Alan Brooke, David Brandon, Pitkin 2010, £4.99

Pitkin aren’t known for their in-depth analyses of any subject, but that’s not what you buy ‘em for.  They’re cheap and cheerful introductions to a place you visit on a day trip, with just enough info to entertain the casual visitor and pique the curiosity of the relatively few who decide to go further.

Having said that I have a Pitkin Guide to the Cutty Sark from the 1960s positively crammed with information – far too much for the MTV generation of today (admittedly including me)  brought up on soundbites and sidebars. Grainy black and white photographs and large blocks of text don’t look particularly inviting, but they’re certainly substantial, and if memory of my parents grumbling serves, they were comparitively pricey back then.

I’m not aware that I have ever noticed Pitkin for years – certainly I haven’t bought anything (new, obviously – obscure second-hand volumes about weird things still make my spectral fingers itch) but my eye was drawn by Under London in Waterstones the other day.

Pitkin has hipped-up. Admittedly the subject matter was the thing that grabbed me about Under London but when I flicked through I was seduced by the glossy pages, the full colour illustrations – and yes, okay, by the fact that I needed something to read in the coffee shop and I could do this one cover to cover in the time it took to slurp a cappuccino. Oh – and the price. £4.99. You can’t really knock that…

What is it about things that are either very high up or buried beneath your feet? I guess it’s the lure of the unknown but it always seems to be the towers or the tunnels that sell out on Open City (this year on the weekend of the 18th/19th September – put it in your diaries now if you haven’t already…)

London seems to have as much underneath her as on top, and that’s where a guide of this size starts to run out of puff. It’s a really good looking book – lots of shiny photographs (I love George Formby singing about his little stick of Blackpool rock to sheltering Blitz Londoners) and quirky snippets, loosely gathered into themes – cemeteries, underground stations, murder, ghosts, plumbing and sewers – and there are things obscure enough to entertain an Underground London fan, but at 48 pages, this can only ever be a brief overview.

Greenwich, sadly, hardly comes into the picture at all – a fleeting mention of the Foot Tunnel, but nothing about the Swiss cheese that the town becomes further up the hill. I guess that’s forgivable since it’s a London-wide book, and it necessarily has to concentrate on the centre.

So. A handsome paperback, well-priced and with fun, funky facts and a breezy style. It’s not going to replace Antony Clayton’s Subterranean City(which itself could do with a bit of an update) and there is still a big yawning gap for a specifically Underground Greenwich book, but as a shiny intro to the delights under your feet in the City and beyond, it’s an entertaining light read.

It’s been ‘opening soon’ for so bloomin’ long that I had frankly given up on ever seeing the Dial Arch open. I used to go past the lovely old building (a mews, perhaps?) on that fantastic ‘village green’ at the old Woolwich Arsenal, and think ‘this could be really good’ but with the financial climate as dodgy as it is just now, I didn’t expect to see it open this year.

But open it has – and thanks to Ken for telling me about it. I’ve now been three times - once just for an afternoon drink outside, the other times indoors to eat. And I have to say, I’m impressed.

Now, I’m a bit of a fan of ’scruffy’ Woolwich – I really think that much of the town’s charm is that it is a little tatty round the edges. I particularly like the Friday market, a proper market much like one you’d find in the less fashionable towns of France – minus the fabulous fruit & veg sadly, but the sort of place that sells pots and pans, cheap clothing and bizarre electrical items I’m not sure I’d want to actually plug in to a 240 socket. I also really like the factory shops down the high road that actually have bargains, as opposed to the ghastly Bicester. And for Chinese food, I really rate the Favourite Inn, just behind the DLR station.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have time for the more serene, leafy quiet of the Arsenal across the road, and I think they’ve got the Dial Arch just right. I mean – just look at it.

Inside, the style is corporate bohemian  (what Ken describes as “an inevitable mix of wonderful and kitsch”) – bare brick, decorated with things they’ve found around the site and bought-in ephemera, mixed with designer plush – multicoloured velvet chairs and wood/metal tables surrounding a walk-in wine cage one side, which feels quite ‘night time’, squashy leather armchairs and firebowls the other, feeling more ‘daytime-y’ meeting in the middle with a glass atrium where the main bar is. There’s also a semi private room that would be good for birthday parties or Christmas dos. I confess I really like it.

