Swanscombe Peninsula Kent 2015

Swanscombe Peninsula Kent: I visited and photographed the Swanscombe peninsula in the 1980s as a part of an extensive project along the south bank of the River Thames east of London, returning occasionally over the years, particularly in the 2000s when I documented the building of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link which crosses under the river here.

Swanscombe Peninsula Kent

Back in the 1980s there was still a large cement industry here. But it was here that Portland Cement became the centre of the UK cement industry, with huge quarries digging out the chalk, often 100ft thick here, leaving huge gaps in the landscape. But most of these quarries were now worked out and the industry was fast declining and has now all gone.

Swanscombe Peninsula Kent

On my 2015 post Swanscombe on My London Diary you can read more about the industry. The Swanscombe cement plant was the l argest in the UK from 1840 until 1930, but was largely derelict when I took pictures in the ’80s though it only finally closed in 1990. That at neighbouring Northfleet, was only fully developed in 1970, although cement production had begun there in 1796. That site, the last working cement plant in the area, closed in 2008 was cleared and its landmark chimneys demolished in 2009-10.

Swanscombe Peninsula Kent

Chalk had been quarried to within a few feet of the main A226 London Road and in some places on both sides of the road, leaving it running on a narrow spine of chalk.

Swanscombe Peninsula Kent

From the road the Pilgrims Road leads down steeply to Swanscombe marshes, with some industrial developments in the former chalk pits on both sides.

Swanscombe Peninsula Kent

Kent Wildlife Trust describe the marshes as “Home to a remarkable mosaic of grasslands, coastal habitats, brownfield features, scrub and wetland” and I certainly found it a remarkable area both in the 1980s and in later visits – the last a year or so ago. My pictures more reflect an interest in industrial archaeology rathe than nature.

In 2012 plans were announced to turn 216 hectares of this site into a theme park, at first with the support of Paramount Pictures who withdrew their support for Paramount Park in 2017 with the proposed park being renamed London Resort. Paramount are also taking London Resort to the High Court over a financial deal after the London Resort was in danger of going bust, although they still apparently have an interest in providing content based on their block-buster films.

In 2015 it looked likely that Paramount Park would go ahead in the relatively near future, prompting me to get on my bike and revisit the area. In the post on My London Diary I give some details about my route. I think all of the site is privately owned but back then much was still open to the public to wander around. Since then there have been more fences and notices restricting public access but there is also a new section of the England Coast Path opened at the start of 2022 through here.

The English Resort plans are still in limbo and the planning permission has lapsed, although the company still believe they will go ahead at some time, others feel the project is dead. Development of the site became more complicated when it was declared as an SSSI on account of its jumping spiders in 2021, and its financial prospects are threatened by Universal Studios consideration to build a rival resort in the former brickworks near Bedford. And its unclear if there would be the money to go ahead.

Dartford Council has withdrawn its support for the project, as has the local MP, but it remains to be seen what attitude a new government will take towards the plans. Campiagners against it, including the council have called for it to lose its Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project status which would almost certainly be its death knell.

Of course this doesn’t mean that this remarkable piece of nature is safe from development, and if London Resort is ended parts of the area are likely to be developed for housing as prime riverside sites, though hopefully much will remain.

More at Swanscombe.


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Estuary

Ten years ago on Thursday 16th May 2013 I was pleased to attend the opening of the exhibition Estuary, held to mark the 10th anniversary of the Museum of London Docklands at West India Quay, a short walk from Canary Wharf. I was delighted to be one of the dozen artists in various media to be included, with ten of my panoramic images from my work on the north and south banks of the Thames.

Estuary opening

I’d begun photographing the lower reaches of the Thames back in the 1980s, then working largely in black and white and my work concentrated on the then fast disappearing industrial sites along the river. At first I worked on the Kent bank on the south of the river, having a particular interest in the cement industry that occupied and had radically changed much of area between Dartford and Gravesend. Later I also worked along the north bank.

Estuary
Cement works, Northfleet, 2000

Estuary is a term that has various definitions, and both its upstream and downstream limits have, as Wikipedia states, “been defined differently at different times and for different purposes.” For my own purposes it has been rather elastic, usually beginning at the Thames Barrier and going east as far as it was convenient to travel by public transport, on foot or by bicycle from convenient stations. In earlier years I went further along the Kent bank by car in some outings with friends including Terry King as far as Sheppey.

Estuary
Cement works, Northfleet, 2000

The exhibition had come as a surprise. The ten picture in it were from around a hundred images the Museum of London had bought from various of my projects for its collection a few years earlier and I think the first I knew about it was when I received the invitation to the opening, or perhaps by an email a couple of weeks before that.

