I confess today’s post is a bit shameful for me. Back in February we were discussing the Langton Way plaque and Richard asked me about a second, older memorial in the same lane. “It’s on wall where they’re currently building two new buildings, just opposite Angerstein Lane. It’s a sad tribute to a young girl called Francis Banks, with a Ben Johnson quotation – however I’ve not been able to find out the story behind the plaque,” he said.

‘Ah, yes, I’ll see what I can find out,’ I said, then promptly forgot all about it. I don’t have any real excuses – work – stuff, yada, yada.

Richard, clearly bored with waiting for me, then went off and found out for himself, but instead of having the hump with me, he’s shared the information, which I pass on to you today.

Frances was a 13 year old girl who was knocked down and killed by a car after getting off a bus in the 1980s. Richard thinks the accident happened by the cross roads at the top of the park by the Gibb Memorial on the heath just past the Dips but he’s not 100% sure. There’s also a white flowering cherry tree planted in her memory next to the plaque.

The developer of the two new buildings knocked down the wall Frances’s plaque was originally placed on, but at least moved the plaque. He also agreed not to cut down the cherry tree as he’d planned – makes sense to me – who wants to move into a new place knowing that a mature garden’s been completely displaced for it. A cherry tree’s roots won’t be any problem for foundations.

So young Frances’s plaque remains. Visit it some time, and if you do, make sure you walk along Angerstein Lane and see the Phantom’s Favourite Front Garden

Any idea what happened to Greenwich Woodworks? I see the warehouse in Friendly Place is for sale and they’ve stopped trading but was wondering what the story was.

TGP replies:

Sadly high-end joinery company Greenwich Woodworks died at the beginning of the year. I don’t know the exact details, but I’m guessing it’s yet another victim of the current financial climate.

I confess I was quite surprised at their demise as I’d assumed the really established, top-level companies do seem to be weathering the storm slightly better than newer companies as the sort of customers they attract tend to be less affected – if you’ve got a job (or alternate income), no mortgage or an old tracker then things aren’t nearly as bad as if you’ve got no job and are renting or have a fixed mortgage, and Greenwich Woodworks came with such a very high reputation.

But that’s not to say that even wealthy people aren’t cutting a few corners and luxuries like new posh curtains, carpets – and kitchens – are being put on hold, or being created in other ways.

I know from at least two local carpenters I’ve spoken to that a regular wheeze for people who loved GW’s kitchens but couldn’t afford the hefty price tag was to go and view Greenwich Woodworks’ designs and styles at Friendly Place, then get a local joiner to quietly copy it or do something similar for a fraction of the cost. And if enough people do that, add them to the people who’ve decided to live with the kitchen they already have, the people who aren’t moving house just now and the folks that have just gone for one of the cheaper kitchen firms after all and that’s a lot of non-orders for Greenwich Woodworks.

I suspect that estate agents will still boast a Greenwich Woodworks kitchen in the ads for for some time – if you’ve got one, you’ve made an investment (and need to hope that it’s classic enough not to look like it was done before last Christmas in five years time – if, indeed, you care about such things, which I suspect most GW customers probably do…)

Although I’m not sure what happened to the owners of the company, I can tell you about a new one born from the ashes of Greenwich Woodworks. Two of the guys who worked for GW, joiner Salve D’Acunto and fitter/surveyor Tony DiStefano, finding themselves out of work, have  started SA Services, Carpentry and Joinery (no prizes for guessing the origin of the name…)

Their workshop is at 1 Dacre Place, Blackheath where, Tony tells me, “the high end quality still continues in any kind of carpentry and joinery – but cheaper“.

I’m not listing them in Trusted Tradesmen – yet – because I need to know what you lot think, so do let me know if you get them in to do a job and they’re fabulous, but given they worked for the kitchen company in the area, I suspect they’ll be joining the hallowed pages of TT soon.

07872624216

0208 301 2307

Remember how we all kicked up a stink and the council refused F&B’s retrospective planning permission?

Remember how F&B just ignored the ruling, kept the sign and Greenwich Council (apparently – but read Franklin’s comment below…) did bugger all about enforcement?

Well, it would seem that R&B might be openly flouting the rules, but they’re uncomfortable about it. They’ve applied again for planning permission.

This is not an appeal to the ruling, this is a separate application, pretending the first one never happened. They’re asking for permission to install, not actually admitting to the fact that it’s already been installed, been refused and the refusal ignored.

I suppose they’re hoping that if they keep applying, keep getting refused and keep ignoring the results eventually people will get fed up with objecting and they’ll slip under the radar.

So anyway – here we go again. Here’s the consultation document, courtesy of James. There appears to be nothing whatsoever different about this from the last attempt. If they can cut and paste their application, we can cut and paste our objections…

Here’s one of those Greenwich oddities that gets my mouth watering. It was spotted by local author David Ramzan (it’s in his book ‘Royal Greenwich Through Time‘) but he knows nothing more about it and is wondering whether anyone here does.