It’s a Youngs pub, but it also sells Meantime. For obvious reasons I can’t comment on the beer; I’m told it’s perfectly acceptable and there certainly seemed to be a whole array of choice on tap. I thought the wine list was better than many.

The food, too, is pleasant, if a little patchy. Not gourmet (though the prices are definitely at the high end of gastro-pub.) The menu is ’safe’ – modern European plus pizzas and classic pub grub, but sometimes safe is just what you want. The food is not badly cooked and cheerily served (our waiter spent so long joking about how the place wasn’t finished yet – a reference to the walls not being plastered – that he forgot part of our order but he was so keen it was hard to be cross.) The second time I ate, the order was also slightly wrong, but again, swiftly remedied.  The pub-grub seems to come out better than the pizzas – I think the ovens need to be hotter; hopefully that will be remedied soon.

One thing I should also add – don’t get the Japanese rice crackers – two quid for what amounts to be a large egg cup of them represents extraordinarily bad value for money.

Of course relatively few people are choosing to eat-in at the moment, preferring to make use of the giant garden parasols, but I disagree with the person I spoke with who said this won’t work in the winter months. I think it will be a lovely place to enjoy a cosy drink in cold days to come.

For the moment though, a cool drink by the Arsenal Football Club commemorary pillar, with its jolly red pelargoniums, looking across at the pock-marked Roman chap under his own canopy on the building opposite, staring down the barrel of an ancient cannon whilst avoiding the Lawn Sprayer of Doom on the grass takes some beating.

Someone, whose email, I have to ‘fess up, I’ve lost, so I can’t name (sorry) asks a seemingly obvious question:

Where were the gallows in Hanging Wood?

It’s such an atmospheric name; you’d think there would be loads of investigations into it, but I’m drawing quite a blank here. I’ve checked out all my books, maps etc. dealing with Charlton, but no one really talks about it except to talk about it in terms of what’s left of it; which in London terms, is quite a lot really.

The best I can do is Darrell Spurgeon’s highly enjoyable Discover Greenwich and Charlton, from which I’ve drawn this rather wobbly (and probably very inaccurate) map of more or less where the Hanging Wood would have been (the 1746 map above is borrowed from the excellent Ideal Homes website.)

It would have included all manner of different terrain – from what we call Gilbert’s Pits – an old sand mine I’ll talk about another day, Maryon and Maryon-Wilson Parks, plus other sections now subsumed into suburbia.

So where Hanging Wood was isn’t really a problem. But my mystery emailer didn’t ask me that. He (I’m pretty sure it was a ‘he’) asked where the gallows would have been. I have never seen this issue addressed. If there were gallows anywhere, there seems to be no record of it now.

One thing the place wasnotorious for, though was highwaymen and footpads. In 1661 Samuel Pepys wrote about seeing the  “filthy remains” of a man hanging on a gibbet at Shooters Hill; perhaps there was a set of gallows at Hanging Wood too, to deter would-be robbers. There was certainly no shortage of gibbets around town - Greenwich pensioners used to make a few coppers hiring out telescopes to park visitors so they could peer at the grisly remains of crow-eaten pirate carcasses from Execution Dock being ‘exhibited’ at Bugsby’s Hole on the Peninsula.

Of course, this always assumes that  ’Hanging’  is of the ‘from the neck until you are dead’ variety. It could just be that the woods, being situated at the top of a precipice, the land falling steeply down to the river, ‘hang’ from the ‘cliffs’ that form Charlton’s backbone. Who can tell…

After 1666’s Great Fire, a group of luminaries, headed by Sir Christopher Wren, began to come up with ideas to rebuild London. They ranged from grid-systems, through boulevards and radial designs to series of squares and park ways, and most were pretty radical stuff.

