Catford Market cries put spin on folk album’s poem

Catford Market cries put spin on folk album’s poem: EARLY folk songs about South London have been brought back to life.

Posted from The Mercury News

Love Over Gold mural update

Love Over Gold mural update:

In December 2011 we contacted Lewisham Arts Service to ask for their assistance in the potential restoration of the Love Over Gold mural on Creekside. Cockpit Arts inherited the mural (originally painted in 1989) when they bought the building but had had to replace the rotting wooden doors which contained the centrepiece of the mural in October 2011 (see previous post). Brigid Howarth (Lewisham's Creative Industries Officer) responded with the suggestion of a meeting in the new year, and last week she met with artist Gary Drostle, Becky Kingham (Cockpit Arts studio manager) and Sue Lawes (representing Crossfields) at Lewisham's Civic Suite.

As the artist originally commissioned to paint the mural, Gary Drostle had asked specialist paint manufacturers, Keim, to survey it and estimate the cost of its full restoration (Keim's paints were used in the original). They came back with a figure of £10.5K – a lot of money to find! Gary advised that splitting the work needing to be done into smaller segments over a period of time – as funds became available – would ultimately cost much more, but he estimated that the cost of simply reinstating the centrepiece of the mural on the new steel doors would be around £1000, since the same expensive paints would not be required for this.

Brigid explained that funds available to her to spend on public art were a miniscule £2000, but that the landmark mural was one that the borough was very proud of, and she was prepared to commit £500 seed money to help get renovation started. Becky Kingham kindly offered to match this amount with a further £500 from Cockpit Arts. It was decided that Gary be commissioned to put back the missing part of the mural on the new doors.

Another £9.5K needs to be found through voluntary fundraising efforts on the part of Crossfields and Cockpit Arts over the next 12 months, with initial help from Brigid to put together a funding package. At a time of continued budget cuts in the most needy areas, mural restoration may come bottom of the list, but we hope that there is enough community support to back up any approaches made to those organisations (such as local developers) who may have the spare cash to commit to such a project.

The London Mural Preservation Society has also contributed some helpful ideas for fundraising which we hope to follow up in the coming months. Work will not start on the doors until the Spring, but once restored, the meaning of the Love Over Gold mural will again be apparent.

Posted from Crosswhatfields

Urban Free Festival 1992

Urban Free Festival 1992:

'The Dewdrop Inn. Deptford. For all the old punks n freaks' is a great facebook groups with loads of photos of that pub from the 1980s and 1990s. The Dew Drop Inn was on the corner of Clifton Rise and Angus Street SE14 - sadly now converted to flats (I will do a post about it another time). As the pub faced on to Fordham Park it was the main drinking hole during the legendary Urban Free Festivals held in the park in the early 1990s, which attracted tens of thousands of people from all over London and beyond. I have taken some of the photos of the festival from the facebook group to give a flavour of it - hope nobody minds, this is priceless cultural history

I thought that the festivals ran from 1990 to 1995, but as this 1992 programme says Urban Free Festival III ('You can't kill the spirt') so maybe the first was actually in 1989.


The line up in 1992 included Back to the Planet, Brain of Morbius, The Seas, Sensor, Fat Dinosaur, Sidi Bou Said, Attila the Stockbroker, Moral Panic, The Rythmites, Levitation, Dr Phibes and the House of Wax Equations, RDF, Test Department, Co-Creators, Community Charge and many more. All this and the 'Free the Spirt Rave Big Top'.


Groups involved in organising the festival that year included South East Musicians Collective, SYLVIA (Support Your Local Venues and Independent Artsits), Conscious Collective, Dole House Crew (who squatted the Peckham dole office) and Sonic Relief with sponsors including The Dew Drop Inn, Music City, Catford TUC Centre for the Unemployed and Lewisham Council.
















I believe these photos were taken by Seran Tahsin, who was not sure whether they are from 1991 to 1992. I think probably 1992, because there is a great bit of film footage from 1991 and the structures look a bit different.



I had some great times at those festivals will write some more about the later ones at some point. Any good memories or stories, leave a comment as always (and why was it the Deptford Urban Free Festival when it was plainly in New Cross?!)

