by John Rogers
Just the thought of doing this walk was becoming a mind-altering experience. I needed to get out there on the road to Erith Pier before I stopped existing as a viable human being and fully transformed into the living cliché of a man not coping with entering his forties. My long, straggly hair was bad enough; if I started talking about tripping and mysticism a vortex could appear at any moment and I would disappear completely into my own rectum.
I left home uncharacteristically early, keen to give myself time to explore Woolwich before pushing on into the wilderness. My nine-year-old son was still slumbering in the top bunk whilst my seven-year-old was immersed in an alternative reality via the Xbox. He barely registers my final preparations as I give him a kiss on the head and he mows down several onrushing zombies with a machine gun.
It took a mere fifteen minutes on the DLR from Stratford to retrace the walk I’d done down to North Woolwich. It’s a surreal journey, floating through the air past the giant golden syrup tin of the Tate & Lyle factory at Silvertown, gliding past the mothballed Pleasure Garden that didn’t even make it through the first Olympic fortnight to the Paralympics before it went into administration, and then past cable cars drifting over industrial land between the Millennium Dome and the Excel Centre. The thirty seconds of video that captured this on my compact camera would need a soundtrack borrowed from a dodgy 1980s sci-fi TV series, or the sound of the wind that I once recorded blowing down the neck of a milk bottle on the beach near Tilbury Power Station.
North Woolwich is a windswept relic, left behind by the big-money redevelopments that have swallowed up the surrounding docks. Heavy trucks thunder through, heading for the free ferry service that I’ll travel on as a foot passenger. The only other pedestrians lining up to make the journey are a family. The young boys are excited, asking their mum and gran how long they’ll have to wait. All the old accounts I’ve read of the Woolwich Ferry report that the boats played host to scores of local lads who spent their summer days and weekends travelling back and forth, enjoying the free ride and the passing slideshow of river traffic. The only other moving vessel I see today is the ferry service heading in the opposite direction.
Woolwich Ferry crossing
I could have walked across the river via the Woolwich foot tunnel, or just stayed on the DLR one stop to the Arsenal, but I wanted to make more of my first crossing of the river on these journeys – to savour the passing of the water. The sun reflected off the river as it sloshed against the iron hull. There are coils of rope on deck and other nautical paraphernalia associated with longer boat journeys than this four-minute crossing. There’s the smell of diesel, the clanking of metal chains, the view of the pier from the waterline. It’s an antiquated experience of what was once the beating heart of London – its river and the docks. It was said that more wealth passed through the docks at Woolwich than anywhere else in the world. Henry VIII chose Woolwich as the site of his royal shipyard, transforming the quiet fishing village that dated back at least as far as Roman times into a maritime stronghold. Henry’s colossal Henry Grace à Dieu was built at Woolwich and launched in October 1514.
Woolwich was at the heart of England’s seafaring empire. The ships of Drake slid into the waters down the slipway here, later followed by Charles I’s mighty Golden Devil. Elizabethan explorer Sir Martin Frobisher’s vessel that set out in search of the Northwest Passage also originated at Woolwich. Frobisher’s failure to find the elusive route through to Asia might have had something to do with the fact that the celebrated occultist John Dee had a hand in drawing up the maps for the voyage. I’m glad I ditched the mystics for my inland journey and stuck with the more grounded Ordnance Survey and the Geographers’ A–Z Map Company. I can’t imagine too many chickens were slaughtered and entrails studied in the drawing up of the O/S Explorer 162 map.
The landing at Woolwich is inauspicious – the gangplank leads straight to a traffic-choked roundabout where you can literally taste the pollution. It feels like there are large, black chunks of carbon monoxide kicked up off the road into my mouth. The art deco splendour of the old Odeon Cinema, designed by the great picture-palace architect and Leytonstone lad George Coles, lends some faded glamour, but not as much as when its graceful curves were highlighted in bright-red neon at night. It feels a long way from the ‘fashionable resort’ noted in an early 19th-century guidebook.
