Coots are very good at recycling!

Last Saturday, four FROGs set out from Surrey Quays station to follow Walk B: Shipyards, Granaries and Wharves from the booklet Maritime Rotherhithe by Stuart Rankin, which follows a route around the peninsula’s riverside. It was a beautiful sunny day, and Chris Everitt, who was with us for the morning, was very knowledgable about the local area. But however hard we used our imaginations, it was difficult to visualise the historic shipyards and wharves which had occupied this area for hundreds of years, when all around us were uninspiring modern housing developments. In fact harsher words came to mind for some of it, although Surrey Quays City Farm was a pleasant place (with a cafe) where children were interacting with goats and sheep, and we spent time admiring the vegetables and pigs.

Nelson Dock House

Back to the walk again, changes in the pavement marked where one wharf or warehouse ended and the next began, and I dutifully read out to the others what ships were known to have been built there, or commodities stored. Just occasionally we found some small piece of historic maritime Rotherhithe, much of which seemed to be part of the Hilton Hotel. Nelson Dock is the remains of the last shipyard, but you’d hardly know it now. Nelson Dock House, however, is a beautiful mid 18th century shipbuilders house, and our booklet told us that once most Rotherhithe shipbuilding yards would have had a similar house for the master shipbuilder.

Interesting anchor

Rotherhithe shipbuilders concentrated on comparatively small high quality vessels, and could not compete when iron allowed the building of much larger ships. The yards could not expand because there were already docks inland, shipbuilding having been concentrated on a narrow strip along the river. The last large ship built in Rotherhithe was in 1870. Shipbreaking, of special interest to FROG members, also went on along this river front. I had never realised that the way they did it was to moor the vessel on the foreshore, and let the rise and fall of the tide break the ship.

The one place where history seemed a bit easier to imagine was at Lavender Pond, all that remains of Lavender Dock, a large but shallow area of water where timber was stored. We liked the idea that timber was stapled together – very big staples! But our favourite story from Mr Rankin’s booklet was about the L.C.C. fire station, built in 1903 in Rotherhithe Street, and needed because this northern end of the peninsula was cut off from the rest by the docks, besides being full of timber. Apparently the horses “were stabled in loose boxes at the back, and were trained to respond to the sound of the fire bell by trotting round to the front of the building and backing themselves into the shafts. Harness, hinged in two halves, was suspended from the ceiling. this could be lowered onto the horses and clipped under their bellies in moments”. I’m glad the past had its lighter side!

We finished our walk with a potter on the Rotherhithe foreshore, though the tide was still quite high, and found an almost-present for Gus! (OK it says Milnes & Co not Milne)… My thanks to Chris, Edna and Marion for coming with me on the walk.

A present for Gus!