On 9 Mar 2014, at 04:40, "Alan C" <[email protected]> wrote: > > It's amazing how quickly the face of the Thames is changing.
Yes, when I moved here 20 years ago it was all rather a lovely forgotten backwater with crumbling and derelict light industry along the river, a foul-smelling starch refinery and a lovely old boat repair yard. The boat repair yard is still here but will be moved downstream to make way for the liner terminal and for blocks of flats. > Someone will be making a fortune. I didn't realise Blackheath actually > extended all the way to the Thames. You'd think the part by the river would > have a different name. It does - it's Greenwich. Greenwich as a historical settlement is much older than Blackheath, going back at least to the Bronze age. The name Greenwich is Saxon, but the park contains burial mounds that are thought to be early Bronze Age, and which the Anglo-saxons reused. There are also Roman buildings and the settlement is well attested at that time, not least because the Romans built a road through the park (they'd never get planning permission these days). There's a coaching inn called the Spread Eagle at the point where the road meets the riverside; pubs with Eagle in the name are supposedly, perhaps apocryphally, indicative of where the legions planted their standards and set up a barracks. Greenwich Park used to be part of Blackheath until Henry VIII enclosed it, so in that sense Blackheath does extend to the river, but the bit where I live was marshland until the late 19th century. Endersby's Wharf, which is where the beach and the cruise terminal are, have been industrial wharves for centuries. One of the buildings not being demolished is Endersby house, which is name-checked in Moby Dick. Endersby Wharf was a whaling station, and the name features in place-names in Antarctica and other whaling parts of the world. > A lot of the buildings being demolished are not that old judging by the > concrete. What will they do with all that rubble? Just a few yards downstream from Enderby Wharf is Ballast Wharf. Gravel used to be extracted from Blackheath and loaded onto ships as ballast. There is still a lot of activity there now off-loading various grades of gravel and rock from ships, presumably to be trucked into parts of London where it's needed. My guess is that much of that rubble will be taken by barge to landfill, to reclaiming land, and to be recycled as building material or ballast. A friend of mine who's a structural engineer and worked on the emergency response to the Haiti earthquake told me that it was a big problem for them to dispose of the rubble, which they eventually decided to use to extend the island. London had similar problems after the blitz; much of that rubble was used to fill in the old gravel works on Blackheath. What goes around comes around. B > > Alan C > > -----Original Message----- From: Bob W > Sent: Saturday, March 08, 2014 9:18 PM > To: 'Pentax-Discuss Mail List' > Subject: Beach bike bomb-blast breasts showing building site Bob's barrack > > It's been a lovely warm spring day today here in Olde Londonville, so I had > a nice walk along the river near my house. Here, by way of contrast with > Frank's ice-bikers, is Mr. Sandman: > <http://www.web-options.com/Crusoe/content/20140308_143434541_iOS_large.html > > If you stay in the same place and turn 180 degrees you see this: > <http://www.web-options.com/Crusoe/content/20140308_143521739_iOS_large.html > > You can see an end-of-terrace house with its chimney breasts showing - > that's the street where I live. There probably used to be another house on > the end of the terrace, but a bomb landed there during the war, and that's > likely to be why the breasts are visible. > > In next to no time that building site will be this: > <http://www.westproperties.co.uk/portfolio_greenwich.html> > and you won't be able to cycle on the beach anymore. There won't be a beach. > > Pictures taken with a mobile phone. > > B > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. > > --- > This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus > protection is active. > http://www.avast.com > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
