was the site of a wharf which was bought in the 15th by St. Mary Overie, Borough.
Glass works. There were two 17th century glass houses here, hence the name. The earliest was probably set up by Ananais Hennezel around 1590.  A window glass factory with a wharf was set up here by Robert Mansell in 1604 and where he used coal fired furnaces – having begun manufacture in Newcastle. The glass does not seem to have been particularly successful although it continued making flint glass and window glass. It was run by the Henzey family who had interests in glass elsewhere – notably Stourbridge. It had closed by 1702.
Glass works. A second glass works appears to have been set up by Robert Hooke and Christopher Dodsworth to make window glass in the 1690s. By 1703 it was for sale and appears to have closed
The Woolwich Kiln. An archaeological dig of 1974 uncovered considerable evidence of pottery manufacture in the area between Glass Yard and Bell Water Gate. They uncovered two kilns one of which is said to be the first 17th Bellarmine stone ware kiln found in Europe and the other the other which produced a distinctive local pottery. The Bellarmine kiln was preserved and now stands, still boxed up, alongside the Heritage Centre.
Foot tunnel. This was built by the London County Council in 1911 as part of a programme of free river crossings in east London. It was built without the Greathead shield and designed by Council engineer Maurice Fitzmaurice. It is lined with cast iron segments and is 500 metres long. It is similar to the Greenwich tunnel but on a less than lavish scale. There is a circular entrance building and access is by lift - installed after the opening - or by a flight of stairs. The lifts were replaced in 1954 and again in 2014.
Consumers Gas Co, This works was on the west side of Glass Yard. Complaints about the price of gas had led to the formation of the Woolwich Consumers’ Protective Gas Company in 1843–4 and a works was opened in Hog Lane. They later redeveloped a wharf on the west side of Glass Yard- at the end of Short's Alley behind the Carpenters Arms, east of the Arsenal. In 1850 it had two gasholders. The premises were extended towards the High Street, where an office building was built next to the Carpenters’ Arms. The works were enlarged in 1862 and in 1872 when a steeply sloping brick wall was built which remains in front of the Ferry’s yard. The company was amalgamated with the South Metropolitan Gas Light & Coke Company in 1884 and closed immediately. Sold to Tuff and Hoar, cartage contractors.


Globe Lane
This ran from Bell Water Gate westwards parallel to the river.
Woolwich and District Electricity Light Co. Power Station. In 1893 part of Roffs Wharf was used to build a power station by this consortium in a conversion of some steamboat repair workshops. An engine house was added in 1900. It was purchased by Woolwich Borough Council and enlarged in 1903. Expansion of the works continued with a large turbine hall in 1912 and gthe whole of Roffs Wharf was tkane ovdr. A boiler house and chimneys followed. The cooling system was a tunnel under the river. The coaling jetty – still in place – was built in 1930 to the designs of the Borough Engineer. This was an efficient power station and remained under the Central Electricity Board to supply the grid. It was further expanded in the 1930s and was the only power station in the country built by direct labour. It had art deco decoration as befitted a town centre building with three fluted chimneys as a local landmark. Generation stopped in 1978 and it was demolished the following year


Greenlaw Street
This was previously Orchard Street and renamed after a 19th rector.
St. Mary Magdalene with St Michael and All Angels.  This is now Church of England and United Reformed and there are fittings brought from the demolished Presbyterian Church in Woolwich New Road.  There are Community organisations in the crypt. The church is a successor to the original parish church in a commanding position on a hill overlooking the river. There is evidence of a church here by 1115 and there may have been a Saxon church here. The medieval church was dedicated to St.Laurence, and later to St, Mary the Virgin.  It seems to have suffered from subsidence and slippage.  The site is now a viewing platform. The current building dates from 1727 by Deptford bricklayer, Mathew Spray and completed in 1739.  Its application to be one of the Fifty New Churches Act of 1711 was turned down. It is a plain Georgian brick church Built of stock bricks with a plain square west tower. Inside are galleries on octagonal supports –but the galleries and nave were closed in 1961 and now used as offices. The Chancel as added by Oldrid Scott in 1894. A stained glass window commemorates the dead of the Princess Alice disaster in 1878. The church is allowed to fly the Red Ensign because of its importance as a navigation point and at one time a semaphore was on top of the church tower. In the vestibule are the royal arms.  There are wall monuments, including one to engineer Henry Maudslay who died in 1831.
Churchyard. Thus was taken on by the MNetorpolitan Publuic Gardens Association in the 1890s and tuned into a public park opened as Woolwich Gardens by the Duchess of Fife in May 1895. There have been other changes to it since. A drinking fountain was erected in 1900 and funds for its maintenance were provided by John Passmore Edwards Gravestones were laid round the walls. There is a monument to the bare knuckle fighter Tom Cribb, Champion of England for Life who died in poverty in Woolwich, in 1848. The monument has a colossal lion resting its paw on an urn. There is a Balsom Poplar in front of the Church entrance.  There is also sundial of 1830 with no maker’s name. The Maudslay tombstone was rescued by Jack Vaughan and others in the 1980s. Until the late 1980s bedding plants were grown in a glasshouse in the staff yard and on what is now lawn behind the New Wine Church. The landscaping includes a lime walk, shrubbery beds and floral displays and one of the flowerbeds is designed with a nautical theme. Trees include silver birch, lime, maple and London plane trees, and also an Indian bean tree and a weeping willow and seating overlooking the river.
Almshouses. The Woolwich Parochial Almshouses were relocated to the west side of the street in 1958 in plain brick


Hardings Lane.
Woolwich Equitable Gas Works. The Company was established in 1832, and incorporated ten years later, to supply a cheaper and purer gas than that which was being received from the first Woolwich gas company, and the works and apparatus of this older concern were bought. They built a new works which eventually consisted of four gasholders, a retort house and other buildings (including a pipe factory), on the western side of the Royal Arsenal. The works and was amalgamated with the South Metropolitan and the site sold in 1887. It was then occupied by Messrs. Kirk &; Randall, building contractors, but during the Great War the buildings of the Royal Arsenal were extended to include it.  The site has been the subject of a recent archaeological dig by MOLAS, and in the 1980s by the Kent Rescue Archaeology Unit.


Hare Street
The road is named after John Hare who had an 18th brewery here. The road was laid out by him and his partner but built up in 1804 as part of the Powis Estate and initially called Richard Street. It was widened by Woolwich Council in the 1880s becoming the main road to the ferry and there was then much rebuilding – and it became a major shopping street.
40 Prince Albert or ‘Rose’s’. This was originally a beer shop associated with the brewery in the alley adjacent. It was rebuilt in 1928 by E.J.Rose & Co. And a bottle store behind added in 1930.
51-61 this is a Burton’s menswear store built in 1929 and was in their signature faience with black granite surrounds. Above was a billiard hall, which is now a club. The shop is now a restaurant.
24-28 this was an early Woolworths shop opened in 1911 in a former grocer’s shop and rebuilt by their in-house architects in 1924.  It was later extended to appear as one shop.


Hog Lane
This was later Nile Street
A building from the 15th or 16th stood on the west side and was part cleared in the 1880s and entirely in 1905.
4-5 Ferry Eel and Pie House. This was a 17th timber building demolished in the 20th.
Nile Tavern. This had been the Green Dragon and was demolished in 1887
Hog Lane Stairs. Also known as Green Dragon Stairs. The stairs remain parallel to the river, near the Foot Tunnel but sealed off from the footpath. They were rebuilt in 1970 to replace stairs that extended onto the foreshore and remains remnants of the paved causeway can still be seen at low tide
Baptist Meeting house built in 1757. This appears to have been short lived.
Woolwich Consumers Protective Gas Company was formed following complaints about the price of gas in Woolwich. In 1844 a gasworks fronting the river at Hog Lane was opened. The company was incorporated in 1855 as the Woolwich, Plumstead and Charlton Consumers Gas Company. Around 1862 it moved to Glass Yard


Hopton Road
Building 45. This is the north and south single-storey ranges of the west quadrangle of the Grand Store.


James Clavell Square
Green laid out in 2004. This is in front of the Firepower offices and library. It was previously the site of a War Office police section house of 1963 demolished in 1999–2000. It has an array of mounted guns


John Wilson Street
This is the final eastern section of the South Circular Road – which began at Kew Bridge.
St Mary’s Gardens. Entrances to the gardens from John Wilson Street were
Ebenezer Building, Christ Faith Tabernacle. This was the Granada Cinema for many years previously the Gala Bingo Hall. Built in the 1930s the Granada had seating for nearly 3,000. Cecil Masey and Reginald Uren were the architects and the builders were Bovis. The plot is awkwardly aligned to the High Street, and layout resulted in what are two joined buildings – the frontage and vestibule and the auditorium. The stark brick exterior hides a quite fantastic interior, he most elaborate of the purpose-built Granada cinemas - “the most romantic theatre ever built” by Theodore Komisarjevsk theatrical designer, of Moscow Arts Theatre. There are panels of figures in a Quattrocento style was probably painted by Vladimir Polunin. There was a tower, which was illuminated at night, café-restaurant, a ‘Hall of Mirrors’, and a Wurlitzer organ. But the café- was disused by 1953, and by the early 1960s Bingo was being played once a week. The cinema closed in 1966 and was converted for full-time Bingo; the organ was removed... Bingo ceased in 2011 and the building converted into a church.
Gateway House, New Wine Church. This was the Odeon Cinema, latterly the Coronet. The Odeon cinema chain was known for Art Deco stylishness and The Woolwich cinema is a good example. The exterior is considered to be the finest surviving example in London of the 1930s 'Odeon' style,   picked out with neon tube lights.  It was planned from 1935, with George Coles as architect built by James Watt (Catford) Ltd. The outside is streamlined, curvaceous and window-less with buff-faience surfaces, with vertical fins. Inside stairs lead from the vestibule into an inner foyer and auditorium.  In 1964 decoration was removed and it closed in 1981. It reopened as the Coronet Cinema in 1983, and was altered in 1990 to allow for two screens. This closed in 1999. The building was then adapted for the New Wine Church


Laboratory Square
The Royal Laboratory. The Workshops at Greenwich Palace that had been the 16th armoury were taken over by the Board of Ordnance in 1671 and became a laboratory for making ‘fireworks’. It was moved to Woolwich when the Royal Hospital was built. It was laid out around two yards in 1695–7. In 1695–6 a barn in the Greenwich tilt-yard was re-erected at the south end. This was a highly rational development, to undertake the tasks associated with the making of gunpowder, shot and shells, there was a watch-tower and clock-house gateway for surveillance and control, an early planned instance of the co-ordinated time and work discipline. The main quadrangle had Tijou gates facing the river between stone piers topped by carved lion and unicorn, which survive at Building 40. There were no chimneys. The pavilions survive, still bearing King William III’s monogram. By the 1770s women were working in the laboratory, sewing flannel cartridges. In 1854 the tower was taken down and the quadrangle covered with an iron-framed roof to enclose a steam-driven ammunition factory. This continued as the main machine shop through the Great War. This was taken down in 1950–1 and 1972–4. The pavilions stood derelict for many years. Restoration by Berkeley Homes is intended.
The Royal Brass Foundry. This dates from 1716-17 and was the first building here designed for the manufacture of guns. It is on the site of the old Greenwich barn. The building of furnaces and a boring machine would have been undertaken in consultation with Andrew Schalch, the Swiss founder who moved from Douai to Woolwich when appointed as the Board’s first Master Founder. The Portland stone royal arms over the foundry’s north entrance and those of Marlborough in the keystone below were carved by Thomas Green of Camberwell. The foundry was entirely timber-framed in a two-colour brick shell when, there were few domestic models for large workshops. Gun making was then still a rural craft and its formal origins are with barns. It comprised a long tall nave with low aisles which housed furnaces. At the north end, timber-was a vertical gun-bore smoothing mill driven by a horse gin. In 1770 Schalch's successor was a Dutch master gun founder, Jan Verbruggen, who undertook an extensive reconstruction of the foundry in 1771–4. In 1878, no longer suitable for gun making, it was taken over by the Royal Laboratory and again partly rebuilt.  It became a store in 1939 and a garage for officers’ cars. It was sold to the National Maritime Museum in 1972 and the interior was filled with demountable storage racking.
Statue. Outside under an awning, is a high-relief figure of a tunic-clad oriental barbarian of the 1st to 3rd AD. It was dug up in Alexandria by British troops in 1801, shipped back to London and left at Woolwich.


