Scott asks:

I’m thinking of buying a little house on Orlop Street. The street looks quite quaint, but what kind of reputation does it have now? I know that the orlop deck is the lowest deck of a ship with four or more decks and wondered if that were still indicative of the area today, or whether things have gone more upmarket. The prices, although relatively cheap compared to other parts of Greenwich, would suggest the latter, which is quite ironic considering how little money the original inhabitants must have earned.

The fact that we’d be close to the river, train station and park, yet away from the touristy part has great appeal, but I’d love some reassurance that I’m doing the right thing from someone (or people in the comments) who know the area well. Coming from Finsbury Park, it feels like a massive change, and almost a different city.

The Phantom replies:

There were several streets round East Greenwich named after parts of a ship – spare a thought for the poor residents of Frigate Street who, in the 1960s had become so far removed from the concept of shipping that they thought the name was rude and campagined to have it renamed the much more genteel Feathers Place. As far as I am aware there is no Poop Street. Now there is a name I’d campaign about.

It’s true that the Orlop is the lowest deck of a ship and there was a time when this charming little one-sided back street, running parallel to Traf Road was home to some of the ‘lowest’ residents in Greenwich Society, though Charles Booth was apt to be a little kinder.

These days, like all of the Pelton Road area, it’s all got a hell of a lot more gentrified and therefore, as you’ve noticed, expensive. East Greenwich still has a long way to go before it reaches Royal Hill or Ashburnham Triangle fancyness, but I really like the rough-around the edges feel it still has and we may well start to see more shops and facilities opening when the Heart of East Greenwich development starts getting residents.

I love East Greenwich – the people are generally friendly, the pubs are good (especially the Pelton and the Vanbrugh, jury’s still out on the new-look King Billy, nearest you, the only time I ate in there the food was okay, but my pal and I were entirely alone for the entire experience and the lighting felt very harsh, but I’d be willing to try it again) as you point out you’re close to the rivier and transport.

I don’t know what the configuration is inside the houses – some of those below-street level basements have been filled in, others haven’t – no idea how it is on flooding etc, though there are basements on bloomin’ Ballast Quay, mere yards from the river; it can’t be that much of an issue.

The only thing I would want some confirmation on, preferably from someone actually living in Orlop Street or knowing someone who lives there, would be the effect of being one-sided with shops backing onto your front door, and how that would affect noise levels, commercial bin-emptying and, at night, chaps who’ve been ahem, ‘caught short’ on their way home from the pub…

So – Orlop Street experiences please, folks…

This Rear Window view (haven’t had one for ages; good to kickstart the series again…) relates directly to the post a couple of weeks ago about Woodland Heights and its view back in the 1920s and now.

Jim says “Keri and I live in the top middle flat you see in the postcard view, so we have the pleasure of the view through that round window (everyone’s favourite when watching Playschool, surely).”

It’s an absolutely incredible view, and the reason why I particularly like this shot is the view of the old district hospital site in the middle-ground – with the gallons of rain we’ve been getting it looks like the council decided to give up with the rubbish swimming pool plans and just turn the whole site into a lido – or perhaps some natural wetlands.

Jim was impressed with some information about the houses in Dinsdale Road and Vanbrugh Hill that Methers had supplied on the preivious post, and asked me about it. I am pretty sure that data as detailed as that about Westcombe Park can only have come from one secondary source (unless I’m maligning you, Methers and you’ve been slogging it out in Greenwich Heritage Centre ) which is the sadly out-of-print Blackheath and Environs II by Neil Rhind.

The first book in this superb series of everything you could possibly want to know about Blackheath, about the village itself, has been reprinted and I am eagerly awaiting Volume III later this year, but II is pretty rare. You may find it on Abe Books or Amazon Marketplace or alternatively all the local libraries carry it (if you can find one open…)

Jim’s also asked about other pictures of the old Greenwich & Deptford Hospital /St Alfege’s Workhouse and I found this fascinating account. Apart from a couple of nice pictures, I am especially impressed with the sheer variety of the fare served at the workhouse. These paupers got to taste EIGHT different types of food in a week. Luxury! Of course it was the same eight foods every week. It’s a really interesting, if frankly dismal read; despite the workhouse’s huge size it was seriously overcrowded and the woefully inadequate rations given to poor boys even at the time shocked one of the teachers there.