Thomas Burke was a fan of Woolwich. It was his words that gave me encouragement. In The Outer Circle (1921) he wrote:
It does not attract at first sight. One could not love it for itself alone. It possesses no external beauties, no excellencies of line or feature, is tricked in no fair clothing. To love Woolwich one must love one’s kind; one must hold an instinct for humanity in its most crude expression – soldiers, sailors, policemen, costers.
***
I tried to think of this walking down Powis Street processing my reactions. The phrase that particularly struck was ‘To love Woolwich one must love one’s kind’, because initially the High Street seemed to be a bastion of white working-class London. Aside from six months in New Cross Gate, I’ve spent the rest of my twenty-plus years in London in more cosmopolitan districts north of the river. Although both white and from a working-class background, I felt like an intruder, a foreigner, as if I were noticeably different to the locals. Truth is, until I get a haircut and shave I’m going to stick out in most places beyond a ZZ Top gig.
My ‘instinct for humanity’ guides me to strike up conversation with a policewoman in Greggs the Bakers. As she loads up with filled baguettes and hot jumbo sausage rolls I enquire about Mortgramit Square. I’d passed the entrance on the way along Powis Street and it seemed as if it were a descent into another world – dark and mysterious. As I took photos, two ashen-faced men with baseball caps pulled down tight over their foreheads slunk off the street and into the square as if they had business to attend to.
At first she wasn’t sure where I was talking about, and whilst thinking about it ordered a couple of iced ring doughnuts. Then her colleague said, ‘Oh yeah, it’s going to be a Morrisons.’ ‘No, a TK Maxx, I think,’ she corrected him and that was it, not the notorious Dickensian crime pit I’d imagined, but the latest retail opportunity on Woolwich’s long-established premier shopping street.
I take my Greggs booty and perch on a bench at the end of Beresford Square, which Burke considered to be the centre of Woolwich life. Today it’s fairly sedate – there are a few market stalls, bunting laced between the lampposts fluttering in the wind blowing in off the river, most likely placed there to welcome Olympic visitors making their way from the DLR to the shooting at the Royal Artillery Barracks.
Woolwich has the feel of a Medway Town – a Kentish riverside settlement that in reality it was for most of its history. Our contemporary London has swallowed whole chunks of the surrounding counties of Middlesex, Surrey, Essex, Hertfordshire and Kent. With the archaeological evidence of early settlements around Woolwich, the town could lay claim to a heritage older than Roman London. There was perhaps a Woolwich before there was a London, just as there was a Barking and a Brentford before a brick had been laid in the London Wall.
The Royal Arsenal is a further barrier between the Kentish tribes and another London that sits behind the huge cast-iron gates. Aside from being Britain’s largest armaments factory, workers from the Arsenal formed one of London’s top-flight football clubs, Woolwich Arsenal, now based over in Islington. In the Georgian era the Arsenal sat at the centre of a powerful military complex, with the Woolwich Docks, the Royal Military Academy and the Royal Artillery all clustered around the town.
So strategically important was Woolwich to Britain’s defences that it was one of the marked ‘vulnerable points’ on a secret map prepared by the Ordnance Survey at the time of the General Strike in 1926. These were the places that would be most at risk at a time of civil disturbance. An article in the London Topographical Record points out that when a public version of the map was published in 1933, ‘all the de
tail of the land adjoining Royal Arsenal at Woolwich was omitted.’
A novel from 1871, The Battle of Dorking, imagines a German invasion of Britain in which the capture of Woolwich is a pivotal event. The London Topographical Record article explains how the German military used a version of the O/S maps for their bombardment of London during the Second World War, filling in the blank spaces around Woolwich and the artillery ranges on Plumstead Marshes. On the 1960s One-Inch Map that is pinned to my wall at home, the site of the Arsenal is again bleached out into a long, white, formless void as far as Cross Ness Point. The existence of the munitions works and testing ranges, unavoidable on the ground, is again deleted from the cartographic record.