Major Draper Street
Cornerstone Cafe
The Dial Arch. This is now a Young’s Pub.
Great Pile (Dial Arch). This dated from 1717–20. It was called Grand Square by 1764 but only the entrance range remains. It is in such a strikingly personal style that it seems more likely that Vanbrugh was responsible than Andrew Jelfe, the Clerk of the Works for the Ordnance from 1719.  It was known as Foundry Square before it became Dial Square or the Dial Arch Block The range was once part of a complex of buildings built around two brick built squares. What survives is the front range of a forecourt of workshops. Behind them were two gun-carriage storehouses, one for the sea service, and one for the land service. The sea-service building had a central circular basin called ‘fountain court’. The south-west block was used for turning, washing and engraving brass cannon while the south-east block was smiths’ workshops. These buildings could only be entered through the Dial Arch – with pylons topped with pyramids of shot above and in 1764 a bronze sundial to help regulate work. At The back decorative cast-iron arch has ‘1780’ and the names of the Inspectors of Artillery and of the Royal Brass Foundry from 1780 to 1855. In 1775 the workshops were adapted for horizontal gun boring using horse mills replaced with steam in 1842–5 and in the iron foundry in the 1860s a seventy-ton steam-hammer anvil was cast.  The complex shut down in 1950 and was cleared in 1969. The south range was refurbished around 1984, and more substantially overhauled in 2009–10 to become a pub. The rest of the Great Pile site was redeveloped in 2010–11 as flats.
Stone ‘tribute plinth’ with a bronze football. This is to commemorate the origins of Arsenal Football Club
Roman Burial Ground. In 1853 workers digging here found Roman burial urns, and subsequently a burial ground was found beneath what is now Dial Square


Market Hill
The market had moved by the 1670s to where the High Street widened, south of Bell Water Gate on part of the old Gun Yard, this is the current Market Hill was sold and built on in 1723–6 . The manor of Charlton acquired it with the right to the market tolls. In the 1720s Sir John Conyers owned it and built a new market place in a square with offices and sheds for and new houses on three sides with the wharf to the north. In the 19th there was an attempt to move the market to a site to the south in what is now Calderwood Street but Trade continued in the old market house and at Market Hill and eventually the market moved to its current site in Beresford Square
The King’s Head. This was part of the market development in the 1720s
Crown and Cushion. Probably early 18th and rebuilt in 1875 and again, in 1930–1 for Mann Crossman and Paulin, and demolished in 2008.


Marlborough Road
On the south side of the road are the buildings of the Grand Store - also described in the square to the east.  These buildings were used as storehouses for many items and changed over the years.  Later they were converted to offices and some used as book stores for the British Library. They have now mainly been converted to flats.

McBean Street
This was previously Union Street
MacBean Centre – Electricity Department Depot. In 1930 Woolwich Council’s Electricity Department extended its rear premises onto what had been Thomas Nash’s timber yard. This extended from Macbean Street to Murray’s Yard. On its south side a three-storey block of stores and offices was built in 1931. Later a covered link was made to the showroom building. The Greenwich Development Agency took it over in the early 1980s and turned it into the Macbean Centre, for community and voluntary sector organizations, including Greenwich Mural Workshop. Subject to demolition
Woolwich Polytechnic Lower School. The School Board for London bought a builders yard here to build Union Street School in 1881. In 1920–1 the London County Council enlarged. An infants and a babies’ room was below the girls’ school, with the boys and their practical workrooms on top. The school was renamed Powis London County Council School in 1938, and it was also used for evening classes by Woolwich Polytechnic. It became the Woolwich Polytechnic Secondary Technical School for Boys in 1956 and then Woolwich Polytechnic Lower School. This was moved away in 2006 and it was demolished in 2011.


Meeting House Lane
Meeting House. Around 1690 Presbyterians built a wooden meeting house, in an orchard near the river, close to Cutt’s Stairs and what later became Meeting House Lane. This was enlarged, and then in 1800 used by Methodists and then Unitarians and demolished in the 1840s.
Baptist wooden meeting house from about 1690 to 1772.


Mortgramit Square
A back alley which once was the site of low grade housing. The name is made up of the builder’s surnames.

Nelson Street
The Woolwich Baths and Lecture Hall Company built here in 1850 as one of London’s earliest public baths. There were two plunge baths, and slipper baths below a first-floor lecture hall plus a reading room and library. In 1888 Furlong converted the building it to a furniture depository, with van-loading bays where the baths had been. In 1911 they added a reinforced-concrete warehouse on the south facing the High Street. The main building was demolished in 1950 and the warehouse in 2008


New Laboratory Square
Building 41 (New Laboratory Square) Greenwich Heritage Centre.  The sea storehouse of 1783–5 on the west side was James Wyatt’s first project for the Board of Ordnance. It was built to house supplies for the Navy, He prepared plans in early 1783 and it was built in a rearranged shot-yard.  The ‘square’ was formed in 1808 when storehouses were built to the east and north.  In 1856 work was done here to form a factory to make packing cases and barrels for ammunition. This was done under the supervision of Col. Beatson. It had a sawmill in the east range and the west range had carpenters’ shops and a wood store. The south side of the square was closed with the building in 1877–8 of a carpenters’ workshop with American machinery for making boxes and barrels. The carpenters’ workshop was adapted around 1900, during the Boer War, to be a factory for small-arms bullets which continued through the Great War. Around 1917 the west range was converted to a drawing-office. Later the first floor of the east range was a firing range, and much of the rest was a Customs and Excise stores.  English Partnerships and the London Development Agency refurbished it in 1999.  Since 2003 the former sea storehouse to the west has housed the Greenwich Heritage Centre, which shares the southern workshops with Firepower
Building 40. The Academy. Tower Place was replaced in 1718–23 by a new building with two dwellings and corporate space. In 1718–20 a new Board Room and entrance ‘saloon’ were built and in 1721–3 a second ‘great room’, to be an Academy for training the young officers of the Ordnance’s two newly formed ‘scientific’ corps, the artillery and the engineers.  The brown-brick façade is arresting and unusual with certain stylistic features that probably derive from Hawksmoor. The storekeeper’s house to the rear is plain and functional and laid out with a ‘great kitchen’ with a three-bay arcade so that food for the Board Room did not need to be carried through the house. This was demolished around 1890. In 1741 two more houses rear amend Rooms for the first drawing master, and model makers, were fitted up in 1743 in the Tudor tower’s upper rooms. In 1764 the Royal Military Academy was reorganized and became an enlightened establishment in which training comprehended ‘writing, arithmetic, algebra, Latin, French, mathematics, fortification, together with the attack and defence of fortified places, gunnery, mining, laboratory-works, fencing, dancing, etc’. Many of it masters were extremely distinguished in their fields. The Tudor Tower was demolished as unsafe in 1786. The Royal Military Academy moved up to Woolwich Common in 1806 and this building home became part of the Royal Laboratory, which used it as ‘model rooms’. , In the 1840s the former Academy Room housed specimen ingredients and machines for the making of gunpowder, and on the floor and tables there were ‘moulds for casting balls and bullets of various sizes. The former storekeeper’s house was refitted as a chemical laboratory for Frederick Abel around 1854. A clock, made by John Bennett of Greenwich and Blackheath with a mechanism by Thwaites & Reed, was put in the in the pediment in 1837 and also a weathervane, also supplied by Bennett’s firm... On the outside back wall is a tall gauge for explosives testing from the 19th. Around 1920 the ‘model rooms’ were converted and The Royal Arsenal Officers’ Mess continued here until 1994. Since a refurbishment of 2000–1 the building is left largely empty save for occasional hire of the grand rooms.


Nile Street
This was originally Hog Lane
Woolwich Free Ferry.  This was planned by the Metropolitan Board of Works who has been petitioned by the Woolwich Board who were keen for it to happen. The Act was passed in 1885.  It opened in 1889 to great celebrations. The first ferries were the side-loading paddle steamers Gordon, Duncan and Hutton, named after General Gordon, who had local connections, Colonel Francis Duncan MP and mathematician Charles Hutton who had worked at the Royal Military Academy. Each was powered by a condensing engine manufactured by John Penn & Son of Greenwich. This fleet was replaced, in 1923 with The Squire, named after a former Woolwich mayor, and in 1930 with the Will Crooks, after Woolwich's first Labour MP and the John Benn, Liberal MP for Wapping and a member of the London County Council. The current three vessels were built in Dundee in 1963, and were named John Burns, the first Labour Cabinet Member, Ernest Bevin, local trade union organiser and government minister and James Newman, another Woolwich mayor. These ferries feature Voith Schneider propulsion systems for maneuverability. A cycloidal propeller is fitted centrally at either end, and each is driven by a 500bhp 7-cylinder Mirrlees National diesel engine. The original southern ferry approach at the end of Nile Street was flanked by blind-arcaded walls. There was also a new river wall from which two lattice-girder steel fall-bridges ran which could be hydraulically operated. These gave onto the floating pontoon or landing stage, of wrought iron and timber. In 1900 this was widened and equipped with public lavatories. In the late 1950s problems generated by demand for the ferry from larger and more numerous vehicles led to new roads and the ferry approach being moved from here to a new road at the end of the south circular.

No1. Street
Verbruggen’s House. Jan and Pieter Verbruggen came to Woolwich in 1770 to take over the Royal Brass Foundry and did not like the accommodation used by Andrew Schalch, a new house was built in 1772–3.  It is a compact brown-brick block, with two rooms on each floor in an unconventional layout. After Pieter Verbruggen’s death in 1786 it was occupied by the Inspector of the Royal Military Academy, and his successors to 1829. It was eventually converted to offices and a Board Room for the Ordnance Select Committee. It continues in this use.
The Main Guard House dates from  1787–8 . James Wyatt designed this it between the earlier guard room and the Royal Brass Foundry. The plain stock-brick building has an outsize Portland stone Doric portico. , It continued as a guard room under various police forces until 1896–7 when it was converted for record storage. It remains in office use.
Assembly, a group of sixteen cast-iron standing figures, made by Peter Burke stands at the river end
Riverside guard rooms. These are twin octagonal buildings, the western one for officers, the eastern one for artillerymen, which were built in 1814–15. They flank triple landing stairs which were an important point of access. The west room was used as an armoury by 1864 and was a mortuary chapel for the body of the pretender Prince Imperial of France in 1879. The landing stairs were removed in 1931. The rooms were then used as stores but have since been refurbished.
Pontoon pier built in 1999 for Greenwich Council through Posford Duvivier, engineers.


Parsons Hill
Parsons Hill now barely exists consisting of a Chinese takeaway on the edge of the South Circular and its roundabout. It was once a steep path from the High Street to the Church.
Welsh Chapel, built in 1806. This became a synagogue from 1906–13 and then the Woolwich Animals’ Welfare Centre. Demolished.
Parson’s Hill Baptist chapel. This was built in 1857 on the corner of St Mary’s Gardens. From 1879 it was the Baptist Woolwich Tabernacle. This was one of John Wilson’s chapels and when he moved to Beresford Street it was bought by the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society as the Co-op education centre. Demolished in 1960.

Powis Street
55-63 Marks & Spencer. This was originally a cabinet makers dating from the 1860s. In 1907 Gaiety Arcades’ ‘automatic machines and shows bazaar’ were on the ground floor. Marks and Spencer bought it in 1914. It was remodelled in 1934-5 after a Lutyens design and extended. They eventually took over adjacent properties.
71–77 A large house here was adapted in the early 1840s for the London and County Bank. By 1907 the local Labour Party had its Central Committee Rooms here.  It later became part of a large site that extended across the railway built in 1970–3, Littlewoods Mail Order Stores.
111-113 in 1894 this was the headquarters of the Woolwich Equitable Building Society. It was replaced in 1935 by Equitable House. It was founded in 1847 on Powis Street. It was a departure from temporary initiatives in Woolwich. The ‘permanent’ principle was introduced by a breakaway group of local businessmen who launched the Woolwich Equitable Benefit Building and Investment Association, using a schoolroom at the back of the house.  The Association’s patron was Dr Carlile, the Congregationalist pastor at the Salem Chapel. In 1858 the Society moved to what was then 113.  Eventually new offices were opened in 1897. Traces of identity, as well as the stone, have disappeared, as have the banking hall’s mosaic floor and mahogany fittings. The Board Room was on the first floor, and above that there were lettable offices,
117 was probably built in the 1860s to house the Woolwich Mutual Benefit Building Society.
119–123 were the premises of John Furlong and Son, ‘auctioneers, estate agents, valuers, undertakers, removal contractors, upholsterers, steam-carpet beaters, etc’. There was a three-storey showroom block to the fore, with new auction rooms and carpet-beating and other workshops round a yard. A new building was erected in 1964–5 and first let to a supermarket.
120-130 site of the Premier Electric Theatre was built in 1910–11 as a small cinema. It came to be ‘famed for its damaged seats’. It was bombed in 1940. Despite being declared safe to reopen after the war, the site was soon after cleared.
125-153 Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society. In 1873 RACS moved to house approximately on this site at the west end, this store was only open four evenings a week and on Saturday afternoons, with   commitment to unadulterated produce and the refusal of credit. Two adjoining houses were acquired for a draper, a tailor and a bakery, plus a lending library and reading room, a boot-making workshop, a bake house and a stable yard for ten horses. In 1884 the Society took four more houses, and George Smith’s rope ground and timber yard behind. It opened a butcher’s shop and a dairy. By 1889, RACS was the largest co-operative society in London. In 1893 another house was converted for a confectionery department, with tea rooms new stables were built in 1890–1 and  A large bakery followed in 1892 and this is a three-storey block, with a fireproof interior and the country’s first travelling oven was installed in 1912. It was converted to offices in 1961–3. The frontage for the central stores was erected in the early 1900s. In 1902 two commemorative tablets were put in place, and building work began. The opening included a speech by Labour MP, Will Crooks, and a procession round Woolwich and Plumstead of the society’s 130 horses and 86 vehicles accompanied by military bands. The final western section was added in 1925–6. A central copper-domed clock tower rises 106ft and there is moulded terracotta decoration. Above the main entrance is McLeod’s over life-size statue by the sculptor Alfred Drury. Above is the society’s wreathed motto. In the entrance hall are the foundation stones and a war memorial unveiled in 1920. There were shops for groceries, boots and draperies and the upper storeys were offices; there were strong rooms in the tower. To the west a furniture shop was under committee rooms, converted to the McLeod Café in 1926–7. The top storey was for workrooms and offices. The basement housed stockrooms. In 1937 in a radio and garden shop. The shop front was replaced in 1965–6 and the Central Stores were vacated soon after the RACS lost its independence in 1985. The building was then used by Greenwich Council as offices. In 2011–12 it and the Old Bakery were converted into a Travelodge hotel 
138-152 RACS Department Store. Plans for a new department store were prepared in 1935. And it opened in stages in 1939 and 1940. It presents contrast with its predecessor across the road, with a streamlined moderne approach with twin end towers anchoring the cream-faience-tile-clad elevation. The east tower houses a water tank above the store’s main open-well staircase, vertically lit to show off the wrought-iron railings which are patterned to form the letters ‘co op’. Inside the vestibule and stairs are lined with Travertine marble. The ground floor was an ‘economy’ department, for the sale of a wide range of cheap small goods. There was a restaurant on the third floor, finished with recessed lighting and white Indian mahogany lining. After RACS was taken over the department store closed, but the upper storeys were used as the CWS’s regional offices until 1999, latterly included an archive and small short-lived museum organized by Ron Roffey, the Regional Administrator.
136 This was built in 1930–1 for RACS funeral furnishers. A bay rises bears the society’s wreathed motto, ‘Each for All, and All for Each’.
Powis Street school and site of the Salem Chapel of 1798–9. This replaced a chapel on the Plumstead Road for the Countess of Huntingdon’s movement had founded. It went into decline after the foundation of the Rectory Place Congregational Church in the 1850s. It became part of Powis Street Schools, the London School Board’s only establishment in Woolwich in built in 1873 hwe3re, Infants used the former chapel and older children were accommodated in a new block with designed under E. R. Robson. In 1903–4 the premises were converted, the former chapel to take thirty blind children, the rear building for forty ‘mentally defective’ and twenty deaf children. From 1929–36 the premises were used for adult education and was cleared around 1960.
Woolwich County Court. This was built at the end of the street in 1935, designed by the Office of Works. The central public entrance incorporates a royal monogram and date, with the royal arms
179 The Castle Tavern replaced the Castle Inn, a major hostelry in the early 19th when it was used for petty sessions. It was rebuilt in 1937 for Watney and Co.