It’s in the Thames Wall up by the power station and David says:

None of my friends or relations who know riverside Greenwich well, had any idea this inscription was on the riverside wall close to the old Power Station, and it would be interesting to find out if anyone knew any more about it. 

For example would this type of inscription have been commonly found along the riverside walls close to old historic landing places? Unfortunately like a lot of the historic Greenwich riverside architecture, these little curiosities are also gradually beginning to be lost to time. 

To me it looks like re-used stone, though from what and when it was built is a mystery. Perhaps it was built when the power station was built, between 1902 and 1910, but the stone could have come from anywhere.

It also looks as though they broke the stone – either in transport, during the build – or, how about this for a theory – actually at the stonemason’s yard, when the junior carver got a clip round the ear and a month’s wages docked for spelling ‘friends’ wrongly..? Perhaps the master mason decided to sell the stone off for scrap and it ended up here?

I wonder what the message was – all I can make out is

Neighbours and Freinds (sic) welcome ar (e?) XXXXwill strangers XXy XermiXX

Okay – let’s see who can fill in the gaps with the best phrase… (Scared of Chives, I still haven’t forgotten ‘…and gut your first octopus‘…)

In the meanwhile – does anyone know anything more about this – or, indeed, has anyone ever actually noticed this before? Do you know of any other places strange messages are carved into the river wall?

Laurence says:

The sensitive mariners aboard the Royal Navy’s HMS Ocean, presently moored on the River Thames at Greenwich, raised a security alert with the River Police on Saturday (12 May 2012} at about 6pm after they spotted a small motor boat named Bin Laden I, occupied by a man and 3 small children, passing nearby.

My boat, a 4 metre dinghy, which has been registered with that name for past 2 years, is one of the least threatening craft on the river. Nonetheless, on passing near HMS Ocean, the largest ship in the Royal Navy, length 200m, 22,000 tonnes, equipped with 8 military helicopters and armed with torpedoes and guns, we evidently alarmed the Ocean’s 500 naval officers and crew and triggered a security alert.

Presumably it was all hands to deck and an hour later, on returning to land in Greenwich, Metropolitan river police apprehended me in a dramatic dusk landing raid on the local yacht club premises. Police demanded to know why the boat was named after the Saudi terrorist. They recommended in the strongest terms that it be renamed for the Olympics so as not to cause any further security incidents. Even if we are not mistaken for terrorists, I was told, the present name is evidently provocative and might be seen as a protest, so cannot be permitted on the river during the Olympics (inconceivable that Londoners could have anything to protest about).

I am considering calling it “Free Speech”, but quite apart from fact that it is believed to be bad luck to rename a boat, I fear that the phrase itself may have altogether passed out of use in the UK.

So – there you have it. Just out of interest, Laurence, why is your craft called Bin Laden I?

We haven’t had one of these for weeks, months even.

So today,

on a sunny Friday that just can’t last to the weekend (can it..?)

for a bit of fun

Let’s see how many Greenwich things with the letter C

we can think of…

I can understand why there’s going to be such a rush, of course. That £534 per person (entry-level deal) does include fresh-baked pastries and morning coffee, and if ten people book together you get your own table!

Of course you get the other things too, like Champagne and a souvenir programme.

Oh, sod it, it’s just too good a deal for politeness. Watch out. The Phantom elbows are growing sharper. I’m getting to the front of that line, £534 in sweaty paw, by any means necessary…

Obviously there was theatre in Greenwich before there were theatres. I’m sure the requisite number of mummers and mysteries were put on by sundry guilds in the middle ages and although the first recorded professional actors came to perform for Queen Elizabeth I you’re not going to tell me that Henry VIII, between all his jousting and feasting, didn’t have the odd play, musical or at least knockabout farce. A king cannot live by Will Somers alone.

And of course there were the strolling players for whom Greenwich Fair, with all its shabby delights, was a magnet. Problem was that was only at best twice a year and the rest of the time theatre lovers could whistle.

I guess we have three things to thank for the start of permanent theatre at Greenwich – Sir John Vanbrugh (though not in the way you might think, given what he’s famous for) a squabble between the Haymarket and Drury Lane – and the bubonic plague.

The thing that got a load of London actors’ goats was the long summer vacation at the big playhouses. This was for several reasons, not least that plague had the annoying habit of breaking out every summer in the city. Medicine was pretty poor, but they had worked out that large gatherings of humans were more likely to catch something bad. There were various ‘religious’ reasons also cited, but frankly theatregoers didn’t give a stuff about that sort of thing. If the play was on, they’d have gone.