Of course none of them came to fruition – Utopian ideas that mean your particular hovel’s footprint will now be the middle of a boulevard are rarely popular with current landowners. And there were always going to be the odd buildings that didn’t get torched or bits that would need to be kept for one reason or other, right in the middle of an otherwise perfect grid.

I confess that I am rather glad that the City never ended up as New York or Tokyo – lovely thought they are. I love to get lost in the tiny, illogical alleys and ridiculous windy streets that more or less follow the old plans. I really like that modern buildings often end up really daft shapes to fit in the space available, their architects dictated to by medieval Londoners.

In 1943, London was facing the biggest mass-destruction since 1666 – and in many cases, not least in loss of life, it was worse. It certainly covered a bigger area. The sirens of the Blitz were still sounding in Londoners’ ears and the fire engines would not be stood down for another couple of years.

Nevertheless, a fearless bunch of luminaries were already having similar ideas to Messrs Wren, Hooke & Co. and in May, RIBA (the Royal Institute of British Architects) produced the Second Interim Report of the London Regional Reconstruction Committee - Greater London – Towards a Master Plan.

Of course, it could only be an interim report – at the time, they had no idea just how much longer Britain would be at war, or how much more of London would be lost, but they had faith – if nothing else, that St Paul’s Cathedral at least would survive, and they seem to have made that their central starting position in their idealised London rebuild.

They were only too aware of the issues the Great Fire rebuilders had faced – they stated quite baldly

“Our effort must be fearless, it must not allow obstacles to blot out our vision of the future and no substitutes for proper planning can be allowed. Unless planning is started now we shall find ourselves countenancing a continuance of the bewilderment which at present exists.”

The main bewilderment was with transport, which, they correctly predicted, was only going to get worse. They included helpful diagrams to show the problem:

Which finally brings me to the point of today’s post. Anyone who complains about too much air traffic over Greenwich, look away now, while I reveal what I think is the first ever suggestion for London City Airport – not a million miles from where the present one is, but with, ahem, just one or two more runways than we have:

Yup, folks, that’s FIVE runways criss-crossing their way across Canary Wharf, though to be fair, they weren’t expecting 747s, Concorde or Airbus at the time. But all the same there are two direct flight paths across Greenwich, where the other directions only get one each.  The reoprt points out“The effects of the development of aerial transport may be far-reaching…both in regard to the transport of passengers and goods. It is only necessary to call attention to the interplay of the air with railway and road communications and the necessity to zone air-ports for the protection of aerial traffic, Zoning of this kind is also concerned with the preservation of amenity, especially protection against noise.”

So, basically, South East London’s already ruined, has a load of docks, factories, bomb damage and nasty roads – best put the airport there too, keep the grot from the rest of town. Makes sense – if you don’t live in South East London. The bit on the bottom of the Isle of Dogs, and on Greenwich peninsula, BTW, are proposed redesigned dock-basins, with railways going all around – well, everywhere. Interestingly there are no major roads south of the river save the A2 (and of course there wasn’t a major road leading north across the peninsula until the 70s.)

It’s a curious map - and, even though the London City Airport we did end up with is actually quite nearby (albeit just with the one runway) it shows something that it’s almost impossible to imagine. So this morning, I’m idly wondering how things would have turned out if, instead of developing Heathrow, Docklands  had become Britain’s major airport…

Here’s a lovely thing to look out for for all you people who are going to be doing Bank Holiday trips to the sundry DIY superstores in Charlton today. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been past this modern sculpture, meant to say something about it and totally forgotten, but hey – I’ve remembered at last. As you can see from the above photo, it’s on the wall surrounding the industrial estate containing the dreaded Macro, a place I have never entered.

What I really like is that for once, instead of doing something as cheap and nastily as possible, whoever it was built the wall thought ‘ You know what we need here is a bit of Art,’ and they went ahead and commissioned something unique. It’s totally appropriate for the area, and created in specially fired bricks, yet it ’s simple and elegant - something a bit special to just happen upon. I love those moments…

For once, too, I didn’t have to spend too long searching for information about a modern work of Greenwich Art. It’s called, unsurprisingly, ‘Knots’  and it is, according to the artist,  John McKenna a “brick relief sculpture comprising of two large knots 7.5 m/24ft wide by 1m/ 3ft high, tied around a pillar, sited on the enabling road route to the Greenwich Millennium site, London.” 