Riverside
Consumers gas works (see Glass Yard)
Albion Wharf. Waterman’s Steam Packet Co., works. In the 1830s between Glass Yard and Hog Lane workshops were built here but closed in 1870. The wharf was sold to William Rose and Albert Mellish, millers and partners at the local Steam Flour Mills. In 1871 they built a tall flourmill known as Town Mills. In 1911 it was enlarged by which time it had been renamed A. W. Mellish Ltd’s Free Ferry Mills. It was demolished in the mid-1970s.
Remnant foundry. This foundry for making guns, shot and shells was west of Bell Water Gate. It belonged to Samuel Remnant and his son Stephen in the 18th supplying British and foreign governments with guns and ammunition.  In the 1830s it became Strother's coal yard. From 1906 until the 1960s it was used by Woolwich Council. There was also a house, with a clock turret, which was demolished around 1930.
Bell Water Gate Stairs
Gun Wharf. This lay east of Bell Water Gate. The Crown used the wharf for shipbuilding from 1512. And the ropeyard was built in 1573–6 and remained until 1833, during this time the wharf had associated uses. But after 1671 gun manufacture was moved to the Warren by the BH0ard of Ordnance.   In 1512 three galleys were built here and then the Great Harry an experimental carrack launched in 1515 and probably the largest warship in Europe. A dock was used to house The Sovereign in 1514–15. This and a wharf with a salt-house combined to form Gun Wharf. In 1912 the remains of a large vessel, which may have been The Sovereign, were found on a slipway here. By the 1540s naval shipbuilding had been relocated to the west. The wharf was used for the storage of heavy ordnance. It was also used as the wharf for the ropeyard. In 1671 William Pritchard, was granted the site as a private wharf while still being used by the Crown. By 1807 the ropeyard used the whole wharf
Power Station frontage. In 1933 the borough surveyor designed and built this stretch of mass concrete river wall some on reclaimed land.  This includes the still extant long wooden jetty parallel with the shore, which was used by Woolwich Power Station and a barge grid.
The Roman settlement is believed to have stood at the site of the old power station.
Pier from Eastern Counties Railway at North Woolwich 1846 used Roff Pier with wooden booking box
Gas Works. In 1817, Thomas Livesey and a Mr. Hardy, a coal merchant, built a gas works. This was on a site called 'Roff's Compound' or 'Edgar's Coal Wharf'. The works was eventually sold to the new Equitable Gas Co.,
Roff's wharf and pier. Around 1808 the old Gun Wharf frontage, east of Bell Water Gate to Globe Lane, was taken by William Roff, a coal merchant, and William Burgess, a lighterman.
Waterman’s Steam Packet Co. dock and works. This was set up in 1834 to run boats between to and from Hungerford Market. A pier was built in 1840 at Roff’s Wharf, and the eastern part used as a workshop. They built two covered graving docks in 1853–4, reusing an early Tudor slipway. In 1871 they began services to Clacton. In 1878, the office was used as a mortuary following the sinking of the company’s Princess Alice. In 1879 the pier was destroyed by a runaway ship.
Penny Ferry.  Cross river paddle boats to meet the Eastern Counties Railway were promoted by engineer, George Parker Bidder in 1847. This used Roff’s pier. This penny ferry’ carried on until 1908, after which the rebuilt pier at Roff’s Wharf was removed
Blue Anchor stairs. At the end of Globe Lane, previously called Toddy Tree or possibly Golden Anchor in 1707, or Parish Water Gate in 1807
Ship and Half Moon Tavern, This was present by 1712. It was rebuilt around 1850 and was a women’s lodging house into the 20th.
Ship and Half Moon Wharf. Waterman’s stairs. Also called sheep or ship stairs
Equitable gas works 1853 (see Hardings Lane)
Cutts’s stairs
Warren Lane Stairs. (See Ship and Half Moon Passage)
Royal Arsenal Gardens. This was the site of the original late Iron Age settlement and of the Roman camp. The Power Station’s coal yard cleared around 1988. In 1998 the Woolwich Development Agency, made this a park with a riverside walkway to link across to the Arsenal. It Opened in 2000 and includes a promenade flanked by lamp standards a semi-sunken skateboarding playground and sculptures by Ekkehard Altenburger and Richard Lawrence that allude to the history of Woolwich.

Ropeyard Rails
Woolwich Ropeyard. This was set up by the Crown in the 1570s to make large cables for Navy warships. This was the country’s first naval ropeyard. Rope was crucial for the Navy, and expensive. In 1573 Thomas Allen, a Muscovy Company rope importer was granted a Royal warrant to build a ropeyard in Woolwich. It was a mile from the dockyard, uphill on an oblique line now followed by Beresford Street. Hemp soaked, beaten, combed and then spun into yarn – by men who wrapped fibre round their waist, twisted the ends onto rotating hooks on manually turned spinning frames at one end of a long range, then, walking backwards formed the yarn. In 1633 the Ropeyard was leased to the East India Company and enclosed by a brick wall but by 1661 it was back with the Navy. The yard was constantly upgraded but was also subject to industrial action and also some criminal activity. There was a big brick warehouse was built, with a clock turret and here were two gateways, with the royal arms. There were also houses for the master rope maker and the clerk of the yard, as well as cabins for security staff. By the early 19th the ropeyard still had a workforce of 247 but rope making methods were changing. Around that time machinery was introduced at Woolwich, and in 1832–3 the ropeyard was closed and sold. Clearance followed in 1835.
Almshouses, Simms bequest. In 1621 four tenements backing onto Bowes’ almshouses and facing the ropeyard were given to the poor by Richard and Ann Sims.
Almshouses and Workhouse.  As a result of Sir William Pritchard’s bequest of the old market house to the poor in 1679 the vestry built three more almshouses. They were replaced by a workhouse, in 1731–2. Through another bequest in 1754 from Ann Withers a school-house was added to south of the workhouse. By 1820 two more houses of ten rooms each had been added to take more than 300 people. The workhouse and its school closed in 1839–41 following the Poor Law Act and formation of the Greenwich Union. Council Chambers, late The Old Casual Ward consisted of two doors, women on the right and men on the left and, no communication between the two. The site was redeveloped in 1843–4 with nine parish almshouses. The accommodation was similar to that in the Goldsmiths’ blocks. These almshouses they were damaged in the Second World War slum-cleared and demolished in the late 1950s


Royal Arsenal
Tower Place. In the 1530s, soon after the Crown had begun to build ships in Woolwich, Martin Bowes, a goldsmith and figure at the Royal Mint, began to buy lands in Woolwich There were already houses and watermills on the land, but by 1545, Tower Place was standing on the site now occupied by the former Academy, at the end of a first-floor gallery there was a five storey octagonal tower,. Some of the marshland that became a private garden and rabbit warren, with orchards, ponds and moats. The estate was later sold. Tower Place was replaced by the building which became the Royal Military Academy.
The Warren was called Woolwich Green. By the mid 17th the Crown was using it to prove guns made at Gun Wharf. A parapet range was built by Prince Rupert in 1667 along the riverside. In 1671 the Tower Place estate was swapped for Gun Wharf. Thereafter more fortifications were built on the river front plus a line of trees called Prince Rupert’s Walk. Tower Place was used as officers’ quarters but there was also a wharf with cranes and a shot-yard. There were also sheds to house gun carriages for ships, and a gunpowder magazine in an old dovecote. There was saltpetre refining and storage, and firework making, and in the 1690s a substantial ammunition factory was built. The Laboratory was transferred here from Greenwich. An accident intervened in 1716. Ordnance officials attended Baglys Moorfields foundry to witness the recasting of captured French guns. There was a devastating explosion and Seventeen of the twenty-five present were killed. Within six weeks the Board had decided to bring the manufacture of ‘brass’ guns in-house to Woolwich in a new purpose-built foundry. Tower Place was rebuilt as a new headquarters, and barracks had to be built to accommodate a growing workforce of artillerymen. The project was carried through with extensive levelling groundwork and a considered layout.
Cadets' quarters. These were demolished for the widening of Plumstead Road, which they lay alongside. In 1744 the students at the Academy were formed into a company of gentlemen cadets, and so quarters were built in 1751–2. This was a comprised eight rooms, each for up to eight young gentlemen, often two to a bed. Another building has a cold bath in 1760 and later a hot bath in 1774–5. The Warren’s hospital was later refitted to provide more cadets’ barracks and a colonnaded hall linked the blocks. After the 1860s they became homes for officers except for the central hall which was a school
Infirmary and social facilities. West of the cadets barracks along the same perimeter line, was placed the again rebuilt ‘firework barn’ converted to an infirmary for artillerymen in 1741. A larger cadets’ hospital replaced this in 1756–7.  Later they took over a three-storey office block of 1890 near Verbruggen’s House to constitute a works hospital. To the east a library and reading rooms were converted into a Mechanics’ Institution in the early 1860s. A larger reading room was adapted for lectures and concerts by 1884 and, later used as a theatre and for boxing. Beyond were a racket court and police barracks. All this was cleared in 1984–5 for the widening of Plumstead Road.
Tunnels under the site, It is claimed that tunnels going to Shooters Hill and Thamesmead exist.


Ship and Half Moon Lane
This was previously part of Warren Lane, going to Warren Lane Stairs
Warren Lane Stairs. This was included a public draw dock and a ferry. The ferry was a long established one running from Barge House on the north bank.  It had a horse raft and closed when the free ferry opened.

The Dust Hole
This area was on the riverside west of the Arsenal and east of Bell Water Gate, said to be very very poverty stricken and very dangerous

Warren Lane
Part of this is now Ship and Half Moon passage. Warren Lane itself has been subject to almost total demolition and is now a regeneration area with blocks of flats going up fast. The only remains from the past is a stretch of the Arsenal Wall and a few parking meters.
Pottery kilns of the 14th and late 17th have been found here.  And a later clay-pipe kiln.
Three Daws, pub which was on the north side. Demolished
The Marquis of Granby, pub which was on the north side. Demolished
The Royal Standard, pub which was on the north side. Demolished
Crown and Masons’ Arms, north side rebuilt in 1869 and since demolished
Goldsmith's Almshouses, classical. Demolished. These were endowed by Sir Martin Bowes in 1560–2. This was a group of five houses on what was then East Street and is now Warren Lane’s south-west side. They were managed by the Goldsmiths’ Company and rebuilt in 1771 for five widows in a block that survived until 1958.