Of course now I want to know more about the accommodation for ‘bad women’…

Dear Mother and Dad

Things are still going well in East Greenwich. On some nights you’d even believe it’s a normal hospital. The girls in the nurses’ home are such a hoot. Joan and I staked four vamps last full moon; it was exciting but Joan snagged her stocking and nylons are so hard to come by with all this rationing. Thank you for the garlic, so sorry to hear about Fluffy. You might want to cremate him, it’s not worth taking chances. Love to you both and tell George not to worry, 

Ethel

‘Fraid this postcard was unwritten too, it’s not surprising since I got it and yesterday’s card as a pair. I assume they were bought as a memento by a nurse who lived at the old Nurses’ Home (now Woodland Heights).

Of the two I find this the most interesting card because there’s just so much of old East Greenwich to see. The dark, satanic castle-like place in the middle of the background isn’t Vanbrugh Castle, but the old Greenwich and Deptford Hospital – the old Union Workhouse/Asylum. It was demolished to build the short-lived 1970s monstrosity Greenwich District Hospital which, in its turn was demolished to build – well, as yet, bugger-all.

I can’t tell whether there are two gas holders in the deep background, or just the one and a cloud. Just beyond the (treeless) turning circle, you can just see the top of the Vanbrugh Tavern and bits of Humber and Dinsdale roads.

It’s almost impossible to get the exact same angle for a shot today, because the area around the car park (in which I once, on a very, very cold night, saw a cab doing scary ice-dancing) has a whole bunch of trees and shrubs, so I had to try to get a photo from the road.

Gone is the old hospital, but the not-quite finished cable car is, I think, rather a nice touch.

I have one more pic for you, that by rights, should have its own ‘Rear Window’ post – but hey, it fits in so well with today’s  piece that I’m including it here. It’s from Thomas’s kitchen window, up in Woodland Heights:

Thomas tells me he never tires of it. I believe him.

Dear Mother and Dad

Settling in well at the hospital, though still missing you and George. This is the nurses’ home, just up the hill from work. It’s quite a walk home after a late shift! The other nurses are all very friendly, and there is a cinema just down the hill. Joan and I go when the vampires aren’t too restless. We’re getting through a lot of stakes, I can tell you!  Hope you are all well, kiss Fluffy for me, love Ethel.

It’s nice to find unusual postcards of Greenwich, but they’re often unwritten, so I’m forced to invent correspondence that might have been written and it sometimes gets surreal.

The real downside to postcards being unsent is that I have no way of knowing how old this one is. I’m guessing maybe 1930s -50s, mainly from the quality of the photo and the paper. The old nurses’ home up Vanbrugh Hill (now Woodland Heights) was built just after 1927 when Woodlands, a large Victorian mansion was demolished – its lodge still stands, next door.

The nurses’ home wasn’t built on the site of the house itself, but its gardens; there’s a tiny bit of woodland left just behind Maze Hill station (over which many a battle has been fought over the years.) It’s been private flats for some time now but as you will see from my photo (it was impossible to get the exact shot as there’s been so much building since) the exterior hasn’t changed a huge amount. I had assumed the top level was a modern addition, but it’s not.

Since I never went inside either before or after the conversion I can’t tell you how much it’s changed, but I bet there’s one hell of a view…

Talking of views, tune in tomorrow folks, for Part Two…

Every time I walk around whatever part of the Thames Path is available on the Peninsula at any one time (precious little at the moment) I’m reminds of The Long Good Friday, the movie that catapulted Bob Hoskins from adult literacy info-dramas to megastar.  Perhaps less so now that the satanic old factories, warehouses and wharves are being razed to erect bland steel and glass apartments whose clones already adorn one-building’s depth along most of the Thames Path between Waterloo and Putney, but there are still one or two creepy places that bring John McKenzie’s terrifying 1980 East End gangster movie to the edge of my teeth.