In case you’re wondering, the knot on the right is a Carrick Bend, which is used for joining two bits of really heavy-duty rope together – the sort of rope that would have been used in the industry round here. It doesn’t get itself in a pickle even if the rope is soaked with water or carries really heavy loads. The rope on the left is tied in the slightly more familiar Double Sheet, which is used for joining two pieces of unequal weight or thickness together.

Just in case you’re buying rope – or anything else for that matter, at Wickes this weekend, then…

There are a lot of apple trees claiming to have been grown from the seed of the fruit that may or may not have fallen on Sir Isaac Newton’s head. And this may or may not be one of them. I never did manage to pin anyone down as to exactly which gnarled old tree in the delightfully overgrown orchard at St John’s Jerusalem is ‘the one,’ but that’s sort of beside the point with this incredible, secret place just inside the M25.

I know. It’s hardly Greenwich – but it’s a great afternoon out, and this is the time of year to go. Go, that is, if you can manage to get there for the four hours it’s open each week in summer (two hours in winter.) It took me years to get round to seeing it, as the National Trust in its wisdom chooses to open this utterly gorgeous garden on Wednesday afternoons, no exceptions.

It’s at Sutton-at-Hone, which is a cough and a spit from Dartford, or a hop over the fence if you’re on the M25, and it’s about as perfect an English garden as you’ll get. The house itself is what’s left of a 13th century commandry of the Knights Hospitallers of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, who set up shop there in 1199. You can only admire it from the outside, sadly as it’s privately rented (how do you get those NT-tenant gigs?) but you can have a poke around the chapel, which takes about five minutes if you go slowly.

It’s the garden that’s the real star, and there is an advantage to the place being virtually unknown and only open on Wednesday afternoons. When I finally made it there, I had the place to myself – formal borders, cottage planting, a moat (fed from the river Darent), orchards, lawns, wild-gardens and a rather fabulous dovecote – all for me.

What’s so great about going this time of year (and why I’m telling you about it today in case any of you can make it down to Dartford for tomorrow) is the wonderful blossom as the fruit trees are in full bloom, happily buzzed-round by fat, fuzzy bumblebees.

It was, I understand, the first place to grow Kentish Pippin apples, one that you don’t see too often these days (the ones on Blackheath farmers market every week just seem to be mishapen versions of supermarket varieties, which is a shame. )

There is an extremely tenuous link with Greenwich here. Edward Hasted, who wrote the seminal History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, from which most Greenwich history seems to be taken these days (and I raise a guilty paw myself here) lived here in the mid 18th Century and wrote said History there.

Although the formal gardens will have changed since then, I’m willing to bet that the orchard’s much the same as when Hasted lived there – and, presumably, entertained Sit Isaac Newton at some point, who, presumably ate an apple there. and was, presumably, a bit careless with the core. The volunteer was keen to tell me the story, but it never quite sank in.

If you do manage to go tomorrow, be careful how you go. You can only realistically get there by road, and you’ll probably end up driving straight past the entrance, even though you know it’s coming up. There’s a map here but you’ll need a bigger one as it’s a bit of a fiddly drive. I came off the A2 near Hall Place and carried on down the same road but then had to do a bit of jiggery-pokery. Despite the fact that the way I originally discovered the place was by accidentally driving past it, finding it again was a challenge.

Being National Trust, it’s free if you’re a member,£2 if you’re not. But with weather like this, the peace and beauty of St John’s is hard to beat. If you can get a Wednesday off, that is…

Very occasionally in Real Work I get to the end of the financial year with leave to burn. The ’selling it back’ option is at such a piss-poor rate I might as well just take the time off. In this particularly circumstance, it was like finding a tenner down the sofa as I could have sworn I’d already taken all my leave when I was suddenly told I had to use up two whole days before the end of March. Yo!

So I decided to visit the National Archives and see just what Greenwich stuff there is secreted there that I could plunder at a later date.