Estuary
Greenhithe, 2000

These pictures all dated from the early years of this century, those from Kent in 2000 and from Essex in 2004 and all were in panoramic format. In 2000 I was working with two swing lens cameras, a Japanese Widelux F8 and a much cheaper Russian Horizon 202. Both work with rotating lens and a curved film plane, invented by give Friedrich von Martens in his Megaskop-Kamera in 1844, but instead of the daguerrotype plates he worked with use standard 35mm film, producing negatives around 56x24mm.

Chafford Hundred, 2004

The two cameras have a similar field of view horizontally around 130 degrees and have a cylindrical perspective which renders lines parallel to the film edges straight but gives an increasing curvature to horizontal lines away from the centre of the image. The image quality of the two is very similar but the cheaper camera has a rather more useful viewfinder.

Dagenham, 2004

By 2004 I had two further pieces of equipment which extended my panoramic photography. One was a new camera, the Hassleblad X-Pan, which had generally received rave reviews. I found it rather disappointing at first and it was only after I added the 30mm wideangle lens that it became useful for me. The X-Pan is a standard rectilinear camera design but gives negatives 65x24mm rather than the normal full-frame 36x24mm. The horizontal angle of view it produces with the 30mm is at the limits of rectilinear perspective, before stretching at the edges becomes too apparent, and is considerably less than the swing lens cameras at 94 degrees. The lens comes with a separate viewfinder that fits on the top of the camera, but does make operation a little less convenient.

West Thurrock, 2005

The second, and very important for working along the north bank was a Brompton folding bicycle, which enabled me to travel the greater distances needed there. Of course I also used this and the X-Pan for later pictures elsewhere.

Mucking, 2005

You can see more of these pictures in two sections of the Urban Landscapes web site, which also includes work by other photgraphers, both British and overseas. Some of the pictures I’ve chosen for today’s post were in the Estuary show, but others were not – I have a rather larger body of work to select from than the Museum, some of which appears in my book Thamesgate Panoramas.

Northfleet, 2000

The site has separate sections on the Thames Gateway in Essex and Kent, as well as from my Greenwich Meridian project in 1994-6 and a wider selection of panoramic work from around London from 1996-2005, though there is much more that I still have to put on-line. Some is also now on Flickr.


South of the River 1985

Container ship, biker, Shornemead Fort, Shorne, Gravesend, Gravesham 85-6c-43_2400

In 1984, I more or less came to an end of my work on the River Lea (though I returned to it later) and the major focus of my photography shifted to London’s Docklands, and I’d photographed the West India and Millwall Docks as well as the Royal Docks, pictures from which I’m currently posting daily on Facebook. And later in that year I also went to the Surrey Docks, where work by the London Docklands Development Corporation was well advanced.

I was very aware of the political dimensions of the redevelopment, with the LDDC taking over from the elected local authorities and imposing its own largely business-led priorities which although accelerating the development distorted it away from the needs of the local area, and particularly away from the still pressing need for more social housing and for better employment opportunities for local people.

Northfleet, Gravesham 85-8e-35_2400

In those years I read every book in my local library on the history and geography of London, and began to build up my own collection of older works bought from secondhand bookshops and by post. Before the days of on-line listings I used to receive a monthly duplicated list of books on offer from a dealer I think in Brighton, and found many topographic and photographic items of interest, often very cheaply, and would look forward to receiving heavy parcels wrapped in several layers of newspaper. Yes, there was mail order before Amazon, and it was rather more exciting.

Cement Works, Northfleet, Gravesham 85-8e-53_2400

It was reading one of the books, Donald Maxwells ‘A pilgrimage of The Thames’, published in 1932 with his imaginative text and evocative drawings (some originally printed in the Church Times) that prompted me to walk in 1985 as he did from Gravesend west through Northfleet and Greenhithe exploring what he christened ‘the Switzerland of England’. As a rather more down-to-earth guide I also had the more academic ‘Lower Thameside’ picked up for pennies in a secondhand bookshop, which included a chapter on its 1971 cement industry by geographers Roy Millward and Adrian Robinson.

Crossness Marshes, Belvedere Power Station, Belvedere, Erith 85-9j-53_2400

My series of walks traversed what was an incredible industrial and post-industrial landscape, altered on a huge scale by quarrying and industry, continuing past Gravesend along the riverside path past Erith and Woolwich to Greenwich and Deptford (areas also covered in my 1985 London Pictures), as well as walking further east to Cliffe and Cooling.

Cement Works, Manor Way, Swanscombe, Dartford 85-9g-36_2400

It was a project that I returned to for several years – and I went back to the area more recently when the Channel Tunnel Rail Link was being built as will as the occasional walk or bike ride over the years.

You can see 280 of my pictures from 1984 now on Flickr in the album
1985: South of the River: Deptford to Cliffe


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