During the riots of August 2011 it took just a relatively small crowd of civilians to capture Woolwich town centre as they overran a flimsy vanguard of riot police, not with state-of-the-art weaponry, but by hurling bins, bottles and traffic cones. Woolwich was annexed not by the Germans but by the local malcontents. Whilst elsewhere in London that night, camera crews and media outlets almost equalled rioters in number, down in Woolwich the primary record of the events was taken by a couple of startled onlookers filming with a consumer device from a rooftop. On the YouTube footage you can hear their commentary: ‘Holy fucking Christ, are you kidding me? … They need back-up,’ they say as the crowd advance upon the retreating coppers.
The Arsenal may have played its own small part in that outbreak of civil insurrection. The munitions factory and the docks, in the words of the developer, have been ‘tastefully’ converted into a ‘riverside development spanning 76 acres’. The site built by convict labourers imprisoned on hellish prison hulks moored on the river now offers up one-bed flats for sale from £180,000. The smallest apartments are let for upwards of £775 per month. It’s a world away from the forlorn people I saw trudging along Powis Street.
Royal Arsenal Residential suggests its inhabitants hop aboard a special Thames Clipper service from a private jetty to London Bridge, avoiding any contact with the natives. With its own transport links and shops it becomes a colony of city workers, holding on to the Woolwich Reach with a large iron gate to keep the South London hordes at bay.
I saunter through the gate unopposed. The Greenwich Heritage Centre has an exhibition dedicated to Eltham boy Bob Hope – ‘England was the scene of my greatest performance … I was born here.’ A tank from the Royal Artillery Museum is parked on the gravel path, its barrel pointed ominously in the direction of Wellington Street where the rioters put the Great Harry pub to the torch. It is eerily quiet, like a large-scale version of the model village at Bekonscot where I went for my very first school trip in the summer of 1976.
I could spend hours exploring Woolwich; Thomas Burke would probably grab a pub lunch and then an afternoon movie before getting the ferry back across the river. But I’m not quite louche enough for that. I’m also not in the mood for a heritage trip to the Royal Artillery Barracks and the Woolwich Rotunda. This is a break for the border. I’m striking out for the wilderness and the ‘promising uplands’ that rise above the Thanet Sands.
Moving up along Plumstead Road my momentum is broken by the covered market. There’s been a market on the site since the 1600s – the poor forgotten cousin of the more famous Covent Garden. Thursday is early closing, which probably accounts for the lack of activity. It must be a hard life grinding a living out of the stalls here. The Gurkha Café has a few punters supping tea on its outside tables. I do circuits, soaking in the atmosphere: the narrow ways between units, the coloured lettering all around, pulsing reggae music bouncing back off the glass ceiling. There are echoes of Grand Central Market in Los Angeles that provided the inspiration for scenes in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic Blade Runner. A mash-up of ethnic influences coming together into a hybrid street culture, a Himalayan-Afro-Caribbean-Indian-Jutish cocktail.
I was zooming in with my pocket camera on a flashing neon ‘Jesus Is Lord’ window sign when a lady suddenly emerged from inside the shop to confront me. ‘What you taking a photo of?’ she challenges.
‘Your sign – it’s interesting.’
‘It’s for sale if you’re so interested.’ A fair point.
I explained the walk and how lugging a flashing multicoloured messiah sign round Crayford Ness might not be such a great idea. I would cease to be a topographical rambler and become a neon evangelical come to convert the heathen marsh people. Instead, she unpacked various brightly dyed African suits for me to try on. ‘Well, not really my style.’ I gesture to my dark-navy garb. ‘Bit bright for me. But I’ll tell everyone what a great shop you have,’ I say as I back out of her emporium, and she grumpily packs the clothes away.
The Woolwich section of Plumstead Road is a strip of paint-peeled shop fronts offering a smorgasbord of phone cards. Hidden behind torn fly-posters for R&B acts and chipboard-covered windows is a slowly crumbling Georgian house. Perhaps it isn’t Georgian, I’m no Nikolaus Pevsner, a man who spent his life logging the architecture of England county by county, town by town, but it’s old. Buddleia sprouts from the roof and the side wall. A plastic bread crate is propped up beneath the parlour window as if fresh from that morning’s delivery. There’s an ornate lintel above the front door with an intricately carved woman’s head. The dereliction casts a serene expression across her face.