First things first. Ignore the website when it says you don’t need a reader’s ticket. You do.

They actually don’t want people to visit the archives, however much they make the site look cuddly and open. They are utterly swamped with ladies of a certain age hoping to find their Great Uncle Albert who served in the war; they really don’t want anyone else turning up.

So the website goes on and on about how much archive material is online (and, admittedly there is a lot) and how there’s hardly any parking and it’s really out of the way etc. etc. (it’s about a five minute walk from Kew Gardens tube). It also says you only need a ticket if you want to look at original documents, and emphasises what a terrible palaver it is to obtain such an item so don’t even bother, okay. I was only going for a reccy and not bothered about ordering original documents to scrutinise, so I decided to forgo what seemed to be a really laborious procedure and not get a ticket.

What the website doesn’t tell you is that to even get into the map room on the second floor you need a ticket, whether you want to look at original documents or not.

Stupid Phantom as I am, I had taken the website at face value and was ever so politely stopped by a security guard and packed off (most apologetically, I suspect she gets it a lot) to the ticket room. I fished around in my cloak, under my tricorn and down my boots, but just couldn’t drag together the mountain of ID they require. Consequently, the entire second floor is still a mystery to me.

Don’t get me wrong – I think it’s right and proper they protect irreplaceable records, and I would have been only too happy to apply for a ticket and bring all the clobber needed. I just wish that they hadn’t been so busy telling people to do their research online that they’d failed to say a ticket was vital if you’re actually going to visit the place.

Instead, I contented myself with the first floor, which has much to enjoy. Dozens of computers, mainly occupied by the aforesaid genealogists, but if you look hard enough there are one or two that haven’t been jealously guarded with the proprietorial pencil and notebook.

It’s very geared-up for family history seekers. There are a lot of leaflets telling you how to find your relative if they were in X Squadron or worked in the tin industry; fewer telling you what stuff they actually hold.

Much of it’s catalogues; some good old-fashioned drawers of cards, some paper books, a declining number of microfiche stations, but most of it is online nowadays. There are various search mechanisms within the computer network, though of course, much like the British Library, you have to know what you’re looking for in the first place. If you don’t know (or at least suspect) a document exists before you go in, chances are you still won’t know when you come out, though there seem to be more helpful staff, actually there to assist searches rather than act as threshold guardians to the documents, than at the British Library, and they are far less disapproving of the public too. One might even say friendly.

What IS really good is the access to the fantastic British History Online which is only available in cut-down form if you don’t have a subscription elsewhere. At the Archives you can read it in full (if you have a spare ten years or so – it’s huge.)

You know, I think I need to go on a ‘how to go about researching stuff’ course. There’s clearly an art to finding your way around records and my usual approach of wandering around until I find something that interests me is clearly a bit hit-and-miss. My day at the Archives only told me what I knew already. I am a rank amateur.

Browsing is not the best way to approach the National Archives and since browsing is how I find out most of my favourite stuff, I decided to look on the bookshelves instead. Victorian telephone directories, street maps and record books promised rich rewards, and although the library is no way comprehensive, I spent most of the day in the London and Kent sections with old record books of Greenwich charities, Admiralty expense accounts and sundry Royal Assizes (and no, I’m still not quite sure what they are), using my patent ’scattergun’ research technique.

You’re allowed to take in a notebook, pencil and a camera, as long as you don’t use a flash, and since photocopies are 20p a shot, I now have a lot of fuzzy photos of articles to squint at on the screen at home. My eyes are already cursing me for being so cheap.

It’s an interesting day out (there’s a nice cafe, a little museum that contains a copy of the Domesday Book and a mummified rat from the days when the archives weren’t so carefully looked after, and a shop that sells family history magazines and books about Hitler) and I’m glad I went. But I’d say that unless you’ve got something absolutely specific in mind, you’re best off with Greenwich Heritage Centre for local stuff.

A couple of people have been asking me recently if I know any quirky stuff about Shooters Hill. To be honest, it’s not my manor, but I always keep an eye out, and yesterday, whilst looking for something totally different, I found this tiny snippet.

