In June of this year, the Thames Discovery Programme’s FROG team made a dramatic discovery on the foreshore at Millwall, near Island Gardens. We discovered and surveyed the substantial remains of the 150-year-old slipways used to launch Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s huge steam ship, the SS Great Eastern.

Brunel’s ship is now seen as a truly magnificent, pioneering project, a wonder of the Victorian age. The survey work on the foreshore this year helped commemorate the feat, since it marked the 150th anniversary of the vessel’s first transatlantic crossing, which set out on June 17th 1860. It also highlighted a new initiative to erect a more permanent monument on the riverfront, in recognition of Brunel’s great achievement, and the expertise of the London shipbuilders. It may prove possible to mark out the full size of the ‘footprint’ of the ship on the Maritime Quay, complete with paddle wheels, funnels and six masts. This would serve as a fitting Monument for Millwall and a new Landmark for London. Support for this proposal has come from the Brunel Museum at Rotherhithe, the site of Isambard’s first major project, the first tunnel under the Thames.

The SS Great Eastern was once the largest ship in the world. It had an innovative metal hull, two paddle wheels and five funnels, and took four years to build. Since it weighed over 12,000 tons and had a length of over 200m (700ft), the launch of the vessel was every bit as complex as the construction. Because of its size, it had to be launched sideways into the Thames, utilising two slipways, each 37m wide. It is these slipway features that have now being recorded in detail for the very first time. Our new archaeological study has been extended onto the dry land, where the Museum of London’s Geomatics team also found time to survey the still-visible remains of the slipway fragment exposed in 1984, during the redevelopment of Napier’s Yard.

Under construction, showing cradles and launch slip

The slipways comprised a concrete base, into which squared timber beams were set at c. 1m centres. These had to be laid at a precise height, but also on a pre-set incline. A second tier of timbers was then laid over them at right angles, and these supported a field of iron rails running down to the river. The ship itself (all 12,000 tons of it) was held upright in two timber cradles, the bottom of which was clad with iron plates. These cradles were constructed directly over the slipways, and the ‘launch’ (which took several attempts over several months) involved the slow inching of the cradles down the slips at low spring tides.

Our foreshore study (shown in image left) has examined only the basal members of the slips, since the upper tiers of timberwork and the iron rails have long-since been recycled. During the survey of the for’ard slip, it was noted that the central section of the concrete base was very badly disturbed, in relation to the sections either side of it. Further research uncovered the reason for this marked differential erosion: it was the crater left by the V1 ‘doodlebug’ that exploded on it in June 1944. We have therefore recorded evidence for two of the most significant events in Millwall’s recent history. An open morning was held in the local community centre to coincide with the fieldwork, with further information about the project and the opportunity for the public to handle some archaeological finds from the Millwall area.

Cable laying machinery aboard the Great Eastern

During its varied but eventful life, the SS Great Eastern served as a passenger liner and cargo-carrier on the Transatlantic run (its fastest time was 9 days) and a troop ship. Following a major refit in 1864-5, it began a new career laying submarine telegraphic cables below the Atlantic, some (machinery shown in the image above, courtesy of the National Maritime Museum Flickr site) 2,600 miles, as then another vast cable from Aden to Bombay. This revolutionised communications across the globe. No other single ship in the world was large enough to carry a sufficient length of cable to undertake such work. Sadly, the great ship then fell on hard times and was ignominiously broken up in Liverpool in 1889-90.

Quite by chance, Mike Stammers (from the Merseyside Maritime Museum) was surveying the Mersey foreshore this summer at the same time as our Millwall study, and has located very substantial metal plates and rivets on the site of the Great Eastern’s breaking yard: thus in 2010, foreshore archaeologists have recorded the birth and the death of a truly legendary vessel: we think its memory deserves to be better celebrated, together with its visionary designer and the London shipbuilders who worked with him.

At Liverpool waiting to be broken up at Henry Bath and Sons yard