Of course the famous actors managed nicely enough – private engagements and other theatres outside the no-go zone kept them going until the new season. But young actors yet to make their names were stuck.

A chap called, appropriately enough, Rich, decided to get round the agreement between the theatres not to put on shows in the summer, by exploiting these eager starlets and starting a ‘Young Company’ where the actors would perform at a reduced rate or, more usually, for free, thus circumventing the ‘no professional theatre’ rule – the actors would take a risk that they could live on what was left of their winter advances while they were being discovered. Unsurprisingly he ended up being sued in 1704.

But what he’d done was give theatregoers an appetite for shows in the summer months and Drury Lane Theatre, where Rich had been putting on the plays and who had some powerful friends, decided to open anyway, using all sorts of ruses, such as calling their performances  ’open rehearsals’ for the winter show.

Their rivals at John Vanbrugh’s Haymarket theatre were furious and there were all sorts of shenanagins while the Lord Chamberlain was trying to knock heads together. He gave the monopoloy of operas to Sir John Vanbrugh (something he lived to regret when he lost a load of cash in a very short time and had to sell his share of the theatre) but that meant that Drury Lane didn’t get to put on plays at all in the summers of 1707-10 and eventually the Lord Chamberlain closed the place altogether and while the tumbleweed blew between the sets the actors were out on their ears.

The big stars didn’t care. They got work at the Haymarket, or continued their corporate function gigs but the rest had nothing. They even appealed to Queen Anne, to no avail.

But then one of them had a Bright Idea. William Penkethman, who’d formed a travelling troupe to at least visit the various fairs while they were all unemployed, hit on the idea of putting on the show right here. Why not have a permanent theatre in Greenwich? It would be okay for the locals, ‘but get this, get this,’ I can hear him telling potential backers. ‘We arrange the performance times around the tides and put on boats to bring the toffs down river to see the show, and then take them back again before the river goes out. Ta-da! No-summer-theatre-in-London problem – bish-bosh – solved!’*

I don’t know where the Hospital Tavern would have been, but a wild guess puts it, er, near Greenwich Hospital. What do you think – somewhere around where the Pepys building is now, perhaps? It would have been near the quay, for all those visitors and I’m sure the guv’nor would have been only too happy to have the new Play-house camp out in his pub.

 The Daily Courant, 9th May 1709 has William Penkethmon performing there, but mentions that it’s next door to his new play-house, so it’s clear the permanent theatre was being built at the time and the actors were just using the pub’s ‘function room.’

The actual building opened on 15th June 1710, and, presumably as a bit of a cock-snook to the Theatre Royal, the show was Love Makes a Man, or the Fop’s Fortune, by Colly Cibber – Drury Lane’s manager.

Penkethman and his mate Jubilee Dicky Norris were the big draws.  And they’d even worked out what to do when the weather was too bad/tides were not in their favour – the resting actors just took temp work on the boats as fishermen. Plus ça change…

Sadly, after 1712, Penkethman’s theare’s never mentioned again. Perhaps those fickle playgoers took advantage of the theatres in town patching up their differences and putting on plays – between 1713 and 1715 Drury Lane was once again ‘a gold mine,’ taking huge box office reciepts. Presumably theatre goers would rather not have to take a journey on a leaky barge when they could walk round the corner. But I like to think that Billy and Jubilee Dicky became so much a part of the furniture in Greenwich that they were just no longer newsworthy and continued to put on shows quietly for many years without being a story for the Daily Courant.

*Not unlike the O2 putting on clippers for stadium goers…

We heard much about the demise of Greenwich Playhouse over the past few months. Apparently Galleon Theatre are looking at the stables at Charlton House as a new home, which could be an interesting proposition (though less convenient for people coming from London – it’s close to Charlton station but we all know what people who don’t come to South East London are like when it comes to not wanting to venture into places they’ve not heard of…)

Which means that now, there is a space free. And, as you can see, it’s very free. All mention of Greenwich Playhouse has been painted out, the posters are gone, there’s nothing to say there was ever a theatre there.

The reason I didn’t go absolutely ballistic over the ending of the lease with Galleon was this article in The Wharf where the landlord of Beds and Bars who own the building says that they are not looking to pack the place full of extra bunks to cash in on the Olympics. In the words of Edmund Passey, Group Operations Director:

“We’re looking at what we can do with it and have made no application to change the space.

“The only difference is we’re now the landowners of the site and we’re not looking to have one theatre company running it.”

I took that as being a multi-theatre company venture, perhaps a theatre space for hire, like so many of the fringe theatres in the centre of London.

So, Edmund Passey, when are we going to see this happen, then? Certainly the first phase, that of obliterating the former occupants of the theatre, seems complete (albeit harsh, they are as much a part of the place’s history as any other). The next few months will show the real colours of Beds and Bars but I have faith.