Update: here's a couple of interviews with people remembering the festival (film was made by people from Deptford.TV Collective in 2007)

Posted from Transpontine

The Takeaway Shop

The Takeaway Shop: No, I'm not talking about one of Deptford's many fried chicken takeaways; the Takeaway Shop is a project by Amy Lord which is running from 20-27 January at Number 82, the gallery at the bottom of Tanner's Hill.

Here's what she says about it:

What do you know about where you’re living, where you wake up every morning? 

Archives are often unruly, dusty masses of paperwork and words locked away to keep them safe. What if you learn about the most interesting bits straight away? And more importantly, be able to TAKE them AWAY with you?



This will be a place for people to drop in and learn craft activities including book-binding and paper-making, and to collect real stories about the lives of the local residents, families and the history of the area. It will be a place to meet. 

People that come into the shop will learn how to create individual handmade books and be able to cut, paste and assemble their favourite bits of text, pictures, true stories, people and textures, to create THEIR own mini TAKE-AWAY archive.



I think it’s important to know the area you live in, it’s history, what came before it, and who lives here now. It’s the context in which you are positioning yourself, and your life.



82 Tanner’s Hill, Deptford SE8 4PN

http://www.amy-lord.com/the-takeaway-shop/

20th – 27th January 2012 

(Closed 24th)
10:30am – 6:30pm weekdays, 12 – 5pm Sat & Sun

Late night Friday 27th January as part of South London Art Map tour (until 8pm)



PLEASE EMAIL TO BOOK A SLOT [amy-lord at hotmail dot com]


Posted from The Deptford Dame

Deptford Copperas

Deptford Copperas:

Copperas Street is a topographical reminder of one element in Deptford's industrial past. Copperas manufacture began here in the seventeenth century and continued until 1828. Although now largely forgotten, the industry was once a highly significant one.

Copperas, or iron vitriol, is a ferrous sulphate. It was made from iron pyrites stone: not the shiny, 'fool's gold' form but heavy, dull black pebbles found in London clay and on Kent beaches. Once manufactured, Deptford copperas was used to make black and red dyes. (Other possible uses included production of sulphuric acid, or oil of vitriol, dye fixative, ink and gunpowder manufacture. It even became an ingredient of various patent medicines)

Sir Nicholas Crispe - whose main trade activities were in West Africa, and included the slave trade -established copperas manufacture in Deptford, off Church Street. The works had their own dock on Deptford Creek. An account given to the Royal Society in 1678 described the copperas bed as 'about an hundred feet long, fifteen feet broad at the top, and twelve feet deep, shelving all the way to the bottom.' The bed had clay and chalk at the bottom, with a wooden trough in the middle which led to a cistern. The iron pyrites stones were laid about two feet deep, then left to ripen for five or six years in the sun and rain before they began to produce a liquor of sufficient strength. New stones would be laid on top every four years to refresh the bed.

The liquor ran into a cistern which could hold seven hundred tons. The cistern was built from chalk-caulked oak boards; further boards sub-divided it to prevent leakage. Its liquid was pumped to a lead boiler some eight feet square where it was boiled with scrap iron for a week - thanks to improvements brought in by Crispe. Prior to his innovations, the process had taken about 20 days. This was expensive, as the fuel for this process was Newcastle coal.

Once sufficiently concentrated, the liquid was left in a cooler for a further two weeks for the crystals to form. Deptford's cooler was unusual in being made of tarras, a form of cement, rather than the more usual lead. It was twenty feet by nine feet, and five feet deep. The copperas would form five inches thick on the bottom and sides.

The copperas works are not simply a forgotten piece of local history or a byway of industrial history. Rather, researcher Tim Allen argues that they force us to reappraise the origins of the Industrial Revolution. Well before the development of the coal and steel industries in the north, these chemical works in London and on the Kent coast required capital investment and a long manufacturing process, and produced large returns. Copperas also contributed to many other industries, and was arguably a vital forebear of the modern chemical industry.

Image: Iron(II) sulfate [copperas], from Wikimedia Commons.