I always thought it was just a feeling I got – that South East London dockside was much the same as North East London dockside and that it was coincidence that it reminded me of it so much.

But then I discovered something. Guess where Barrie Keeffe, the movie’s scriptwriter, was living when he wrote it? East Greenwich, that’s where. Admittedly, in a Guardian article he says he was a journalist in the ‘real’ East End, where he met a load of gangsters, and that from his place in Greenwich he could watch the new developments at Docklands, but surely no one could live that close to the docks in the Peninsula and not be just a tiny bit influenced by them?

He doesn’t mention in the article which pub he met the Irish Republican who gave him the idea for the terrorism-meets-mob story, but it could well have been any of the East Greenwich pubs, most of which have gone now, just as much as it could have been an East-End pub.

I’m not sure how cool it is to claim the Greenwich could have been the grubby inspiration for a film as gruesome as The Long Good Friday, but hey. I’ve just done it.

I don’t know exactly which house or street that Keeffe lived in, but it’s been done up since, as this article from the Guide last year explains.

A glorious fantasy of a building, Rothbury Mission Hall somehow seems a bit lost and forgotten, lodged between Blackwall Lane, Mauritius and Azof Roads and a car mechanics -  an area which has never been either glorious or fantastical, even when this exuberant confection of turrets, steeples and stained glass was built.

Darryl Spurgeon describes it as “An extraordinary building of 1893 with a quite fantastic roofline of cupola, thin spirelets and dormers,” and I guess that just about sums it up.

Pevsner has nothing to say about the place, but the fabulous Julian Watson tells me that “according to LAJ Baker in his ‘Churches in the Hundred of Blackheath’ it was built as a Baptist church and was bought by the Congregationalists in the 1890’s.”

According to a short piece in Greenwich Industrial History Society’s site it was built by W T Hollands with the cash stumped up by a splendid chap with the enviable name of Josiah Vavasseur. Vavasseur (can’t you just think of a million nicknames for that…) had a nice little company making recoil-components for naval armaments until he was bought out by another, much bigger manufacturer, William Armstrong, for a very tidy sum indeed. Apparently Vavasseur was rather amused at the source of his sudden wealth and named his architectural contribution to the spiritual welfare of Greenwich’s paupers after Armstrong’s house in Northumberland.

By the time Life and Labour of the People of London 1890-1900 was written, the final volume of which I found in the “everything £1″ box of a secondhand bookshop (you do always check those, don’t you…) it had already become that Congregational mission.

Charles Booth wasn’t impressed. He describes it  as having “a pauperising influence and not effective from the religious standpoint; the Sunday school the principal piece of work, eight hundred children in average attendance; a good deal of money spent on social work.”

It’s been the home of Emergency Exit Arts for some years, a festival-making organisation about which I don’t know enough and would like to know more, not least because the homepage of its website has giant meerkat puppets on it. The building is Grade II listed, but not in a great state.

Whilst digging around the net for this post, I discovered a group called Heritage of London, a pan-London building preservation trust I had never heard of but who seem like A Good Thing. According to HoL’s site, Greenwich Council has offered to sell the building to the Trust, which they will restore, whilst keeping the arts group in residence, which sounds like a win to me.

Thing is, there are no dates on the website, short of the 2012 at the bottom, which could just be an automatically-updated thing. It looks a new site, but the prices – both purchase and restoration – look a bit low to me. It also ‘hopes the building will be workable for the Olympics’, which feels a bit late in the day, frankly, unless work’s been going on and I’ve been hyper-unobservant.

Does anyone know anything more about this? Has work been going on that I’ve missed or was this an optimistic piece of puff from before the recession?

Okay – so part three of Hilary Peters’s fabulous memories of living, working and gardening in Ballast Quay/Union Wharf in the 1960s and seventies. If you recall, she’s found a place to live, persuaded Morden College not to knock it down, built a garden with the help of the local kids and is now a successful gardener working for, among others, St Paul’s and Southwark Cathedrals. Her latest big job is at St Katherine’s dock, where an old East End docks is being transformed into a playground for the gin-palace brigade. her brief is to make the place ‘look like a million dollars.’  But back at home…

Union Wharf never looked like a million dollars. It was a working wharf. I didn’t do much loading and unloading from the river, but I did get a boat. Tamar was a small clinker-built yacht, with a brown sail and an inboard engine. I never got the hang of sailing, but I used Tamar a lot on the tideway, which was quite dangerous enough, even with a reliable engine. I kept her at Bugsby’s Hole (on the peninsula – TGP). She’d have been smashed to pieces in two tides against my wharf and the pieces would have settled on an old shopping trolley.