I look forward to sitting in the front (read ‘only’) row of the next production at the space formerly known as the Greenwich Playhouse as a lovely diversion for all the occupants of other hotels during the Olympics.

Talk about Chinese whispers. It seems that everyone, including me – and the Royal Navy – who was told about the open day on HMS Ocean yesterday got a different story about who was allowed on board.

The very chirpy personnel (they were all incredibly friendly; I can only assume that they’d given the grumpy characters sump-duty or something) talking to the (enormous) queue told us that they had been told every possible variant on who was allowed, ranging from SE10 residents only, through to all Greenwich Borough residents (the Greenwich Council website said borough residents, with priority given to most local, which I took to be SE10)  and ‘local’ residents (i.e. Lewisham and Tower Hamlets) to a TV programme, I don’t know which, telling everyone on earth to turn up.

Given the extremely mixed messages and the compounding factors of the pier entrance being next door to a very busy bank holiday Clipper service and the ugly restaurants bang  in the way, I think the Navy did pretty well, really. They gave borough residents prority but kept a ‘general public’ queue, taken from the main queue when you got so far) and every so often did a run for them.

I did have to smirk at the bolshy bloke who strode up to the front of the queue (when the people I was with had waited two and a half hours) brandished his council tax bill and demanded to be given priority “But I’m a Greenwich Resident,” he announced as he was told that 98% of the queue were residents and (much more gently than I would have done it) directed to the back…

By the time I got in the queue, it covered the entire frontage of the Old Royal Naval College and was right round the corner, almost to the central path (see above). The atmosphere was Britishly stoic; even when the rain came, people stayed and I didn’t hear much in the way of moaning, bar a few grizzling children. I also notice there seem to have been a muddle about baby carriages – the Greenwich council website said there would be nowhere to leave pushchairs, but there was a fairly large corral of them by the ubitquitous recruitment tent in the ORNC.

Of course the queue did allow us to take closer looks at stuff going on on the river – I was particularly entertained by the barge tugging the newly-spruced up podule for the London Eye:

They’d hired a couple of City Tours boats to ferry people across. I’m guessing different people had different experiences but I waited about two and a half hours to get on Ocean and about half an hour to get off. If it had been a nicer day I’d have enjoyed being a bit less cold, but I wouldn’t have swapped the experience.

We were allowed to wander as we liked through the ‘big’ areas of the ship – two levels of cargo-carrying deck and the main deck on top, which they’d put several helicopters, troop carriers and vehicles that I have no recollection of what they do but was very interested at the time

As I mentioned I’m sure they chose the jovial crew members to talk with us, but all the people I met were only too delighted to talk or show us what stuff did (I spent some time chatting with the woman who packs the survival kits – I love that they include a condom in them…)

One of the most popular displays was of the food rations you get at different stages of engagement – I couldn’t actually get close to that stand but I understand they have ginger beer:

I suspect what the Navy achieved from this day is a lot more intangible than much in the way of recruitments (no one around me seemed remotely interested in joining up) but that was never the point.

They’re going to be here for several weeks now and again during the Olympics and they are only too aware of the rubbish way we’ve been informed about the placement of missiles around our houses, on our commons and, in the case of some TH residents, on our roofs. LOCOG and whichever government departments in charge of this, have been utterly useless in informing residents what will happen, leading to a load of fear and anger.

If we’d thought about it, of course we were going to need some kind of security around the games – ever since Munich they’ve been essential –  and scary though seeing SAMs on Blackheath is, the problem with having an urban Olympics is that there’s always going to be someone who has the security on their doorstep. Certainly my beef is more with the way we’ve been told so late, as a fait-accompli and so badly – I got a letter through my door that included only one of the leaflets  it said it did,  and an invitation to a similar open day at Oxleas Wood the day after it had been and gone.

What I got from yesterday’s event was the human element – that this ship is staffed by actual people with actual lives whom I got the feeling actually knew what they were doing.  I enjoyed talking with them and If I see them around town I won’t be looking at them as intruders, but as people who live on the big boat I can see from the shore.

I’ve seen where they live (well, okay, I haven’t, we didn’t get to poke around the cabins or the mess rooms or the day to day living areas which, although fair enough, being a nosy old Phantom I’d have loved) and I’m cool with the fact that they have to be here.

I’m curious to know what you thought of it (I’m assuming you went – half of Greenwich must have been there) and what you got from it. I did get a couple of other things – not least the feeling that the Naval Lady is protesting just a leeetle too much that she is ‘relevant’ – I’m not sure I saw a single banner that didn’t pronounce the fact – and that the chaps at HMSO don’t proof-read their leaflets – ‘birth cabins’ anyone?

But for me the Navy’s real achievement for me yesterday was its people – thanks, guys. It was fun.