Stowage, Deptford

There is still a short section of street called ‘Stowage‘ in Deptford today, running east from Deptford Green, and a couple of buildings remain on it from when I walked along it in the 1980s, but the whole character of the area has changed, and I think most of my pictures from it were taken in what is now a private street on a new estate and is called Clarence St.

Then, Stowage ran from the the side of The Hoy pub in Creek Road, and turning into it was as close to entering hell as most of us would like to go.  Certainly you took your life into your hands walking past unsafe piles of scrapped cars and other metal and junk, and your ears were assailed by the banging and hacking of metal from all sides.  You had to keep a keen eye on where you were walking to avoid slipping in patches of thick filthy oil and tripping over scattered junk.

It was also an area where anyone with a camera aroused  suspicion, if not outright hostility. If you were lucky people just asked accusingly “You from the council?”, but there were others who made rather more direct threats. it was an area where there were dodgy deals, stolen cars and other things going on that it wasn’t healthy to poke your nose into. Most of the time I kept my Olympus OM1 under my jacket as I walked along.

On the other side of Creek Road too, in Copperas St, running along by Deptford Creek there were also some similar scenes, if rather less intense than in Stowage. Unfortunately in those days before digital cameras and GPS there is no record on these images of exactly where they were taken, except for the clues in the images themselves and their position in the contact sheet, and any notes the photographer made.

I was never too good at notes, and except for the broad details I recorded on the contact sheets and the pictures themselves there is little to go on. In later years I marked up my contact sheets more carefully, with street names, Grid References and occasional notes, but back in 1982 and 1984 when these images were made I hadn’t got around to this.

The whole area is rather different now, with new housing on most of it, and the scrap yards and breakers long gone. Copperas St is now the site of the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, and where the Deptford Power Station was a two bed flat will set you back half a million.

These pictures are among those in the next book in my London Docklands series, the fifth, which will cover Deptford and Greenwich and possibly along to Woolwich, though I still have quite a lot of work to do on the images. Typically, retouching the scans takes about half an hour per image, which slows down the production.

Previous volumes from the series (as well as my other books) are still available on Blurb, either as soft-cover books or PDF:

London Docklands 1   City to Blackwall 1978-84
London Docklands 2   The Deserted Royals
London Docklands 3   Southwark & Bermondsey
London Docklands 4   Rotherhithe & Surrey Docks: 1975-1985

Those with an address in the UK can order printed copies direct from me at a reduced price of £25.00 post free for volumes 1 & 2 and £28 for volumes 3 & 4 post free – most titles are usually in stock. But as always I recommend the PDF versions from Blurb at just at under a fiver.



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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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