Thanks for the history lesson, Bob. Very interesting. My wife's cousin & her
husband used to own "The Pointer School" in Blackheath so we were fortunate
to spend some time in the area. I understand that the open area of
Blackheath is actually an informal cemetery from the days of the plague
which is why no construction has ever taken place.
Alan
-----Original Message-----
From: Bob W-PDML
Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2014 10:53 AM
To: Pentax-Discuss Mail List
Subject: Re: Beach bike bomb-blast breasts showing building site Bob's
barrack
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
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