Woolwich High Street
This is now an arterial road with nothing to remind one of the past apart from a few battered c 19 terrace houses. It may have had Roman origins as part of a route linking riverside settlements.
A market probably existed before it was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1618. A market house may then have existed near the corner with Ropeyard Rails. This market house was given to the parish poor by Sir William Pritchard and it was rented out as a school.
Town cage and stocks. There were here in 1671 and There was also A watch-house and from 1735, a pump. The watch-house and cage moved to the other side of the ropeyard, to the site of the old market house, in the 1770s; in 1812.
The ‘manor’ house. Woolwich Hall was here until the 1780s standing where Hare Street now joins the High Street,
Rectory. This stood near the Manor House.
Enon Chapel. Built by Baptists who moved from Hog Lane, in 1761. It was on the north side near its west end, close to the rectory. It was a simple box refitted in 1886. A Sunday school was built behind it in 1825. Both were demolished for the rebuilding of the free-ferry approach in 1964.
Furlong’s Garage. This has a forecourt to the High Street with buildings extending back to Powis Street. It is a complete motoring complex of said to be the largest in south-east London in the mid-20th. Furlong’s, interest in Woolwich began in 1812 when John Furlong set up as a cabinet maker, His sons and grandson diversified. Motoring was a logical progression after the Great War when the great-great-grandson of the founder, set up a motor-car garage at what had been Murray’s Yard. In 1938–9 Furlong’s built on Mortgramit Square the existing multi-storey ramped garage plus a showroom in Powis Street. There was a commitment to provide car parking for the two cinemas. There was a filling-station forecourt and a workshop and store with a caretaker’s flat, linked by a high-level bridge. The moderne faience showroom façade had an early neon sign. They expanded onto the High Street in 1955–6, building a service and filling station, and another car showroom to the forecourt is now used as a car wash. The garage behind is still used for repairs and parking.
Crown and Anchor, with a stuccoed front to an older 17th building, and demolished in 1974
Carpenters’ Arms on the north side of the High Street west of Market Hill rebuilt in the 1840s and again in 1924–5.
110. This was built in 1784–5. In the 1840s it became the Bank Tavern beer house and was partially rebuilt for the North Kent Brewery in 1892, and renamed the Coat & Badge.
111–112 the oldest houses in Woolwich dating from the early 18th
120 Coopers' Arms,  Plaisted’s Wine bar.  A pub was established here with the latter name in the 18th. the present building dates from 1929–30 and was built for E. J. Rose & Co. Its external lantern may come from the earlier public house. It was taken over by Rose around 1890 to be a wine shop, retaining both Plaisted’s name and the older one of the pub.  Plaisted was an earlier landlord.  The cellars may be original.
Waterfront Leisure Centre.  After the ferry approach was moved to the south circular the old terminal had no use. It was not until1985 that work began with a new river wall. The leisure centre was built in 1986–8, with a new the car park and a toilet block on the power-station site. The eastern Pool Block has the swimming facilities, a 25m fitness pool, plus beginners’, deep-water, lagoon and flume pools and a smell of chloride. The western Sports Block has a large hall, two games courts, squash courts, a projectile hall, fitness and dance rooms and a sauna suite. A lounge bar overlooks the pool and the river.
109 Ironmongers shop with on the wall a Mural People of Greenwich Unite against Racism by the Greenwich Mural Workshop 1981. Painted over inadvertently in 2008
Coach and Horses, demolished in the 1880s
Duke on Horseback, formerly Duke William, demolished in the 1880s,
George and Dragon, rebuilt in 1847 and reputedly the roughest public house in the area in 1900.


Sources
Banbury. Shipbuilders of the Thames and Medway,
Bygone-Kent
Carr. Docklands History Survey
Chris Mansfield. Web site
Clunn. The Face of London
Crossrail. Web site
Glencross. Buildings of Greenwich
GLIAS. Newsletter
Goldsmiths. South East London Industrial Archaeology
Greenwich Borough. , Local List,
Hamilton. Royal Greenwich,
London Encyclopaedia
London Gardens Online. Web site
Pevsner & Cherry. South London,
PLA  Magazine
Spurgeon. Discover Greenwich and Charlton
Spurgeon. Discover Woolwich
Steele. Booth’s Survey of London
Survey of Woolwich,
Summerson. Georgian Buildings in London
Thames Basin Archaeology of Industry Group. Report
Tucker. Ferries of the Lower Thames,
Watts. Glassmaking in London
Woolwich Architecture Trail,
Woolwich Antiquarian Society Journal

As ever Edith is very embarrassed at the amount of material she has taken from Peter Guillery's very wonderful Survey of Woolwich. Please read the original rather than this, it is superb!!

Riverside. South bank east of the Tower. Woolwich Dockyard

A major Crown owned industrial site from the 17th - now a housing estate

This posting covers sites only on the south bank in this square.. The north bank is North Woolwich

Post to the east Woolwich
Poat to the south Woolwich West


Antelope Road
The north/south stretch of the road is built roughly on the site of a rail line which went to the riverfront from the main line, via a tunnel under the dockyard wall.
The blocked granite-ashlar entrance to 3 Slip remains discernible north of the road
87 Busy Bees Day Nursery. Community and training facility
YMCA Woolwich Centre. Purpose built centre built as part of the Dockyard Estate for a long established Woolwich institution. It is on the site of the Dockyard chapel.
Dockyard Chapel. Before 1812 there was no purpose built chapel in the dockyard. In the mid-19th this was thought necessary. A chapel was built in 1856–8 to designs by George Gilbert Scott. It was built to hold the marines as well as officials and artisans. The simple interior with galleries had cast-iron columns, plain and octagonal at the base, rising to circular shafts moulded with foliage patterns, supplied by Francis Skidmore of Coventry. The chapel soon stopped being used. It was taken down in 1923 and re-erected in Rochester Way, as the church of St Barnabas.


Boneta Road
Woolwich Dockyard Day Service. Depot for Social services and other related facilities.  Within the dockyard it appears to have been an area of housing and stores.


Bowling Green Row
Before 1800 this was ‘Day’s Passage’. It is now flats built in 1968 as part of the Comprehensive Development Area.
Ship Tavern. This was opposite the Dockyard Gates and was built before 1780. It had the bowling green after which the turning was named.
Jolly Shipwright. Demolished 1950s
Golden Cross. Demolished 1950s and also called The Anchor.

Church Hill
The hill was lined from the 18th with old houses, often picturesque. Despite efforts to have them preserved they were demolished in the early 1950s.

Commonwealth Buildings.
RACS. The largest buyer of defunct dockyard land was the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society. It took nine acres including part of the former steam factory, with frontages to Woolwich Church Street and Warspite Road.  In 1927 it held the largest national co-operative exhibition ever staged housed in four ‘bright and attractive exhibition halls’. And boosted RACS membership by 30,000. More land and a river frontage was acquired, and conversions were carried out under the supervision of the Society’s architect. Complete by 1932. The site’s south-west corner and its sheds housed the laundry and works department. There were motor vehicles repair shops and manufactures, and tailors, and boot-repairers. To the north, RACS erected new sheds and workshops. , It became an important regional distribution centre. By 1984 most of Commonwealth Buildings had been demolished.

Defiance Walk
Defiance Walk Housing. Site acquired by London Borough of Greenwich in 1973, designated for housing and redeveloped by 1980.  It was designed by London Borough Greenwich Architects Department.  
4 Sheltered housing
Clockhouse Community Centre. Built in 1783 as the Dockyard's Admiral-Superintendent's house and office.  The Clock House is the grandest dockyard building left in Woolwich. This was an administrative headquarters, to house offices at the centre of the enlarged yard - a beacon of supervision and control. There is a central clock turret, with clock faces to all four cardinal points; and a 19th octagonal cupola. The building is brick with stone dressing. The two wooden porches either side of the central entrance step, were added in the mid-19th.  Each department had its own suite of plain but well-proportioned rooms off a central staircase. After being used as an office it was largely rebuilt in 1977–8 as a community centre. On the ground floor are two ceramic tiled pictures s by W. Lambert, 1896, brought here in 1980 from the demolished Clarence Arms pub in Plumstead. One of the ‘Woolwich Infant’.
Near the Clock House, were: a hydraulically operated chain-cable proving house, a substantial guard house and surgery block, and a weigh-bridge house.
Cable shed, this was built in 1856 near the river north of the Clock House. It became a covered parade for pensioners and stood into the 1970s.

Francis Street
395-497 tower block of 14 storeys. Built 1965-1968 by Concrete Ltd.

Harlinger Street
Land to the west was bought doubling the size of the dockyard. This area was in use by 1750. In 1771 the younger Edward Bowater had set up as a ship- and boat-builder here with two slips, a brick wharf, cranes, sawpits and a mould loft for the East India Company. This was leased by the crown and purchased outright in 1779 and 1784.
Steam yard. This was built on the site of a complex of basins and ponds. The planning of a new steam yard behind this frontage began in 1825. Here boilers and engines could be fitted to the largest ships afloat as steamships gained recognition from the Admiralty.
Steam-factory, the project began in 1838 with a long range south of the mast-pond, which housed fitting and erecting shops, a foundry and boiler shops. He also designed it to allow overhead travelling cranes and introduced communication between the various workshops.
An engine-house was built in 1838 and a smithery nears the yard’s western margin. This was soon extended to house smiths’ shops for engine-making, a punching and shearing shop, a coppersmiths’ shop and a boiler smiths’ shop.
Steam-boiler factory extended south of the engine-house on a large L-plan.
Offices. There was an office block and another two-storey range with additional offices and engineers’ stores.
Outer Basin.  This was the enlargement of the outer mast-pond to form a substantial enclosed steam basin of almost four acres from 181. It was infilled around 1930.
Mast pond. This dated from the late 18th later enlarged into an inner basin off the south-east corner of the outer basin. This mean that two steamships could to lie alongside the factory to engines and boilers fitted. The inner basin was infilled during the First World War and the area was used for stores, offices and a dining-room for the women now working on the site.
1 Dock Dry dock – in the place of the western dock, a granite-lined dry dock was built in 1843 off the outer basin’s south side. This was designed by James Walker in consultation Oliver Laing. It was larger than any other yet made. Infilled around 1960. Ruston Road is also on part of this site
Rolling mills were established in 1850, and an armour-plate shop was enlarged as late as 1863.
Albion Sugar. In 1850–1 in the dockyard substantial buildings were erected around the mast-house as a rigging house and an engine store. In 1856 they were linked with a range of workshops for riggers and sailmakers. This had a cast-iron framed structure and was an innovative trial of rigid framing via bolted connections.  It eventually became a factory for making invert- or brewers’-sugar and glucose for Gillman and Spencer, Bermondsey cereal millers who formed the Albion Sugar Company. A large maize silo was added in 1962, and it became the Cargill-Albion Glucose Works. It closed in 1979 and the riverside buildings were cleared.

Kingside Industrial Estate
This consists of two large sheds of lettable units were erected in 2002 on the old steam-factory area.  Also covered under Ruston and Harlinger Roads,
Chimney. This is a 208fh high octagonal shaft standing on the boundary and built by a specialist chimney engineer. It was to vent all the yard’s flues and is sparingly detailed. It has been reduced in height to about 180ft

Kingsman Street
Built up in the 1950s as part of the St.Mary’s redevelopment scheme. The name of Kingsman is a conflation of King Street and Coleman Street.
North Kent Sawmills. On the east side in the 19th
Nelson Inn. On the east side in the 19th

Kingsman Parade
Shops built in the 1950s as part of the St.Mary’s redevelopment scheme
Subway. This runs from Kingsman Parade under Woolwich Church Street and pierces the dockyard wall to emerge in Leda Road. This north portal is decorated with plagues and there are decorative features in the tunnel.
Mural. This was unveiled by Nick Raynsford MP in 2000. It is on the entrance to the underpass connecting Kingsman Road and the Woolwich Dockyard Estate. It was created by the Greenwich Mural Workshop with pupils of Cardwell Primary School and from the Woolwich YMCA and GD Youth Project. It shows the launching of HMS Trafalgar at Woolwich by Queen Victoria in 1841.

Leda Road
This area – and the roads between it and the river is on one of the oldest parts of the dockyard
A tile kiln was set up to the south of the docks. This was eventually replaced with timber shed and in 1656 storehouses
Docks. There were originally two docks on an unlevelled but probably previously quarried area of Thanet sand. The water line before the embankment was built may have been 200ft further south than now. These two docks were probably mud-cut, timber-lined, troughs with gates. Ships could be floated in and propped up for repair. in 1608 ‘Woolwich Dock’ was provided with new gates and The western dock was enlarged to take two ships This ‘galley dock’ was for a long time the state’s only double dry dock suitable for ‘great ships’. The important Sovereign of the Seas, was built here in 1634–7. The single dock was rebuilt in 1720 and the the mast-house and slip of the 1660s were replaced by another slip. The double dock was also remodelled by 1728.
Land. After the docks were built the surrounding land was levelled. This resulted in a flat area which stretched 500ft from the river and reaching to rough cliffs. In 1625, a brick wall began to be built. Inside the wall the flat area became filed with buildings. There were houses for the Master Builder and Clerk of the Cheque, storehouses, saw-houses, cranes, timber yards, saw-yards and a smith’s forge.
Ballast Quay. This had been to the west of the docks and in 1663 the yard across it and houses were built there for senior officers.
Mast-house. This was put up in 1667 behind the officers houses.
Clock House. Thus was built in the 1670s (not the building which still exists) in order to provide a timing keeping discipline. It included a mould loft where plans could be drawn up. Replaced in the 19th by a boiler house.
Great Storehouse. This was built 1693 near the southwest perimeter and demolished in the 20th
Mast-pond. This was a major undertaking and was a rectangular body of water with a double-gated lock entrance from the river. On its west side there were slips and timber-built mast-houses. By 1810 this was used for boat building
Sheds north of the mast pond were for making small boats
Slips. The eastern slip was lengthened in 1753. The slip which replaced the earlier mast-house was enlarged in 1764,
Smiths shop and pay office – these were near the southern perimeter.
A brick rigging house built in 1740. This had three storeys and was on the anchor wharf on the mast-pond’s north side.
Sail and mould loft, east of the Great Storehouse, this was like an outsized market hall
A boiler house and detached chimney built in the early 19th near the perimeter wall.
Submarine-telegraph store. Built in 1904, south of 4 Slip in ferro-concrete using the Hennebique system. This has gone.