It’s rare to see a house with this heritage in London being left to rot in plain view of the voracious development at the Royal Arsenal over the road. Two miles further east in Greenwich, a restored house like this would fetch a tidy sum the fat side of half a million. Here it represents a prime poster spot.
Crumbling house on Plumstead Road
The military and royal connections of Woolwich brought many worthies to the area. General Gordon of Khartoum lived in the town, as did the Cavalier poet Richard Lovelace, whilst Samuel Pepys saw out the Great Plague here. Perhaps this house suffered the fate of being the home of someone who failed to carve their name in the history books. The face above the door and detail around the windows seem to be inviting investigation, teasing the passer-by with the narratives contained inside.
An email to the Greenwich Heritage Centre elicited the facts that the 1871 Census recorded engineering surveyor John McDougall, his wife Christiana and their eight children living in the house. Eleanor Kemp and her husband, Frederick Isaac Kemp, lived in the house with their two children at the time of the 1891 Census and were still there twenty years later in 1911. The heritage officer points out that the 1901 Census and the street directory also show ‘Harry Mortimer Wise, surgeon and medical officer for the Plumstead and District Woolwich Union’ living in the house with his wife Flora and a servant.
It was a busy family home with the ebb and flow of marriages, first steps, celebrations, arguments, illnesses, quiet Sunday afternoons and departures. It survived the continuous bombing of the Royal Arsenal throughout the Second World War and the regeneration schemes that followed. Now it stands quietly by, waiting to see what will happen next.
Further along I pass the brilliantly named Plumstead Radical Club painted yellow with its moniker daubed in firebrand red. I can imagine a line of Plumstead Radical Club merchandise, mugs, T-shirts and enamel badges that would do a great trade amongst the hipsters of Brooklyn and Dalston. It was suggested to me by a South London friend that the club was far from radical but he didn’t illuminate further.
This is also the entrance to the southern section of the Greenway, the analogue of the raised footpath that I skipped on and off between Stratford and Beckton. Here the terminus of the Southern Outfall Sewer is the mighty Cross Ness Point Sewage Works.
I walked out to Cross Ness one year a few days before Christmas with Nick Papadimitriou. Nick studies sewers with the intensity with which theologians pore over the Old Testament. He reveres the grand sewage treatment works as if they were cathedrals of a lost religion. In Nick’s faith system of ‘Deep Topography’, the Mogden Purification Works on the fringe of West London is Stonehenge.
>
The night before that walk I perused satellite images of the Cross Ness works on Google Maps. A perfect geometric mat of cylinders sits inside neat squares, with a green-baize border nestled snugly against the southern bank of the Thames at Cross Ness Point. Grass it over and the indentations in the ground would be as mysterious as the Peruvian Nazca Lines.
That was when I had my first sighting of Bostall Woods lining a high, dark ridge above the Plumstead Marshes. It was the monks of Lesnes Abbey just beyond that ridge who first drained the marshes and fought a constant battle against the flood tides of the Thames.
It was a fight they eventually lost in the 1500s when large swathes of Plumstead and Erith were consumed by water. They wallowed under this vast lake until an industrious Italian refugee gained permission from Elizabeth I to drain the land. Giacomo Aconcio managed to drain 600 acres before his death. It remains an inhospitable landscape. The waters returned in 1953 and again submerged the area.
The raised concrete walkways of the Thamesmead Estate that Stanley Kubrick exploited to chilling effect in his cult movie A Clockwork Orange were inspired by a desire to protect the living areas from the threat of flood. The architecture of the estate was not so much a recipe for social disintegration as a result of forward thinking. When interviewed about the film by the New York Times in 1972, Kubrick talked of how he found London ‘in the best sense, the way New York must have been in about 1910’, rather than mention the dystopian brutalism that provided such perfect locations for A Clockwork Orange.
Jonathan Harvey’s teenage gay love story Beautiful Thing at least attempted to give the area a new, more benign narrative. But it’s the poster image of Malcolm McDowell and his bowler-hatted gang of ‘droogs’ marching beside the Thamesmead lake that has stuck in popular consciousness.