Tamar was used for gardening though. She was craned into St Katherine’s before they got the lock gates working and from her deck, I planted crack plants in the dock walls. Years later, I’d overhear ecologists exclaiming to each other:
“Gypsophila! Extraordinary! I’ve never seen it seed itself in a dock wall before.”

There were flood scares. I never understood why. The highest tides flooded the footpath outside the Naval College (and still do – on the five-foot-walk – TGP) but never ventured onto their lawns. It was the same at Ballast Quay. Even our cellars were always dry. Experts thought otherwise, so a flood wall was built along the edge of the wharf. It was two foot high and served only to trip up lightermen and ruin the wharf’s effect of grass to the water’s edge. I remember Mr. Robinson (of Robbo’s) looking sadly out of our first floor window and saying ‘times are changing.’

By this time, I had two goats, Tosh and Cud, in a friend’s garden in Blackheath. When one kidded and the other was ill, I nursed her in the back garden at Ballast Quay and she convalesced on the wharf and went for walks to Grot Beach (Pipers Wharf – the bit that’s still a working boatyard – if you’re on the Thames Path it’s the bit that has the giant blue corrugated iron walls – TGP).

With Tosh and the hens on the Wharf, the place began to look a bit rural and I suppose it was giving me ideas. Something was. We flourished as St. Katherines Dock flourished and bought a Dutch barge. We ran a café in the hold, selling our produce and advertising our gardens. We weren’t successful. St Katherines wasn’t popular yet. Still, it was only a matter of time before we needed more produce. For that we needed more land, so I asked the PLA if they had any waste land (can you imagine such a thing as ‘waste land’ now? – TGP)

They lent me Surrey Docks, which had closed in 1970. Acres of scrub, abandoned water and old dock buildings! I took the hens and goats and bought more of both. Local kids again joined in and their parents started an allotment scheme (the current Surrey Docks City Farm is on a different site – it was moved in 1986 – TGP)

Surrey Docks Farm was an expanded version of Union Wharf Nursery Garden and we still did the odd gardening job to pay for it. Its effect on Ballast Quay expanded too. The neighbours gave me their cauliflower leaves, cabbage stalks,  stale bread, roast joints… We had to wade through offerings to get to the front door.

As city-farming took over, the greenhouse became redundant. We clad it to look more like a Kentish barn and the wharf became the Tea Garden. (We had to apply for Change Of Use)

The plane tree was still quite small. When its roots reached the river it suddenly grew like mad and broke up the paving stones which we had laid for the tea garden. But in those days the paving stones were covered in tables and chairs, which extended all along the top lawn. Customers even came by boat. In winter we lit a brazier by the shed. Then the neighbours’ talents for baking and giving really came into their own. People came from all over London (and indeed from Western Australia) to eat our cakes. They queued up for cream teas at 11 in the morning. A notice on the gate said Dogs Welcome.

Along with the kindness and warmth, another great feature of SE London was the bickering. The kids quarrelled with each other and formed rival gangs. Their parents quarrelled about whose cakes were best, whose made most money, who was cleanest, quickest, most efficient. Some put up posters and others tore them down. Some wouldn’t join in because others were in, and others took over and blamed everyone else. Rivalries dating from Victorian times were dug up and picked over. All human life was there.

But oh, don’t you wish it was still happening? Home made cakes and tea in the cutest garden on the riverfront? Sigh…

And of Hilary now?

I am a part-time hermit. I live in a fantastically beautiful gatehouse (In the West Country, I believe – TGP) and carry on the eighteenth century tradition of being the estate hermit. I look after the building and I have made another garden.. Hermitting includes hospitality, so I show people the building if they want to see it, and have people to stay.