Lord Warwick Street
Laid out in the 1950s as part of the St, Mary’s redevelopment scheme

Mast Quay and Mast Pond Wharf.
This was part of the dockyard. But in 1872 the easternmost area was sold.
Royal Dockyard Wharf was the largest plot which included in 5 and 6 Slips (see under riverside above) G. E. Arnold & Co., timber and slate merchants, used it in 1873 and built steam sawmills. Parts of the site were let to other tenants by 1900 and called as St Andrew’s Wharf and St Mary’s Wharf. They were used for stone, manure, slate yards, and a van and bus yard, with a series of long low sheds.
Thomas & Edge, the leading local building firm. They had their works here here from 1915 until 1968,
Stratford & Sons, barge builders. They were on this site in the 1930s.
R. Cunis Ltd, dredger, tug and barge owners, had part of the site from 1919.
Compass laboratory on the roadside.
Parish Wharf. This was used by the Woolwich Local Board of Health in 1872. The Board cleared the wharf and Admiralty House and made it a rubbish depot. In 1891 they added a six-cell dust destructor and a 130ft tall chimney which was demolished in 1932.
Mast Pond Wharf. This was a slate wharf, and from 1905, a depot for United Carlo Gatti, ice merchants – and this lay over the mast-pond overbuilt.
Cawood, Wharton & Co. Had in the 1930s, with plain roadside offices.
Admiralty House. Adjacent in the 1860s the 18th stables south of the mast-pond was a ragged school, dispensary and soup kitchen. In the 1920s, this was replaced by an ambulance station.
W. R. Cunis Ltd took over in 1968 all the wharves and slips on this site for the building and repairing of tugs, trawlers and coasters. They were taken over in 1971 by Cubow Ltd.  And new vessels were built here. Shipbuilding stopped around 1982, but there was a last brief revival of repair work here in the early 1990s.
Housing.  In the 1990s plans were made for a residential complex here. The Comer Homes Group, as Mast Quay Developments Ltd, built a ‘luxury’ housing project. The first phase was Mast Quay in 2004–6 designed by Nigel Upchurch Associates. The blocks stand on blue stilts above car parking, as a precaution against flooding. Nose 5 and 6 Slips are left open, crossed by the extended riverside walkway

.
Maud Cashmore Way
Built to the east of the dry docks in 1989. Maud Cashmore was one of the founders of the Home for Mothers and Babies. It has timber-framed houses in small terraces, developed by Walter Llewellyn & Sons Ltd

Riverside
River Wall.  The western section of the dockyard’s river wharf wall was taken down after a partial collapse and rebuilt in 1817–19. This stretch of brick wall has been refaced in late 20th
River Wall. Rebuilding central sections of the river wall to help scour the mud began in 1834.  Gravel from the centre of the river made concrete poured between rows of timber sheet piling for the wall’s back parts; precast concrete blocks were fixed to the front. There were however problems and it was refaced. There was some rebuilding in the 1950s, but parts remain behind the brick,
1 and 2 Slips were replaced around 1900 with metal  framed buildings with hydraulic lifts, goods chutes and Temperley Transporter Company electric conveyors. Later RACS used these as butter, pharmacy and tea stores, and on the adjacent quayside range a grocery warehouse
Slip 3. The blocked granite-ashlar entrance to 3 Slip can be seen north of Antelope Road.
Slip 4.  This had the second iron-framed slip cover built in 1847–8. This was a new design wider in span, more robust and about double the price. It had a central clear span of 84ft. Similar structures were used for major long-span roofs in railway stations. Under the Army Supply Depot it was used to store telegraph cables. This slip cover was relocated to Chatham, in 1876, where it became a boiler shop. It has recently been adapted to house a shopping mall, the Dockside Outlet Centre.
Dry docks – new docks were built in the 19th on the site of where the original dock yard had begun. These are the extant dry docks associated with the steam navy. After the dockyard closed they became bathing ponds, for Royal Artillery soldiers.  Modern steel caissons seal both docks, which are permanently flooded, and have been used for fishing and recreation as the South-East London Aquatic Centre.
The South-East London Aquatic Centre opened in 1979. New perimeter walls were built around the flooded dry docks, and, between them, a clubhouse used for the storage of canoes. Thereby are now plans to replace it.
Slip covers. After the Napoleonic Wars slip covers began to be built. The first roofs over the Woolwich dry docks appear to have been of a wide-span sub-type. Those over the three western slips were erected in the late 1820s.
2 Dry Dock - Western dry dock - (the one-time double dock, see Leda Road) was rebuilt in 1838–41 when the new river wall reached it. The new dock was built as a mass-concrete dry dock larger in scale. The solid bedrock here allowed a flat base. It was fitted with an iron caisson because of the problems with mud made by Ditchburn and Mare of Blackwall.
No 3 dock, the eastern dry dock was rebuilt in 1844–6 of conventional granite-faced mass concrete. This was the largest dry dock of all. Woolwich could take three first-rate ships for repair plus three. There is a crane base to the south-east
6 Slip - the easternmost slip was lengthened, straightened and granite-lined.  This had the first iron framed slip cover with a wide-span roof erected in 1844–5. The structure was moved in 1880 to Chatham Dockyard, where it was adapted as 8 Machine Shop; it still stands. This slip was used for shipbuilding in the 1970s and is now preserved among new housing at Mast Quay.
5 Slip. This single slip replaced a pair in 1855–6. It is granite-paved with stone-coped brick side walls. This had an iron-framed slip cover built in 1856–8. It was later moved to Chatham, where it was adapted as a factory, and subsequently demolished. This slip was used for shipbuilding in the 1970s and is now preserved among new housing at Mast Quay.
Chimney. This was circular, built near 5 Slip, and demolished in 1974.
Gun battery. This was built in 1847 at the central landing place. It is brick and granite and fitted with gun carriages and platforms made in the Royal Arsenal. . Replacement wrought-iron gun carriages, for resited guns, were made by John Slough in 2005.
Mosaics. The riverside walk was decorated with mosaics in 1984–6 in a project led by the National Elfrida Rathbone Society and the Clock House Community Centre. This included a Mosaic set into a seat showing the world and the months of the year; also a mural portraying a variety of fish set into the pavement.
Bridge. A bridge was built over the floodwall at the north-east corner of the estate to continue the riverside walk. This was a sculptural white-coated steel footbridge, ‘linkbridge 2000’, funded by the Millennium Commission Lottery project. It was commissioned by Sustrans,
Riverside Promenade.  A "'riverside promenade laid out in 1980 runs the length of the housing estate,

Ruston Road
Like Harlinger Road this was part of the steam factory with basins and a dry dock.
Steam factory buildings remain of stock brick with sandstone dressings facing the road.
Remains of the steam factory in Sections of the fire-resisting cast-iron frame of some buildings are said to be in a clearing west of the entrance to the Woolwich Dockyard Industrial Estate. They include plates cast with ‘VR 1843’.
Anchor forge or smithery, steam powered was erected in 1814–17 to replace the old smithery. This was designed by John Rennie and equipped to make the largest anchors and other ironwork. It was the first machine-driven facility of its kind in England. The building was of plain brick, but without timber and had a cast-iron frame, with two rows of cast-iron columns in arcades. Boulton & Watt supplied the engines – two in 1814 to power two forge hammers for anchors, a drilling and boring machine, and a lathe, and for blowing forty-two fires, and another in 1815 as a second forge engine. This smithery was taken down in 1973–4 and re-erected at the Blists Hill site of the Ironbridge Gorge Museum in Shropshire
New Housing by Fairview Homes.
Sheds and trading estate between here and Warspite Road, built in 1999–2000; and from 2010 part used by a Metropolitan Police patrol base.

Spindle Close
First part built of the current housing scheme. Industrial buildings in the riverside were cleared of industry and warehousing in 1996–9 and Fairview Estates (Housing) Ltd, laid out the area and adjacent road, This is on a U-plan block River hope Mansions plus six smaller blocks and 136 houses, these are housing-association dwellings

Warspite Road,
This was called Trinity Street until 1937. Named for the Warspite which was old battle ship used for training boys for seamanship.
Clancy’s Pub, This was the Lord Horwick Hotel.
Trinity Stairs. These were built near the site of the defunct ferry. Public river stairs and a stone sett causeway remain built at the same time as the river wall.  There are two sets of stairs here –Upper Trinity Stairs and Lower Trinity Stairs.
Long’s Wharf. This was at the end of Trinity Street and was taken over by the Dockyard, in 1831–7. A bank was removed and, a new granite river wall built.
Charlton Pier, 1849. A Floating Pier built when the Dockyard was extended westwards. Built by a consortium of watermen on Trinity Stairs and removed when the steamboat trade and ferry ended.  This is where the Warspite training ship was moored.
Wall. A brick boundary wall was built in 1833 along Trinity Street along the dockyard’s west side. This remains.
Ferry. Set up by Sarah Blight as The Woolwich Ferry Company in 1811.  There was ferry house which was also the Marquis of Wellington pub. It was wound up in 1844
Hardin or Trinity Wharf. This was between Trinity Street and the ferry. The wharf handed coal in the 19th. In 1902 J. Watt Torrance & Co., of Glasgow, established sawmills here. A large brick shed still stands, to which offices were added in 1914–16. The sawmills continued through the 1950s. Until 2009, it was occupied by Pisani Ltd, marble suppliers.
General Post Office Cable Depot. In the early 1880s a coal store in the north-west corner of the dockyard, was passed to the General Post Office for a submarine cable depot. The telegraph system had been  nationalised in 1870,  a brick shed was built in 1882–3 covering four circular cast-iron tanks  which remain behind a brick arcaded wall at the end of the street., They were designed by Edward George Rivers for the Office of Works.. State owned ships loaded cable from here and a causeway and stairs were built on the wharf. Since the 1970s this has been a trading estate called Cable Depot.
9 St. Clair’s. This was the Derby Arms pub rebuilt in 1938–9 for Truman, Hanbury and Co. It was also called the Westminster Arms and later Fortys.
Houses. These were slum cleared in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Woolwich Church Street
This was previously called Albion Road
Horwick Mansions.
Fast food restaurant on the corner
West Gate. This was built for the steam factory. It included a police station, police barracks and inspector’s house controlled this from its east side.  The accommodation block is a dignified yellow-brick building with twin entrance porches and bridged chimneys. It became the entry to Commonwealth Buildings and RACS installed new ironwork.
The Woolwich Dockyard School for Apprentices. This dates from 1848–9 and is west side of the steam-factory gate, facing the police station. It survives as built in yellow brick with stone dressings. After the closure of the dockyard it served as offices, as did the former police station, before coming into co-operative society use in the 1920s. In 1961 it was enlarged with a roadside showroom and large sheds. It later took over the police barracks and remains the Co-op funeral department.
Woolwich dockyard industrial estate. This was set up in the 1970s. It consists of the Entrance and a three-storey warehouse, built in 1914 using a reinforced-concrete system within brick walls. A wall crane survives. Also single-storey sheds. 
Boundary walls to the dockyard extend along the street. These are brick with stone dressings. To the east of the main entrance it stands above a sheer drop into the dockyard. The wall has been reni8lt in the 1840s and cut down in height in the 20th.
Old Sheet Hulk. This was a pub opposite the gatehouse
Entrance gates to the Dockyard. A new main entrance was opened in 1639 and later relocated to a bend in the road.  The current gates stand roughly opposite the end of Francis Street. They probably date from 1784 and there are Portland stone piers with reliefs of anchors.
Guard House. This is inside the entrance gate built in 1788 and is a single-storey building with a loggia. It was possibly designed S. P. Cockerell, the Admiralty’s Inspector of Repairs from 1785. In 1981 along with the lodgings this was opened as public house, ‘The Gatehouse’. Following numerous scandals they were used as flats by Gallions Housing Association from 2007–8. The guard house was given an upper storey and a rear extension
Master Warder’s lodgings. This is inside the entrance gate built in 1788. It follows local house-building practice in having chimney stacks between the front and back rooms. There is an entrance and staircase of about 1840,
Farmhouse. This stood near the dockyard entrance in the early 19th. It belonged to Samuel Hardin who died in 1803. By the 1820s it was a pub and then a house and offices for the dockyard’s Commodore Superintendent. It was demolished around 1970.
Retaining wall. Above this is where the medieval Woolwich  church stood.
26 Greyhound pub
Albion Pub. The pub also has hostel dormitory accommodation which it lets out.
Subway. A pedestrian tunnel from the dockyard to Prospect Vale. This was formerly a tunnel for a rail siding - opened probably c1860 - from the nearby North Kent Line, and still has something of the atmosphere of a railway tunnel.
Adventure playgroundShip Tavern Corner – this was the area of the dock gates

Woolwich Dockyard 
Naval shipbuilding began in Woolwich in 1512 and settled in the 1530s.  Land was purchased in 1546 and there may already have had docks here operated by the Boughton family. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars it extended as far as Warspite Road. The yard closed in 1869 and was used for military storage, and in the 1920s western parts were sold to the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society. In the 1960s, Greenwich Council bought the rest for housing; and the Woolwich Dockyard Estate was built in the 1970s. Speculative housing followed on the remainder.
There was a cast-iron-plate tram-road network built in the 1840s, to take heavy loads round the factory on trucks driven by steam-traction engines.
After the dockyard closed The War Office adapted it as a military stores depot with headquarters at the Royal Arsenal. The west end, consisting of the outer basin and dry dock, plus the area behind the main gate, the chapel and the Commodore-Superintendent’s house, became as a supply reserve depot.
Railways – when 3 Slip was infilled the long wharf frontage was used as part of a railway network under the military stores depot.  A branch line passed through a new tunnel under the road to link to the North Kent line, and the Arsenal. The railway was begun in 1873 and some parts were on a narrow gauge,
The War Office decided to wind up the depot in 1924 and land wads put up auction in 1926. They failed to attract a single buyer, so it was sold off gradually and some property remained in War Office use until the 1960s. this consisted of all the land between Mast Quay and Antelope Road plus the site of the Woolwich Dockyard Industrial Estate. The Arsenal closure was announced in 1963 and a year later the Ministry of Defence allowed the property ton e sold. Twenty-three acres were sold to Greenwich Council in 1969 with the south-west section set aside for industrial and commercial use.
Woolwich Dockyard Estate. Some buildings and the dry docks were listed and the site cleared. There were however hold ups through housing demand and also plans for the Thames Barrier. In 1972 the Council’s Chief Architect, prepared a ‘master scheme’ in 1972 for the site. This now consists of a twelve-storey block, St Domingo House, with smaller blocks, Plantagenet House and Sovereign House, and some houses. There are also community buildings and sheltered housing and the new streets and buildings were named after ships built at the dockyard.
Sappers’ tunnels. It is alleged there are tunnels built by Sappers around

Sources
Banbury. Shipbuilders of the Thames and Medway
Bygone Kent,
Chelsea Speleological Society. Newsletter
Clunn. The Face of London,
Field. London Place Names
Glencross. Buildings of Greenwich
London Mural Preservation Society, Web site.
Port of London Magazine.
Smith. History of Charlton, 
Spurgeon. Discover Woolwich,
Survey of Woolwich
Woolwich Archaeological Trail


As ever – this page has relied so much on the Survey of Woolwich that Edith is ashamed.  Please read the Survey itself rather than Edith’s meagre attempts.