Pretty much everything I read about the area tends to be about people travelling through it – it was the main road to Dover (immortalised in the opening of A Tale of Two Cities, as the Dover mail coach lumbers over the hill.) It often turns up as a notorious haunt of highwaymen and footpads, but in the past I’ve really only read about 18th and 19th Century villains.

But yesterday, whilst looking up the history of Britain’s penal system (it’s a long story) I found a strange little (uncredited) paragraph that describes a much earlier attack – and one where some weird sort of martial art seems to have been applied for the purpose of relieving an Elizabethan gentleman of his cash…

“Faith, I have had a foolish, odd mischance that angers me. Coming over Shooter’s Hill, there came a fellow to me like a sailor and asked me for money. Whilst I stayed my horse to draw out my purse, he takes advantage of a little bank and leaps behind me, whips my horse away and – with a sudden jerk, I know not how – threw me at least three yards out of my saddle. I never was so robbed in all my life.”

Sadly I know no more about the incident – the book in question does not tell us where the quote comes from and after that just goes on to talk about ‘eight idle wandering poor’ who stole a cartload of cheese, which, if there was ever a woodcut of the event, would just invite a caption competition.

But the idea of some weird technique that the ’sailor’ used is curious. Perhaps a move he picked up on his travels? Who knows…

Rather slow off the mark this morning, folks, thanks to a tedious hacking incident with Twitter. Apologies to anyone who discovered rather more than they needed to about “The Phantom’s” love life…

All fixed now, I hope – thanks to everyone who let me know about the security breach.

But onto happier things. You may remember Robbie, who plays with local band The Mores. Well, he’s getting married to his ‘Amazonian photographer’ (what an image that conjures up…) and wants to have the wedding somewhere around Woolwich.

I don’t normally cover wedding-venue questions on the main blog any more, since they got so frequently asked that they’ve got their own page these days, but something he’s been saying intrigues me.

He says ” I have been dealing with Major Gleeson on the matter of hiring the Rotunda for our party. All was going well, we went to have a look at it, he seemed fairly excited by the idea, saying nobody had ever done anything like that before (that’s what I like to hear!), and thought it could be done.

He came back with a fairly stiff figure for the hire charge, but we managed to swallow it, until today when he called to say that the fire regs guy had just had a look, and would only allow us to have 60 guests in there! No good. So I am currently trying to negotiate some sort of fire safety situation with the army, possibly hiring a fire engine to sit outside for the day, but it is looking like it might be a shade too pricey for us.”

Before I get onto Robbie’s next question, which of course, is about alternative venues, let’s just think about this.

A few months ago, I was very worried about the Rotunda, and I continue to be concerned about what will happen to it – when we discussed it before, we wondered if it could be done up and used for dignitaries during the Olympics – but using it as a wedding venue afterwards would bring in money to pay for its upkeep and give us that all important ‘legacy’ that everyone’s talking about. I know it’s not an obvious area for the type of people who can afford such places, but I suspect that word might get around and it could be a newly trendy spot (not least from Household Cavlary people…)

The reason why the fire safety guy must be concerned about it is, I presume, the somewhat fragile condition the place is in – but it it was given proper upgrades and facilities, it’s surely big enough to take more than 60 people – not least because of the space around it, now that the big guns are gone. It has a wonderful green area around it, it’s not that hard to travel to and it could make some serious cash for the Army, who own it.

I truly hope that Robbie manages to work something out with the Major – the guy’s a good bloke, charged with an impossible task of protecting a truly unique building with no cash. If it works as a wedding venue once, perhaps he could be persuaded to petition for money as a long-term investment.

In the meanwhile, though, we have to assume that Robbie and his Amazonian Beauty (don’t you just long for them to have a Midsummer Night’s Dream-themed wedding – with the pair of them dressed as Theseus and Hippolyta, her being given away by Oberon, Titania being head bridesmaid and the Rude Mechanicals as the ushers? I’d pay good money to hear Bottom’s best-man speech…) have to make alternative arrangements.