Posted from Caroline's Miscellany

A death in the marshes

A death in the marshes:

A tragic story from 1877:

'At daybreak on Saturday morning a boy employed to frighten crows from a cornfield discovered the body of a gentleman up to the waist in water in the marshes forming a portion of Woolwich Arsenal, The body was subsequently identified as that of Mr David Darling, a pensioned officer from the Royal Arsenal, of 7 Amersham Grove, New Cross. The deceased was last seen alive at the grave of his wife in Plumstead Churchyard, and it is conjectured that in walking through the marshes he was overtaken by the darkness and got into a bog from which he was unable to extricate himself' ('Lost in a Bog', The Times, 5 March 1877)

The elements of Kent marshes, a churchyard and a frightened boy put me in mind of a story written not long before, albeit set further out in North Kent (believed to be based on the marshes around Cooling, beyond Gravesend):

'Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard... and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip' (Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, 1861)

Posted from Transpontine

History of Albury Street. Final Part.

History of Albury Street. Final Part.:

History of Albury Street. Part 8

No. 37.
Old buildings in the neighbourhood with a romantic past such as Deptford’s are invariably associated with well known historical figures. It is reputed that Admiral Benbow lived at No. 20 Union Street, north side (Now number 37) and that Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton spent some time at No. 19 (now number 34) the house built by Reyalls and Pearce.




No. 34.
It is unlikely that Admiral John Benbow who died in 1702 ever lived in Union Street. He leased Sayes Court in 1696 for 3 years from John Evelyn, but does not appear to have been there much. His son, John Benbow the Traveller, who died in Deptford in 1708 and in great poverty, might possibly have lived in Union Street. No evidence has been seen to prove or disprove that Lord Nelson stayed there. It is of greater significance that from the first, Union Street was inhabited by men connected with the Royal Navel Dockyard. Lucas’s will mentions houses occupied or in the possession of five sea captains and three shipwrights. Union Street must have been with these people, the most affluent in the parish, in mind. As the mortgage made with John Loving, the block maker, suggests, it was these people who provided some of the capital needed by Lucas. The rate books which go back to 1730 on the south side, and to 1750 on the north side of the street, show that this link with the dockyard was maintained until it closed in 1869. By the middle of the nineteenth century, there are signs that the occupants of some of the houses were of a lower social order. For instances No. 24 Union Street on the north side in 1851, was in multiple occupation, the heads of the three families being a labourer and two sawyers. But even then fourteen occupiers of thirty-two houses were craftsmen employed in the Royal Naval Dock Yard or were master mariners. Perhaps the most striking thing at that time was the number of private schools or academies flourishing in the street, which seem to have occupied no less than four houses.

Albury St, North side still mostly intact.

The last vacant site in Union Street was filled in 1838 when No.7 on the north side was built. Already, No. 21 on the same side had been pulled down and replaced by a pair of houses first rated in 1829, but by-and-large, Union Street remained intact until the end of the nineteenth century. In the last quarter of the century Lucas’s own house on the south east corner and No.2 on the south side were demolished and replaced by a single building facing the High Street, and the public house (King of Prussia) was rebuilt. In 1882, Union Street was renamed as a part of Creek Road and in 1898, became Albury Street loosing its anomalous numbering. The final re-naming of the street was necessitated by the re-aligning of Creek Road to join, at its west end, Evelyn Street, thereby at last obscuring the field pattern shown in the map of 1623, cutting off the north east corner of James Browne’s land. But even up the time of the Great War, Albury Street remained very much as Lucas left it. But by 1921, the south side had been broken and two large gaps appeared in the terrace in the middle and at the west end.

Since the Second World War these gaps have been made wider and recently they coalesced leaving just four houses of the original twenty-three. The north side has been luckier. A few houses at each end of the terrace on this side have be altered or rebuilt and since demolished, but a sizable number of the houses remain These houses are among the few survivors in the whole of London from the first two decades of the eighteenth century and although the gaps in their ranks are to be regretted, the four houses on the south side of the street and the longer series on the north must be seen as one of the most important treasures architecturally and historically among domestic buildings in London.

My thanks A Quiney for allowing me to reproduce his thesis on Union/Albury Street.

Posted from Old Deptford History