Riverside south of the Thames and east of the Tower. Barrier

This posting covers only the part of the square on the south side of the river. The north bank is Silvertown

Post to the east Woolwich Dockyard
Post to the south North Charlton

Bowater Road
This was originally called Marsh Street and was built by John Long on the south side of his riverside property in 1808–9. It turned at right angles to a new river landing. This area is now an industrial estate with many buildings in use by arts projects.
17-21 Siemens office building. Built in 1911–12 using the Kahn system. This was a five-storey telephone-equipment factory with an engineering shed behind.  It included a laboratory and experimental rooms for engineers. Siemens Brothers took out the first British telephone-exchange related patent in 1913.
17 is now a Chinese performing arts centre
25 junction-box factory built 1925–6
34 Siemens building for training in the use of radar and radio equipment built with Metropolitan Vickers Electrical Co. Ltd. And preferred to Manchester
37 Siemens factory for making rubber-coated copper-wire cable. It is five-stores and remains as built when it was one of London’s largest factories. The building was designed by Herbert and Helland, and it has a reinforced-concrete interior and flat roof on the Kahn system which allowed half the wall surfaces to be given over to steel casement windows. There were five-ton capacity electric travelling cranes on the ground floors.
Siemens factory for armoured power cables built in 1923. Designed by Southey with polychromatic brickwork.
Siemens reinforced-concrete cable shop to which A single-storey machine shop was also added, Laboratories and experimental workshops were unified, and garages and bicycle sheds were built for a workforce that had grown to more than 9,000 on a site that now covered thirty-five acres.
Westminster Industrial Estate. The site was bought in 1971 by the Westminster Construction Company to let as a trading estate. The Greater London Council later bought the complex and leased it to the Co-operative Insurance Society. Siemens’ buildings were largely retained around Bowater Road and the larger ones used as factories. There were also clearances and large standard single-storey sheds were put up in the 1970s between Westfield Street and a new road to the north called Faraday Way. More recent use includes artists’ studios.


Derrick Gardens
Part of an estate built in 1908 by William Cory and Co, for their workers. They were sold to Greenwich Council in 1983. Derricks were the cranes used to convey the coal on a hulk called Atlas.

Eastmoor Street
This was previously called East Street and lined with low quality housing. . It is now all industrial – car breakers and metal workers.
Standard House. Let out as office locations
Barrier entrance. Controlled entrance to the Thames Barrier estate
Hardens Manor Way
Manor way built as 'Ardens Man Way' in the 16th century as part of marsh drainage scheme. Hardin was a local far. This was a toll road and causeways across the marshes. It is now a private road with restricted access.  The southern end as well as the northern end is now a footpath through the park.
United Services Tavern. Pub from the 1840s since, demolished
Barrier Arms. This ex-pub was previously Lads of the Village, renamed 1979. It was built about 1830, rebuilt in 1899, and then bought by Mann, Crossman and Paulin. Closed and become a vets business.
Manor Arms. This was a  Beasley's pub built about 1880. Rebuilt in 1925 but closed and demolished when Siemens closed
Tram electricity substation built
Siemens, Three-storey red-brick block. This was built on a bombsite by Siemens between Harrington and Bowater Roads.
Siemens machine shop built 1937. this was extended in 1957 as a rack-wiring factory, and is now a warehouse.
Barrier Gardens. This is a flat linear north-south park on land on part of Siemens Brothers Telegraph Works.  In the 1980s Greenwich Council got funding from the Greater London Council to landscape it. This consists of beds planted with native trees and shrubs and amenity grassed areas.

Harrington Way
This is now a cul de sac and parking area along the riverside with restricted access
Siemens - Nothing remains of the original Siemens building of 1863, which was in Harrington Way. However, ranges of buildings from 1871 to 1899 remain on the south side of the road. These are now in use as an arts complex
Mellish Industrial Estate. Long’s Wharf and Warspite Wharf were unified in the early 1970s for A. W. Mellish Ltd, rice millers. This is now an Industrial Estate, in a range of four sheds with a brick face to the river. Since 2009 the estate has also incorporated Trinity Wharf
Second Floor Studios. It was founded by Matthew Wood and Kelvin O'Mard who had met at Goldsmiths College. They opened in Greenwich High Road in the old Merryweather factories, but in 2009 moved to Mellish Industrial Estate. Emafyl Properties, the site owners, agreed to support the expansion of the artists' and crafts maker studio provision and this has led to just over 390 artists' studio being developed
The Reach.  This claims to be London’s biggest climbing wall. Around 50 lead climbs, plus 650 square metres of bouldering surface and a 4-metre-high boulder.
Siemens, The west end of the site between Bowater Road and Harrington Road was used to manufacture equipment such as galvanometers and Morse-telegraph and laboratory instruments.
Siemens.  In 1892 an electricity generating ‘central station’, said to be the first of its kind for the electric driving of a factory, was formed on the south side of the road.  Siemens probably accounted for a third of total British electrical and telegraphic production


Herringham Road
Previously North Street
Siemens. Siemens had a large building on the corner with Westmoor Street.
House of Praise Charlton branch. A part of the Redeemed Christian Church of God
3 The raceway. Go Kart Racing. Bunker 51. This is under the House of Praise and claims to be a decommissioned nuclear bunker offering paint ball and other games. This is probably the massive foundations built for the glassworks factory.
Dome shaped structure built as a salt store
Trident House Johnsen and Jorgensen Ltd. Thames Wharf. This was a glass works. Founded by two   Norwegians who came to England to sell Arctic products in 1884. They became involved with Scandinavian glass works interests. They imported glass bottles and then built their factory at the end of Herringham Road. Their factory needed 300 octagon piles of concrete to build. Bottles were then imported from Scandinavia. They became the biggest producer of phials in Europe made with tubular glass imported from Germany. They also made glass tableware in the 1930s and along with United Glass made the majority of wine glasses used in pubs and hotels. In the 1960 they began plastic moulding and made bottle closures. In the 1960s they opened a big new factory and by 1970s were the biggest manufacturers of glass ampoules in Europe. However their big warehouse was expensive to manage. The factory closed in 1981 and the 1920s buildings demolished.
Silicate Paint Works. The company had originated in Widnes as J.B.Orr and Co. with another works in Glasgow. In 1872 they set up in Charlton making a white pigment called Lithopone as ‘Charlton White, and also making Duresco the first washable distemper. They were renamed Duresco in the 1930s.Lithopone ceased manufacture in the 1950s. In 1963 they were taken over by British Dolomac and closed down and moved to Abbey Wood.
Maybank Ltd. Maybank Wharf. Maybanks took over the Silicate paint site. They were waste paper merchants who came here in the 1950s initially on the old tram depot site. In 1964 they built a factory on the paint works site in Herringham Road. This was a vast operation for processing waste paper and was eventually sold to Reeds. There are still recycling firms on the site.
45 Lafarge Tarmac. Riverside Wharf


New Lydenburg Street
Trading Estates – New Lydenburg and Ashleigh. In the 19th this was lined with low quality housing.

Riverside
Hiroshima promenade Nagasaki way – these names given to the riverside walk in the 1970s no longer seem to be used.
Charlton ballast wharf. This was east of Anchor and Hope Lane and handled sand from nearby pits. It was associated with the Glenton Railway which ran down parallel to the east side of Anchor and Hope Lane from pits on what is now Charlton football ground.
Telegraph wharf. This was east of Anchor and Hope Lane and was owned by Johnson and Phillips, electrical engineers of Victoria Way
Thames Wharf jetty built for Johnson and Jorgenson. And ran 150 feet from the bank with an arm at right angles. There was a railway crane for unloading
Wharf for Johnson and Jorgensen built lower than Thames wharf and used for unloading smaller vessels.
Thames Barrier, The north-west corner of the Siemens site was cleared from 1972 for the Thames Flood Barrier, built by the Greater London Council in 1974–84. This includes a public riverside park include a disused ticket office and river landing stage, a café and information centre, and a visitors’ learning centre; a tented rotunda-like building used for exhibitions has been demolished.
The Barrier. There was a decision to build this in 1953 after the disastrous Thames flooding. It is the largest moveable flood barrier in the world designed for the Greater London Council by Rendel, Palmer & Tritton.  Work Began in 1972 and was completed in 1982, and first used 1983. It is a third of a mile long and runs across four main shipping lanes and is made up of 10 separate moveable steel gates of 3,000 tons each which lie on the river bed. Between each gate are concrete piers housing electro- hydraulic equipment sheltered beneath elegantly shaped stainless steel forms. There are shell-like hoods of stainless steel - seven large ones each facing a smaller one. Ships can pass through the four wide gaps between the central piers controlled by navigation lights.  The final decision for closure lies with the Thames Barrier Duty Controller. The barrier is closed under storm surge tide conditions to protect London from the sea. It is also closed during periods of high flow over Teddington Weir to reduce the risk of flooding in west London. It remains closed until the water level downstream is at the same level as upstream. The barrier has closed 175 times between 1982 and April 2015.
Promenade. There is a out promenade on the south bank which goes in a tunnel under the Control Building,
The Visitors Centre is to the south of the cafe. This is now an information centre, which is not always open.
Halletts' Panorama of the City of Bath. This was there at the time when the barrier was more promoted as a visitor attraction. It has now gone
Russian submarine. Foxtrot U-475. This was moored here for a while. It had been acquired after the break-up of the Soviet Navy and has now gone.
Howlett Barge Yard. This was a barge building and repair business founded in 1897 by William Howlett. Working with his son they repaired many vessels, but the lease expired in 1937 and the son went to work for the Admiralty.
Long’s Wharf Clark, a timber merchant from 1806–had a wharf west of the sand wharf. This was taken over by John Long, who had the sand and chalk pits on the site of the modern Morris Walk Estate. It had an eight-acre river frontage. It was also the site of a second Castle ship breaking site where figureheads removed from the old ships were displayed.  It was taken over in the early 1970s for A. W. Mellish Ltd, rice millers, who were about to lose their premises in central Woolwich. It is now the Mellish Industrial estate
Royal Iris. This wreck is lying on the mud against the sea wall. She is a former Mersey Ferry built by William Denny & Brothers and launched in 1950. During the 1960s popular bands are said to have played on her in Liverpool. She was taken out of service in 1991.  In 2002 the vessel was towed to a berth on the river awaiting a possible refit as a floating nightclub. This never happened and she just sits there rotting with constant interest from the river police.
Swimming bath. Built by the Marine Society on a river frontage in 1861 designed by G. A. Young, architect. The baths were vacant by 1908, but not demolished until the 1940s.92
Rigby’s Wharf. Occupied in the 1850s by T. and C. Rigby, Westminster builders,
Halen and Richbell. Steam-driven rocket factory from 1848. This was on the site of Long's Wharf
Siemens Road
Siemens Brothers. Up to the 1960s this works covered most of the area covered in this positing. Siemens Road was named after them,
Siemens Brothers’ telegraph and telephone works. In 1863 the firm relocated a five-year-old submarine- cable business from Millbank, to here. Karl Wilhelm Siemens had come from Prussia to England in 1843 as a young man to develop initiatives and inventions in electrical engineering. Karl Wilhelm was the London agent to his brothers’ Siemens and Halske based in Berlin and then a partner in an independent English subsidiary for which J. S. Newall & Company made cable. William Siemens’s move here allowed his firm to begin to make its own cable. In 1865 the company reformed as Siemens Brothers. This was the first German multinational in Britain and profits soared. One of the biggest early projects was the Indo-European telegraph from Prussia to Tehran, and in 1873 the Platino-Brasiliera cable. The works almost tripled in size in 1870–4. The ground was covered with mostly brick sheds within which cable was made. There were also engine and boiler houses, offices, landing sheds and secondary workshops. The southern block included workshops for the refinement and storage of India rubber and gutta-percha -. The southernmost range of this block survives. Western part housed a gutta-percha masticating shop, the central and eastern parts rubber cleaning, mixing and core covering. There is still a three-storey former core-tanks building of 1873 .they were also involved in electric-arc steelmaking. In 1881–2 an imposing three-storey and thirteen-bay office and showroom block went up at in Bowater Road’s and to the rear along Harrington Road, armouring and lead sheathing workshops were added in 1898–9, The eastern parts of this complex survive. In 1954 Associated Electrical Industries (AEI) Group, took over the whole company. The Woolwich factory was then mainly engaged in making electro-mechanical Strowger telephone exchanges for the Post Office. GEC, the Woolwich works in early 1968.