I’ve already directed him towards the Phantom Shindigs page, but there may be a bit more thinking-cap required. He says:

“We are really desperate to have our wedding party somewhere in Woolwich, we think it is a fantastic area with so much potential, and we have a brilliant opportunity to get a large number of people to come and see the place.

I am really running out of ideas for suitably quirky places for us to have our party, we’ll be expecting around 200 people or so, and we don’t have too much time left, especially if the Rotunda isn’t possible.

We really don’t want to do anything that is too traditional, we have been trying to do something that shows how amazing an area this could be if people just use a bit of imagination, and realize it’s potential. If you can think of anywhere, however weird, indoors, outdoors, derelict, someone’s house, it doesn’t matter, I would hugely appreciate your thoughts.”

My first thought would be Peggy Middleton House – I don’t actually know what state it’s in just now I haven’t been to that area for ages – but if it’s a shell, it would be a great bow-out for the place – very grungy (good luck persuading the Council…)

Another, slightly left-field idea would be to contact the Council Film Unit and ask them what they have on their books – I bet they have abandoned warehouses etc.

Woolwich isn’t quite my area – but it definitely IS some Phantophiles’ manor – so – any ideas, guys?

I don’t normally put two Old-Photo Days so close to each other, but I was reading in bed last night and was astonished to see this picture of Sayes Court in a book from the 1920s.

I’d always assumed that John Evelyn’s house was demolished in antiquity, but here was a photo of it, in glorious Sepia-Vision. To be honest it wasn’t what I’d imagined, but hey – Wonderful London told me it was his old gaff, and who was I to disagree?

Turns out that it’s only part of the place Czar Peter the Great trashed on his gap-year visit to Deptford. The main mansion where Evelyn wrote his diary, tended his beloved garden and entertained Sir Christopher Wren and Sam Pepys was demolished in 1728 for no good reason that I can see. What was left suffered the ignoble fate of being turned into St Nicholas Parish Workhouse.

Things got worse – by 1852 it was an emigration depot, by 1853 a clothing factory and by 1856 just part of a bundle of land sold to the Admiralty, who promptly started demolishing it under the Metropolitan Building Act. They can’t have got very far. The picture above is undated but there is no mention in the book that it’s an old photo of something that’s been demolished.

Things started to look up for the old place in 1869, when William John Evelyn, a descendant of the diarist, bought back as much of the old estate as he could. He made a nice park for the Deptford people, and brought plants for it from Wotton in Surrey, Evelyn’s other house, which was, presumably, still in the family. He turned the house itself into almshouses – a bit nicer than a workhouse, n’est ce pas?

It all sounds rather charming – the 10-acre park had a bandstand, and a neo-classical building that had once been the dockyard’s model-house, which would be a museum and library.

It was all going rather well. In 1884 Evelyn had a brainwave. Chatting to Octavia Hill, a well-known preservationist, he suggested that Sayes Court, with its eminent connections both from an intellectual and (slightly dodgy) royal standpoint should be saved for the nation in perpetuity. Trouble was, there was no organisation that could do it legally.

Nevertheless, Hill contacted her friend Robert Hunter ( a localish boy, from Camberwell), to try to thrash out a way it could be done. Several suggestions were made for a new Commons and Gardens Trust that could take stewardship of important buildings.

It took ten years of wrangling for the new, snappily re-named National Trust to emerge, far too late for poor old Sayes Court. Like the doomed Euston Arch, which died whilst the modern preservation movement built up a head of steam (read about the plans to rebuild it using the stones found whilst dredging the waterways for the Olympic site here,) it was to be a sacrificial lamb on the altar of Progress.

By 1886 only six acres remained, and Evelyn could only afford to dedicate an acre and a half to the public without the help of the fledgling NT.

I’m still having a few problems working out exactly when the house keeled over. I’ve found records of hits to the Victorian terrace nearby during WWII, but nothing to the house. I’m sure someone can put me right.

Whatever, by the 50s it wasn’t there any more. A ‘modern’ park was built, and Convoys Wharf sprawled across the rest. Heaven only knows what will happen to it next…