I do, and sometimes teach, pegloom weaving. Recently, I have started a Social Enterprise called Cards From Prison, using art by prisoners.”

Hilary only occasionally gets back to Greenwich, but she has said that next time she comes back she’ll have a rummage around to see if she can find some pictures for us. In the meantime, though, this extraordinary woman does have one other project that will interest anyone who loves Greenwich. She is the editor of the magazine Follies which is how I came to be in contact with her – the next edition will carry a feature about the Rotunda (not by me, of course, by someone who knows what they’re talking about…)

I am delighted to have ‘met’ her. Thank you Hilary, not just for these memories, but for what you have done for Greenwich.

Today, I’m going back to Hilary Peters’s fabulous memories of Ballast Quay Union Wharf in the 1960s. Just to recap, she’s walked along the river until she found a Georgian house where she might be able to build a garden, persuaded Morden College (who own a lot of the land round there) not to pull down the gorgeous little houses there, and rented one of them for the princely sum of £7 a week. Now, she’s going to build a garden…

I now had a key to the huge wooden gates, though they were hard to open. I could go in and direct the clearing up. It was my very first taste of landscaping, an activity which makes you feel like God.

Lovells’s end crane reached over my wharf, so it was used to remove the barrels of bitumen, railway sleepers and general grot that accumulates on disused wharves. There was a huge cast-iron grab, too, which I wanted to use as a flower pot but that went. If I’d saved it, it would have gone where the plane tree now is. It must have been 6ft tall and 5ft diameter.

I was soon joined by a gang of local kids, desperate for something to do. And there was lots to do. Just picking up the broken glass took days. One of the kids knew of a young cherry tree in the garden of a house that was being pulled down in Banning St. Another had a father who had a key to the water mains. All of them could climb like monkeys. I was alternately blamed for leading them astray and praised for my social work. Together, we spread the topsoil and planted the grass. The cherry tree went in at the end by the pub, the railway sleepers made plant frames. The residual grot was mounded up and covered with soil.

I took this picture in January of the cherry tree – it’s not at it’s best – give it a few weeks and it will be back to its lovely self, but as you can see, forty-odd years have been kind to it…

Our neighbours were wonderful. They would knock on the door and give us food – sandwiches, roast meat, cakes, pancakes, smoked cod, hot cross buns, summer pudding, batter pudding, bread pudding, mince pies. Every time of year had its special food.

Then the greenhouse was built and I called myself Union Wharf Nursery Garden.

I maintained the gardens at Amen Court for St Paul’s Cathedral and the garden round Southwark Cathedral, where the Borough Market was still a real vegetable market and the garden was for drunks to have a sleep. (Plus ça change – TGP) Covent Garden was real market too, which I used, getting up at 4am and driving my mini-van straight into the Piazza.

The wharf housed a shifting collection of plants and trees, and occasionally our neighbours, who had no tradition of using a garden like a London Square. They just kept giving me food in exchange. And when I kept hens in the shed (free range on the lawn during the day) and gave them eggs, they wanted to pay me as well.

On one occasion, a hen disappeared, and then another. There was a large Dutch coaster moored against the wharf (at high tide, the captain’s cabin was a few inches from the shed.) I went on board to mourn my loss. The captain denied all knowledge of hens, wharves and even ships. Most Dutch people speak perfect English but this does not apply to sailors accused of theft. He understood nothing. Soon after, they left on the tide, and there on the sea wall, was the corpse of my second lost hen, carefully returned, though dead. I assume they ate the first one…

I started to work at St Katherine’s Dock, designing garden after garden as the development progressed, salvaging blocks of granite and York stone. They form the basis of ‘the rockery’ in the garden at Ballast Quay, now covered in ivy. All my dockland gardens had a fig tree because I liked the one at Wapping Pier Head so much. To me that huge fig tree against the Georgian houses in Wapping summed up the powerful mix of industry and beauty that my gardens struggled to recreate. Eating the figs in Ballast Quay is an unforeseen bonus.