Unity Way
Telecommunications mast. This stands almost exactly where a tall chimney that served the Siemens works stood until 1969.1
Barrier control. The Port of London Authority’s Thames Barrier Navigation Centre co-ordinates the safe navigation of 33,000 vessel movements through the Thames Barrier every year. It does this 24 hours a day, 365 days a year using aids including radar, Thames AIS, electronic charts, VHF radio and CCTV
Sculptures made up of items of equipment used during the construction of the Barrier. There are two tremies, or funnels of the pipes used to pour concrete into the pier foundations. There is an anchor and chain used for mooring the concrete sill units.


Westfield Street
The road is now entirely a trading estate and light industry.
Siemens. In 1925 there were enlargements of the battery department, between Siemens Road and Westfield Street. In 1930 Siemens introduced the ‘neophone’, replacing the ‘candlestick’ form with one that became ubiquitous for decades – a semi-pyramidal black Bakelite base with a circular dial and a cradle on top for a bracket-shaped handset. To start with these were made exclusively at Woolwich.107

Westmoor Street
Prince of Wales pub. 1830s built beer house. Thus was badly bombed and Demolished in 1947

Yateley Street
Siemens. There was further Siemens building her in the 1950s, erected at right angles in 1956 as a labour and welfare centre using recycled materials from the site’s air-raid shelters

Sources
Bird. Geography of the Port of London,
Borough of Greenwich Local List
Docklands history Survey
Charlton Parks Reminiscence Project. Web site
Pevsner and Cherry. South London
Second Floor Studios. Web site
Smith. History of Charlton
Spurgeon. Discover Greenwich and Charlton
Spurgeon. Discover Woolwich
Subterranea Britannica, Journal
Survey of Woolwich
Transactions of Greenwich and Lewisham Antiquarians
UK Government. Thames Barrier. Web site
Woolwich Architectural Trail

Riverside - east of the Tower and on the south bank. Charlton Angerstein

This posting covers only the south bank of the River. On the north bank is Silvertown

Post to the west Charlton Riverside
Post to the south North Charlton and East Greenwich



Anchor and Hope Lane
This was also once known as Manor Way. It was a 'Man Way' or ‘Great Man Way. In the 16th it was as part of a marsh drainage scheme and later a causeway across the marshes. The current street name is derived from the public house.
Moore and Nettlefold. This firm made hand blown glass bottle here about 1901. 
United Glass. This had been set up in 1913 as a consortium of bottle and glass manufacturers. Initially the company concentrated production at a newly built factory at Charlton which they had taken over from Moore and Nettlefold who were members of the group. They used sand from the Charlton sandpits but also from America and Redhill. By using American machinery they became the largest bottle making factory in Europe. They made all the milk bottles used in London and after the Second World War the advent of the National Health Service led to a vast increase in medicine bottles and related items. They lost production however with the introduction of plastic bottles and were closed down in 1966. The company still exists in Harlow. The Sainsbury’s depot is now on this part of the site. The site extended to the square to the south,
100 Walter Combes House.  Currently in use as office by a bookmaker, this was originally Riverside House, built for Stone Manganese Marine whose propeller works is now based in Birkenhead.  This building appears to have been offices and maybe dates from the 1960s. The area behind, now called Anchorage Point, seems to have been the site of their propeller factory. Josiah Stone established a foundry in Deptford in 1831, of which the non-ferrous works subsequently moved to Charlton in 1917 and became J. Stone and Co (Charlton) Ltd in 1951. Its Marine Department produced the propellers for the Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth and Royal Yacht Britannia, among others, and 22,000 propellers for the Navy during the Second World War. It also made variable pitch propellers and water-tight doors including for the Queen Elizabeth and Royal Yacht Britannia. Stone foundries still operates at Charlton but mainly for the aircraft industry and much of the original site is now in other use
Sainsbury's Depot. This depot, on the site of the United Glass works, has recently been rebuilt. It services 200 local convenience stores. The original centre dated from the 1960s and was built in concrete.  The new building is the first single skin chill building commissioned by Sainsbury’s with ambient, chill and freezer units, a goods in and despatch office, and main office. There are 67 docks, five level access doors, lorry parking for 142 vehicles and a 200 space car park. There are a range of energy saving technologies, including solar panels for heating water and a rain water harvesting system. The centre achieved an ‘Excellent’ BREEAM rating.

Horn Link Way
This is actually the ancient Horn Lane, an access road to the river from East Greenwich.
Traveller site. With 10 mobile homes.

Lombard Wall
This is the historic parish boundary of Greenwich and Charlton which lies on an embankment or causeway built as a Manor Way and as a flood barrier. It has been known by that name since 1555 and built by landowner and historian William Lambarde. 

Pear Tree Way
This is a new road built as part of the regeneration of the Greenwich Peninsula for the Millennium Exhibition held in 2000. 
Greenwich Millennium Village. Flats on the east side of the road are being built in 2015. Originally designated as an area for workplace units there was a challenge to the planning application. Flats are seen as a better screen for the aggregate works behind.

Riverside
Greenwich Peninsula Ecology Park.  This is made up of four acres of freshwater habitat and was set up in 2002 having been built as part of the Millennium Village following the Millennium Exhibition. It has two lakes surrounded by marshland that with a small woodland area worth two bird hides. The water supply is derived from pump houses another parts of the peninsula.  It is managed by BCTV.
Norton’s Barge builders and repair yard.  This was on the foreshore west of the Yacht Club. There were three Nortons – ‘R.Norton, Snr’ – ‘Norton Bros.’ and ‘Norton Jnr’. They used barge blocks running parallel to the bank and two sheds on the other side, one for storing tools, nuts, bolts, paint, etc. In 1908 they rebuilt the wrecked Empress as Scudo and then built Scout, Scud and Serb from new. Scud was a 64-ton vessel, which worked for seventy-three years until she was broken up, Serb, bigger at 75 tons had a shorter life of only thirty-eight years before she was sunk off the North Foreland in 1954. They closed in the 1960s and their sheds were taken over by Greenwich Yacht Club,
Peartree Wharf. Latterly this was used by Palmer barge repairers
Greenwich Yacht club. The club dates from 1908 and originally met in west Greenwich. They then moved to some of Norton’s old huts in this area and then to the Redpath Brown Canteen.  When that was to be demolished for the Millennium Exhibiton (too untidy!) English Partnerships built their current new building on Peartree wharf. 
Angerstein Wharf.  This handles marine aggregates and there is a cement plant.  The wharf was named after John Julius Angerstein who built the associated railway. From the 1850s it was worked by the South Eastern Railway and its successors.  The tonnage handled at the wharf has varied, peaking in 1914. After the Second World War they handled fullers earth from Redhill, and imports included waste paper, timber, flour and packed manure.  During the 1970s the Angerstein Wharf site was used as a railhead to receive large stone boulders from Caldon Low for the Thames Barrier. Until 1987 Thames Metal Company operated a scrap yard here and it was later taken over by Day Aggregates. Since 1990 the site has been used for loading and unloading of sea-dredged aggregates. The current operator is Aggregate Industries.
Angerstein railway. This was built as a private goods line by John Julius Angerstein as a mile long railway line from a junction at Charlton.  Built on private land, it did not need an enabling act. The branch was leased to the South Eastern Railway and they later they bought it outright. Branch lines ran to many industries in the area.
Murphy’s Wharf. This is an aggregates terminal with a mixed concrete crusher, and a glass recycling facility,
Christie. This company moved here in 1912 as William Christie Sand Gravel.Co., Ltd,. They were  sleeper importers and creosoters and they built a large creosoting works and sawmills. They built what was described in the 1920s as one of the finest ferro-concrete piers of its type on the Thames.  The wharf handled over 30,000 tons of sleepers and 30,000 tons of timber, deals and telegraph poles” using steam travelling cranes.
Cunis Wharf. Cunis were dredger, tug and barge owners.
Cory.  Wlliam Cory had a coal business from 1838. Off Charlton they moored Atlas, a disused salvage vessel, used as a floating coal berth and known locally as 'The Derrick'. A second Derrick was built in 1865 as did another Atlas. In 1893 Atlas III was built in Newcastle and remained in use until 1902. The barge works here was set up in 1873. Cory Environmental operate their lighterage business from here. There are two dry docks servicing their tug fleet which is made up of six vessels regularly engaged in the transportation of waste. They include twin screw tug Regain, the first lighterage tug to be built for use on the Thames in 30 years.
Durham Wharf. This was Alfred Manchester's building works site in 1896. He originally had a donkey business but moved on to haulage. The side had previously been the Lee District Board of Works depot. Manchester's steam wagons were ex-ammunition lorries and they transported tar for South Metropolitan Gas Co, In the 1940s there were new storage tanks for bulk liquids but they could not compete as companies got their own fleets of lorries  and they went into liquidation in 1981.
Charlton Wharf. Site used by Flower and Everett, dredging contractors and mud shoot specialists. They were also at Angerstein Wharf.
Anchor and Hope. The pub probably dates from as early as the 16th.. It was owned by the Lord of the Manor and in 1874 leased by Red Lion Brewery, St. John Street. It was rebuilt in 1889 for local workers. It has its own jetty and causeway. In 1938 it became a Charrington’s house. It is a basic riverside pub with a food view of the Thames Barrier snd really nice food.
Ayles Ropewalk. This was a ropewalk and tar kettleshop opened in 1850 and closed in 1908. It ran parallel to the riverside walk in an area now covered by the Sainsbury depot.
Anchor and Hope Stairs.
Castle Ship breakers. One of this firms works was sited here in the 1860s as an Admiralty approved ship breaking yard. It was at the end of the road on the foreshore. Henry Castle and Sons were a ship-breaking company which had begun in 1838 in Rotherhithe, and moved to Millbank and later tto Charlton. Small sheds were built here in 1875 to be replaced with Hennebique-system reinforced-concrete structures in 1912–14. However, except for cranes, the wharf was kept open for the laying out of old timbers, including ornamental figureheads which decorated the gateway at Millbank. Many famous old warships were broken here. The site was said to have one of the largest stocks of timber on the river and teak was supplied to the Arsenal. It was also used to make garden furniture including for the grounds of Buckingham Palace for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887. Other timbers were sawn up and sold as logs for fuel. It is said the timber for the Liberty Store in Regent Street came from here.  Copper was also salvaged.  The last ship demolished was old Arethusa. The works closed in the mid 1930s. Recent archaeological investigation on the site has identified many timbers here – piles of which still lie around the area.
Vaisey’s Wharf. Now the site of houses built out into the river. Thought to have timbers from broken battleships in the foundations

West Parkside
Road built as part of the Millennium Exhibition infrastructure in 2000
Meadows nursery. Temporary horticultural scheme on land eventually to be developed with housing
Southern Park. Part of the Greenwich Millennium Village amenities.


Sources
Archaeology Data Service. Web site
Bygone Kent
Carr, Dockland,
Goldsmiths. South East London Industrial Archaeology
Greenwich and Lewisham Antiquarians journal
Greenwich Chamber of Commerce Journal
Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich Festival brochure
Port of London magazine
Smith. History of Charlton
Docklands History Survey
Southern Railway Magazine
Spurgeon. Discover Greenwich and Charlton

Riverside. South bank east of the Tower. Greenwich marsh


Post to the east Charlton Angerstein and Silvertown
Post to the south East Greenwich
Post to the west Blackwall
Post to the north Leamouth

Barge Walk
New road built in 2014 between large blocks of flats

Bessemer Place
New road built in 2014 between large blocks of flats. Named for Henry Bessemer’s Greenwich steel works.

Blackwall Lane
This is the ancient road into the Marsh. It was also called Marsh Lane and Also Ship and Billet Lane after the pub on the corner with Woolwich Road. In this northern section of the Peninsula its line has been very much curtailed and it now ends at the roundabout with Millennium Way but it once followed the line of what is now Tunnel Avenue to the tip of the Peninsula
Housing. In the late 19th and early 20th there was some housing in Blackwall Lane, most of it associated with various industrial sites. In the 1860s Sidmouth Place ran off Blackwall Lane north of Morden Wharf Road. In the same area a Methodist chapel was associated with an East Place.,


Blackwall Tunnel Approach
Access road to the Blackwall Tunnel built in the late 1960s as part of an upgrade which included the new southbound bore.  Site of a permanent traffic jam.
Morden Wharf Sculptures. These are on the roadside side of Morden Wharf and consist of giant red iron ‘sticks’ in bunches tied round the centre and in heaps. This is an artwork erected by the current developer on site.
Blackwall Tunnel Gatehouse, This is the southern gatehouse to the tunnel built 1897 in red sandstone with a flat above the archway. An Art Nouveau by Thomas Blashill, architect to the London County Council. The facades were decorated with shields carrying the coats of arms of Middlesex, Kent, Essex and Surrey, and commemorative bronze plaques
Blackwall Tunnel.  The, currently northbound, ‘old’ tunnel  was initially designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette but with the inauguration of the London County Council in 1889, a new plan was drawn up by Alexander Binnie, the Council’s Engineer. This was for a single tunnel for two lines of vehicles and foot-passengers. It was, of course, to be free for all to use. The tunnel was driven through water-bearing strata by a Greathead shield and compressed air - the first time these techniques had been combined. It was ceremonially opened by HRH the Prince of Wales in 1897.
Blackwall Tunnel. The southbound ‘new’ tunnel. in the late 1930s the London County Council planned a second tunnel but work did not begin until 1958. It eventually opened in 1969
Concrete screen building. For many years a concrete box stood above the archway into the tunnel – the tunnel itself, not the gatehouse. It is thought that this was a wartime measure which originally contained equipment to close the tunnel in case of attack. It was removed as part of the tidying up process of the Millennium Exhibition.


