Re-photo

Woolwich to New Charlton Panoramas: Continuing my occasional series of colour images from 1995 – I think this is the eleventh post – with some colour panoramas made in May 1995 on a walk from Woolwich to New Charlton.

My walk had begun when I got off the train at Woolwich Arsenal on my way back from Dartford on May 7th and I think these pictures were made that afternoon as I walked from there to another station keeping close to the River Thames. But I did but return to Woolwich the following Sunday, May 14th and some of these pictures could have been made then.

A path leads up from the roundabout at the start of Woolwich Church Street to Church Hill and St Mary Magdalene Church, built on a spur of high ground leading out towards the river. Originally this ground went rather closer to the Thames, but much of it was quarried for sand though the digging had to stop at the church. Although the present church dates only from 1727-39 there had been a church on this site since the 9th century if not earlier and it was probably a much earlier site of settlement.

The road in front of the church, Church Hill, gives a splendid panoramic view of the Thames. In 1995 you could still see the remains of Woolwich’s riverside industry, but by the time I photographed here again in 2000 all had gone and the area was empty and derilect. Now it is filled with four tall blocks of flats and some other housing.

Woolwich Dockyard was the Navy’s most important dockyard for many years and ships were built here from 1512 to the Victorian era. By then it had become too small for the new ships and the Royal Dockyard closed in 1869. Parts remained in industrial use and a large area was bought by Greenwich Council in the 1960s where they built the Woolwich Dockyard Estate in the 1970s – part at the left of this picture. I think this is the Grade II listed Graving Dock.

Taken on the Woolwich Dockyard Estate this shows one of the old dry docks and at a mooring in the Thames the Woolwich Ferry Ernest Bevin. You can just see part of the south ferry terminal in the centre of the image.

The ferry across the Thames became a free ferry run by the LCC in 1889 – two days after they had replaced the Metropolitan Board of Works who had organised and funded it. A number of public bridges had been built to make crossing the river in West London easy and free and it had been decided that there must also be a free crossing in East London. The Ernest Bevin was one of three ferries in the third generation of ships which came into operation in 1963 and it was replaced in 2019. All have been named after local figues and Bevin was elected as MP for Woolwich East in 1950.

These point blocks, close to Woolwich Dockyard Station were built for Greenwich Council are St Mary’s Towers, one of the more successful housing schemes of the late 50s and early 60s, opened by Princess Margaret in 1961. They remain now still in good condition and popular.

Back to the River Thames and another cleared area of the former Dockyard with a view across the river to Tate & Lyle’s Silvertown works.

Another former dockyard area still in industrial use. I think this is Thameside Wharf on Harrington Way. Some of the buildings here were once part of the Siemens Brothers Telegraph Works factory established in 1863 and became Thameside studios for artists around 1990.

Bugsby’s Way took its name from this part of the River Thames known from around 1830 as Bugsby’s Hole or Bugsby’s Reach which probably got its name from this once “marshy area to the south of Blackwall Point where executed criminals were formerly hung in chains.” As E.W.Green suggested in 1948, ‘bug‘ was the old British (ancient Welsh) word for ‘spook’ or ghost, and what could be a better place to meet with ghouls. Bugsby’s Way was built across this marshy area by the London Borough of Greenwich in 1984.

Another picture from Bugsby’s Way. The Beatle Line perhaps got its name from the later meaning of ‘bug’, perhaps from a different Anglo-Saxon root, at first simply meaning beatle, though later coming into popular use for a wider range of species – including the famous moth found by Grace Hopper and colleagues in the Mark II computer at Harvard University in 1947.

More pictures from Charlton in a later post.

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