Any plant that managed to put down roots through the paving slabs became a symbol of new life. The ferns and buddleias that grew out of the dock walls at St. Katherine’s were a language hardly anyone understood, certainly not the architects, who wanted me to make the place look like a million dollars. They actually said so.

But while the architects of St Katherine’s Dock were doing their best to appeal to the gin-palace owners they hoped would colonise that part of the Thames, Hilary already had her eye on another piece of real estate, one that would appeal to a completely different sort of customer. But I’ll leave that for next time…

The fabulous black and white shots, by the way, are by Richard Proctor whose photographs of Greenwich, taken back in the 1980s, really seem to capture something of what the wharf was like in much earlier days…

Lynsey saw this little plaque in Langton Way recently and asked if I know anything about it, which I don’t, so of course I’m asking you. I can find no reference to the Langton Way Association online – it’s clearly quite an exclusive club – I guess you don’t need a website when you can just call round next door for a cuppa and a war council.

My excuse is that Langton Way is a little off my manor – if you’re not quite sure where it is, it’s that delightful little road that runs parallel with the A2 across Blackheath behind the large heath-fronting ‘Captains’ Houses’ and it crosses the even more delightful Angerstein Lane, home to the Phantom’s Joint Number One Favourite Front Garden.

According to Neil Rhind’s excellent Blackheath & Environs II (more about Neil’s latest work v. soon, BTW) it’s named for Langton House, a 14-roomed place at number 132 Shooter’s Hill Road, built speculatively in 1863

It’s a fantastic, ‘secret’ little country lane, somewhere I always enjoy walking through, though I can begin to understand why it might need an association of its own. I can’t help thinking that it’s a classic victim/victor of the back-garden-conversion trend. It used to be a service lane for the big houses on the heath, and although it did have some commercial uses – by nurserymen and, slightly bizarrely, a stable for polo ponies, it was pretty quiet until the Great War, after which a lot of the big houses were converted into flats.

There are some cute old buildings there, converted coach houses and the like, but they’ve been gradually joined since the 1950s by some rather less cute modern ones and although the lane is still very lovely with the two sorts all jumbled together, as you can see from Joe’s photo below, I can understand why existing residents might not want to see any more back gardens converted.

Neil’s book tells me there was a scheme mooted just after WWII to develop Langton Way into a main, relief -road for the A2 and I am wondering whether the Michael Burton who’s remembered in this plaque may have been at least partially responsible for quashing the proposal. If someone saved Phantom Towers from being demolished for a trunk road, I think I’d probably give them a plaque too.

But in truth, I don’t know. Does anyone else?

At last. I know lots of you have been asking for this; ever since I got talking to Hilary Peters I’ve been promising to tell you her story – a remarkable tale of a time within living memory, but one which is in danger of being forgotten. It’s going to have to be in serial-form, as there’s much to cover, but it’ll be worth the wait, I promise. As with the Foot & Mouth Memorial, I’m leaving most of the post to Hilary herself, adding puerile comments of my own along the way…

Ballast Quay always used to be known as Union Wharf. I’m never quite sure where Crowley’s Wharf ended too – perhaps it’s another, earlier/later name for the same place, or it might be where the power station is now. I’m sure someone will put me right. The picture at the top of this post is from the 1930s ( I don’t know whose it is, but if the owner objects to my using it just let me know and I’ll take it down…) but it would have been much the same in the 1960s – change really hadn’t started then.

The Cutty Sark pub, as we know it, was called the Union Tavern, and before that it was the Green Man (which must have been confusing as there was another Green Man at the top of Blackheath). One book I was reading claims parts of the building go back to 1690 but there would have been an inn on the site even before that. The current building says 1795. Perhaps there will be a picture of the older pub in the forthcoming book by Messrs Rhind, Kent and Watson about the lost panorama of that bit of the Thames. Whatever its name or vintage, though, it changed its name in 1954 in honour of the arrival of the Cutty Sark ship. Hilary says

The pub then had two sections, as all pubs did. The public bar was crowded with dockers for short, regular bursts – and the landlord’s wife who sat on a stool all the time and drank gin. I don’t know who went in the other end but they wore suits. Sailing barges were still around on the river, shorn of their rigging and used as lighters and it was only just before my time that they cleared away the old  barge moored outside (the pub) and known as the brothel.