Boord Street
Housing here was demolished in the 1960s.
338 Built as the Mitre public house. Became the notorious comedy venue, the Tunnel Club, and then a whole series of disreputable night spots 
St Andrews & St.Michael's Church.  This was built 1900-2 by Basil Champneys allegedly on a 20ft thick raft over tulle marsh. It is said to have been partly built with the money from the demolition and sale of St Michael's, Wood Street, in the City from where it’s pretty iron bell tower is said to have come from. The Parish was united with Christ Church in 1951 but St Andrew's was not closed until 1965. It was demolished after 1984. The site was leased to building contractors O'Keefe for industrial use and sold to them in 2003.
Weighbridge



Bugsbys Hole
Area in the river off the east bank the Peninsula and which has given its name to the area.  The identity of Bugsby is unknown but the name dates from the early 18th and identifies a part of the river used as a mooring.

Bugsbys Way
Road built by London Borough of Greenwich in the 1980s.
Holiday Inn Express. Built 1998.


Chandlers Avenue
New road built in 2014 between large blocks of flats.

Child Lane
New road built in 2000 as part of Greenwich Millennium Village with a name relating to a nearby school.

Cutter Lane
New road built as part of the infrastructure round the Dome and running between car parks.

Dreadnought Street
This is now a slip road off the A102M running round to the Dome.
Energy Centre. Under construction


East Parkside
David Beckham Academy. This was a football school founded by David Beckham Academy in 2005. The academy pulled out of the London site at the end of the lease in October 2009. Its indoor arena had two full-sized, artificially turfed pitches, alongside an education and administration centre, and a sports medical centre. The facility was subsequently known as The London Soccerdome and used for football coaching run by a different organisation. It closed in October 2014, with the site to be redeveloped for housing. The structure is to be re-erected in Southend.

Edmund Halley Way
New road built as part of the infrastructure round the Dome and running between car parks. This one is named after an astronomer.
Cable Car – aka the Emirates Airline. This opened in 2012 and runs from here to the Victoria Dock.

Green Place
This is a private landscaped service area for The Now gallery and other facilities in Peninsula Square.

Grenfell Street
This street was once the main access road the gas works. It was a short residential street, now under Millennium Way)
East Greenwich Gas Works. The works was set up in the early 1880s by the South Metropolitan Gas Company. It was their out of town ‘super’ works and led to the closure of several smaller works which they had taken over. It aspired to the highest standards and was one of largest gas works worldwide. It was nationalised in 1946.  Gas making ceased with the advent of North Sea Gas in the 1970s and the works eventually closed in the 1980s.
Livesey Institite. This stood at the end of Grenfell Street outside the works gate. It was a social and sports club for gas works staff and included a theatre and other facilities.
Gas Holder 1. This was built in 1886 as the World's first four lift holder and of, 8.6m cubic foot capacity. It was the largest holder in the world when built. It is still extant but unused and its future is unknown.
Gas Holder 2. Built in 1891, it was the the largest holder in the world. It was a 6 lift holder with a flying lift to contain 12.2 m. cubic feet. It was damaged in the 1917 Silvertown explosion and the flying lift was never replaced. It was demolished in 1986 although the tank appears to remain.


John Harrison Way
Road built to access Greenwich Millennium Village in 2000. Named after the clockmaker who lived in Barton on Humber and only came to Greenwich twice.
Memorial Park. Open land named for the Gas Works memorial
War Memorial. This was set up by the gas company and names their workers killed in the forces during the Great War. Originally dedicated in 1926 it was moved here by Kay Murch.
Millennium Primary School. Opened in 2000 to service new residential areas on the peninsula. It was in fact Annandale School which moved here as its founding body. It includes an autistic unit
Peninsula Health Centre. Opened 2000.


Millennium Way
New road built to access the Dome in 1999
St.Mary Church of England School. Extension to existing school opened in 2015.
Portacabins. Offices and depot for peninsula managers8
North Greenwich Station. Opened in 1999. This lies between Canary Wharf and Canning Town on the Jubilee Line.  It has a striking blue-tiled and glazed interior, with raking concrete columns rearing up inside the huge underground space, was designed by Will Allsop
Bus Station and taxi rank. Associated with the station.


Mitre Passage
Office buildings



Morden Wharf Road
This was also known as Sea Witch Lane after a riverside pub. It was called after Sir John Morden who set up Morden College who are the owners of this area. It was built by lessee Charles Holcombe for riverside access. The road was closed for access to the riverside by Tunnel Glucose factory which stood on the site.
The Mechanic’s Arms. Pub built in 1870, the original licensee was William Drew. It was demolished in the late 1890s as part of the LCC’s Tunnel Avenue construction program.

Old School Close
Dreadnought School. The date of the school is unclear and there may have been a predecessor building. This was a London School Board School and may be from the late 1880s - since there are records of repairs and extensions in 1900.It  closed as the population moved from the area in the 1960s and has been used as a store for the Horniman Museum ever since.

Olympian Way
This is a new name for the riverside path.

Ordnance Crescent
Part of west side, including the Ordnance Arms, has gone for the Tunnel.

Oval Square
Shops around a planted and landscaped square for the Millennium Village

Pilot Busway
The busway runs on some dedicated track and on some roads. This section parallels West Parkside. It was built for a guided bus which never worked and never ran


Riverside walk. West bank
Morden Wharf. This square covers only the northern section of Morden Wharf.
Great and Little Pits –these were field names in the riverside area owned by Morden College and leased to industry frrm the late 1830s.
Bryan and Howden. This company leased part of what became Morden Wharf from Morden College in 1837. They made coal gas manufacturing apparatus and were also tar distiller’s
Holcombe. Charles Holcombe leased part of the area from Morden College from 1841 for industrial use.
Willis and Wright. This firm was based on what became Morden Wharf. They were vinegar manufacturers from Old Street in Shoreditch. In Greenwich they had a tar and chemical factory.
Kuper. This was a wire rope making company from Camberwell. Making iron and steel ropes for collieries and ships rigging.  . Some early cable manufacture was contracted to them. From here SS Persian was loaded with cable via a jetty made f barges.
Telegraph Cable Works. Submarine Telegraph Cables. Kuper became Glass Elliott in 1854 and cable manufacture was based here, although it later moved to Enderby Wharf. This site had closed by 1900 and was taken over by Bowater
Bowater. Thames Export packing. Bowaters were paper manufacturers. They leased the site as Thames Export Packing Company Ltd and specialised in preparing paper for export.
Ashby Cement Works.  In 1852 -1856, Henry Reid and John Winkfield made ‘Roman Cement’ here. The company name changed to the East Greenwich Portland Cement Company and in 1870 became William Ashby and Son and closed in 1926. Ashby was a Staines based company
Maudslay Son and Field. Mainly based to the north of this square in Bay Wharf the company had a boiler works here franchised from the French Belleville Company.
Segar Emery and Co. Ltd. took over the Maudslay boiler site in 1904. They were mahogany merchants with connections to America. The business appears to have involved the importation of tropical hardwoods and had a saw mill and dock on site
Molassine Company Ltd. In 1908 this company moved onto the site vacated by Segar Emery. They had been set up with a secret formula for animal feed molasses was stored here in big steel tanks. They made a feed for horses and later dog food. The red sandstone block on Blackwall lane was built in 1916.
Bay Wharf. This site is mainly in the square to the west and will be described there


Riverway
Riverway is now a car park around the Pilot Pub and cottages. Until 2000 it was a road which ran to the river where there was a causeway.  Some of the sites listed below were on the stretch between a wall and the river, now occupied by large blocks of flats.
Railway – there was a railway bridge which crossed Riverway and which would roughly have been on the site of the traffic lights in West Parkside. This was on a branch of the Angerstein Railway going into the gas works. There was a signal cabin above the road.
East Greenwich Tide Mill. This was built on the riverside in 1901 by George Russell. It was upriver of Riverway.  It was designed by William Johnson. During the construction an explosion in a boiler of a Trevithick engine here led to changes in early engine use.  The mill was found to be structural unsound by 1810 and was rebuilt by Brian Donkin. It was probably still extant in 1900. 
Millponds. These stretched back behind the mill – one being described as a ‘basin’.  Some parts of them were still extant in the 1940s.
Hills Chemical Works. The tide mill was taken over by Frank Clarke Hills in 1842 and the site became a chemical works, making manure and processing gas works waste
Phoenix Wharf.  After Hills death the northern section of the chemical works was bought by South Metropolitan Gas Co as an extension to their East Greenwich Gas Works. They ran it to manufacture various chemical from gas works waste.
Ammonium Sulphate store. This was a storage shed with pre-cast concrete parabolic roof on the site of the Phoenix chemical Works.  It remained after all other gas works buildings had gone and was used for film and video production. . Demolished in the 1990s. 
Blackwall Point Power Station site. This was on the upriver side of Riverway. In 1900, the Blackheath and Greenwich District Electric Light Co built the earliest power station here on part of the chemical works site. It was rebuilt in 1951. Rge Control room was separate from the rest of the station and buildings were on both sides of Riverway. The Jetty remains. 
East Lodge. This house was built as part of Russell’s estate for New East Greenwich and generally used for supervisory staff. It was demolished probably in the 1900s.
Redpath Brown– British Steel. This structural steel plant was built around 1901 on a site used for the dumping of spoil from the Blackwall Tunnel.  Redpath Brown was a Scottish company eventually taken over by Dorman Long and Bolkow Vaughan. It was later nationalised as the Riverside Steel Works under British Steel. It closed in the 1980s.The site was later used for Police Riot Training.
Greenwich Yacht Club. The club was for several years based in the old canteen building of the Redpath Brown factory.
Pilot Inn. The Pilot was built in 1802 by Russell as part of his scheme for ‘New East Greenwich’ – a stone on the pub wall commemorates that. The Pilot concerned is probably William Pitt the Younger, ‘The Pilot who weathered the storm’.
Cottages– there were once more cottages and some tenement blocks. These too were built by Russell for workers at the tide mill. Ceylon Place. The name probably relates to the Treaty of Amiens of 1802, the date of the cottages, which seceded Ceylon to Britain.
Thames Church Mission Hall. This mission to seamen started in one of the Ceylon Place buildings. It later evangelised from boats on the river and built St. Andres’s Church in Gravesend.
Coalite Plant. This dated from 1929 and was licensed to South Metropolitan Gas Works.
Fuel Research Station. This had begun as a First World War poison gas research body but became the official government coal research establishment. On closure it moved to Warren Springs


Thames Path east bank
There are a number of seats and stopping places along this stretch.
Port of London Authority scanner
Power Station Jetty. Built for the Blackwall Point Power Station 1950s.  Now in use as a theatre and entertainment site.
Children’s playground
Pilot Causeway. This was licenced in 1801 when the river bank was opened for the east Greenwich tide mill.  It extended from what was Riverway. It appears to have been removed.. 
Redpath Brown Jetty. This belonged to the structural steel works. After their closure it was disused and was eventually taken over by a rival Greenwich Yacht Club. This was closed down and the jetty removed for the Millennium in 2000. It is now used as a mooring area for boats belonging to Greenwich Yacht Club


Tunnel Avenue
Tunnel Avenue was built to access the Blackwall Tunnel when it was first built in the 1890s. It was then chopped up in the 1960s when the motorway was built. The stretch on this square is effectively now part of the Blackwall Tunnel Approach and the roadside of some of the wharves listed under Morden Wharf – and further north, the roadside of wharves which will he listed in the square to the west.
Star  in the East Pub. This is now an electrical shop alongside the tunnel approach
Tram Telephone Box. This stood alongside the tunnel entrance as a reminder of the tram services in the area. It was removed as part of the tidying up process for the Olympics.


West Parkside
Southern Park.  Amenity grassland used for sports.

Scources
Archive
Aslet. History of Greenwich
Bygone Kent-
Carr. Docklands History Survey
Francis. History of the Cement Industry
GLIAS Journal
GLIAS- Newsletter
Goldsmiths. South East London Industrial Archaeology
Greenwich and Lewisham Antiquarians. Journal
Greenwich Chamber of  Commerce. Report
Greenwich Peninsula History. Web site
Greenwich Society Walk,
Industrial Archaeology Review
Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich. Industries of Greenwich
Metropolitan Borough of Greenwich. Festival brochure,
Mills. Greenwich Marsh
Mills. Innovation, Enterprise and Change on the Greenwich Peninsula
Mills. Mr. Bugsby
Nature Conservation in Greenwich
Pevsner and Cherry. South London
Port of London. Magazine
Spurgeon. Discover Greenwich and Charlton