In 1963, Hilary Peters found the house of her dreams in Union Wharf by walking along the river until she found a Georgian house with site for a nursery garden. It was (and still is) owned by Morden College, over in Blackheath. Just in case you don’t know, you can often tell that something belongs to Morden College because it will have a little iron badge on the wall somewhere:

You’ll find these badges all over town, and once you start looking for them, they’re everywhere. This one is on the Cutty Sark Pub.

She remembers that it took months to persuade Morden College to let it to her. She says that the universal attitude to old houses in those days was just to pull them down, something she couldn’t begin to understand.

They wanted to pull down the whole row and build flats. They said that to do up the houses and put in bathrooms would cost so much that the rent would have to be SEVEN POUNDS A WEEK and none of their tenants would pay that. I finally persuaded them that I would pay that rent and even found someone else who was mad enough to do the same, so that was two houses saved.

We moved in in November. It was incredibly beautiful – misty and busy. The river was full of shipping. The wharves on either side of us were working. Robinsons (known as Robbo’s) on Anchor Wharf handled scrap. (Anchor Wharf is the bit in between the power station and the Cutty Sark, where there are new flats now. There’s a giant anchor on the Thames Path to mark it. TGP)

The scrap from the yard spilled all over the neighbourhood – Anchor Wharf, the whole area between Hoskins St and Lassell St, back as far as the British Sailor pub (recently gone, the site is now Barrett Homes) the area behind the pub and behind our houses (which I later landscaped for Morden College).

Scrap encroached and littered the road and punctured your tyres and fell in your garden and nobody minded. The street was usually crammed with lorries queuing up to deliver endless gas stoves to Robbos. The whole of South East London must have had new gas stoves that year.

Lovell’s, on our other side, also had queues of waiting lorries. (Lovells is now the half-built blocks of flats stopping anyone from using the Thames Path – TGP) Lovells was import and export. It looked like a lot more import than export, generally ingots of metal but often crates of almost anything.

Both wharves had creaking, groaning cranes. Sirens went at 8am and the lightermen took the covers off the barges – bang, bang, bang. And the barges banged together and banged against the wharves. Then the dockers took over, some in the hold, some on the wharf, with a whole, forgotten language of hand signals and whistles. Coasters came in and out on the tide, with much hooting and shouting.You couldn’t live there for long and not know that four short blasts on the hooter followed by one long one meant that a ship was coming in.

The wharf between these two giants (Ballast Quay) became my wharf. It had been used in its time by both neighbouring wharves and before that by the Harbour Master.

The wharf was too small by then to be practical but its steam crane still stood proud on the upper level and a very high wall separated it from the street. The rest was covered in barrels of bitumen.

It was only used by the dockers from Lovells to stash their loot; pilfering was part of the job before containers spoilt the fun. Some docker I’d never seen before would knock on the door and say ‘ere’ and slip me a tin with no label. It usually contained pineapple chunks…

Morden College agreed to rent me the wharf for £1 a year but kept a bit to build four garages. (Their idea had been to build garages on the whole thing) Dockers still used the wharf – a lighterman is supposed to need three feet of riverfront to walk on. Indeed the first three feet of the river front was still officially part of Lovells.

They took down the wall and put up the railings but I couldn’t save the steam crane, which I would have loved to do. It was cut up for scrap which paid for the railings. I made a garden for the neighbours, built the greenhouse and started a gardening business.

The ‘garden for the neighbours’, of course, is the delightful little garden on the riverfront we know and love now. Few of us have actually been able to step inside, but anyone can peer through the railings and sigh a little sigh of rural contentment. What I love about it is its simplicity – the dappled greens,  the one or two pots and the handful of daffodils in the spring. Perfect. It could have been a riot of colour or something formal, but this is utterly the right thing for the setting.

Morden College changed the name of the street to Ballast Quay. Not to be outdone, Hilary changed the name of the wharf to Union Wharf. But, she says, the changes were purely cosmetic. Real change came with the failure of the docks and the property booms.

But that’s for next time…