Tag Archives: Thames Stairs

Essex Street Water Gate and Stairs

I have written about the area between the Strand and the Embankment in a number of previous posts. It is a fascinating place of alleys, steep streets to the river, and a place where we can still find features that are reminders of long lost landscapes.

One such feature can be found at the southern end of Essex Street, where the street appears to come to an end, with a large gap in the building at the end of the street framing the view towards the Embankment:

The archway through the building at the end of Essex Street leads to a set of stairs down to what would have been the level of the Thames. The archway in the 1920s from the book Wonderful London:

I love the details in these photos. There appears to be a child at lower left of the arch, who looks like they are holding a small dog or cat.

At first glance, the arch and surrounding building looks the same as the photo from 100 years ago, however looking closer and there are differences. The brickwork in the semi-circular area below the two round windows and above the entrance appears far more recessed in the 1920s than it does today, and along the wall between first and second floors there appears to be a white decorative band protruding from the brickwork which is not there today, so I suspect there has been some rebuilding / restoration of the building and arch.

A look at the London County Council Bomb Damage Map shows that there has indeed been some considerable post-war rebuilding, as the building surrounding the arch at the end of Essex Street is coloured deep purple, indicating serious damage.

A look through the arch in 2025:

The following photo from the the book “The Romance of London” by Alan Ivimy (1940), where the scene is described as “Water Gate, at Essex Street, Strand. This opening at the bottom of the street, which gives a view of green trees, is the old Water Gate, built into the surrounding houses, of Essex House, and the only survival of that great mansion”:

Essex House was one of the large houses that once lined the Strand, each with gardens leading down to the banks of the Thames. These houses would typically have their own access to the river as the river was frequently the fastest and safest method of travelling through London.

The caption in Alan Ivimey’s book is rather ambiguous as it states that the opening is the old water gate. It does not specifically state that the surrounding structure is the original water gate.

The houses lining the Strand often did have a feature where their private access to the river was located, as the view of these from the river would have acted as a location marker as well as a symbol of status, where a large, decorated structure acting as their gate to the river would have impressed visitors and those travelling along the Thames.

Another example is the Water Gate to York House, which was the subject of this post.

The arch was described as a Water Gate in the many illustrations of the feature that have appeared over the last couple of hundred years, including this print from 1848, where the Water Gate is described as the “stately portal with large columns to either side”:

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

So is the arch a survivor from the time of Essex House? Any thoughts that this may be a historic survival are quickly dashed when looking through the Historic England listing.

The arch is Grade II listed, however the listing text states that it is a “Triumphal” gateway built in 1676 by Nicholas Barbon to terminate his Essex Street development, and to screen his development of a commercial wharf below. The listing also confirms that there was bomb damage, and the surrounding buildings date from 1953.

Looking through the arch, we can see the steps leading down to Milford Lane:

Through the arch and down the stairs, we can look back at the rear of the 1953 building, the stairs and the arch. The view shows how the height difference between the streets leading down from the Strand, and what was the foreshore of the Thames have been managed, where the ground floor from this angle is the basement from Essex Street:

Although the building was bombed in the 1940s, and rebuilt in the 1950s, this view still looked very similar to the 1920s:

So, although the arch has frequently been called the Essex Street, or Essex House Water Gate, it appears that the feature dates from Nicholas Barbon’s development of what had been the Essex House gardens, into Essex Street. It was bombed in the last war, restored and rebuilt, and the building surrounding the arch dates from the 1950s.

I mentioned at the start of the post how features such as the arch can act as reminders of a long lost landscape, and to see how this works, we need to follow a series of maps.

Starting with the area today, and I have marked the location of the arch / water gate with the red arrow in the map below (map © OpenStreetMap contributors):

In the above map, we can see Essex Street running slightly north west from the water gate (red arrow), up to the Strand. In the area between the arch / water gate, we can see part of the Victoria Embankment gardens to lower left, and on the right are Temple Gardens.

Going back to William Morgan’s 1682 map of London, and we can see the area soon after Nicholas Barbon’s development, with the red arrow marking the water gate:

There are 343 years between Morgan’s map, and the area today, and the street layout is almost identical, with Essex Street running to the north west, up to the Strand. The same two streets running east and west about two thirds up the street, and Milford Lane (blue arrow) running from the west to the south of the stairs in almost exactly the same alignment as today.

Morgan’s map shows a gap between the buildings at the end of Essex Street, where the arch is today. The map appears to show an open gap, with no arch, or floors above the arch. Whether this was an error in the map, whether the arch had not yet been built, or whether Barbon initially only put pillars on the building to the side of the gap as decoration, without an arch, would require much more research, but the key point is that the gap leading from Essex Street was there in 1682.

The 1682 map shows the stairs to the river, Essex Stairs (yellow arrow). These were not the stairs that lead down through the arch, but stairs at the end of what must have been a flat space between the water gate and the river, probably Barbon’s wharf development that the building and arch at the end of Essex Street was intended to screen.

To see how rapidly this area had changed, we can go back just five years from the above map, and the 1677 Ogilby and Morgan’s map of London.

In the extract below, we can see that Essex House, along with ornate gardens between the house and the Thames were still to be found. The red arrow marks the location of the water gate / arch we see today:

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Essex House can be seen close to the Strand, opposite the church of St. Clements.

Essex House was originally Exeter House as it was the London residence of the Bishop of Exeter who had been granted the site in the reign of Edward III.

The house and grounds were taken during the Reformation, after which it was purchased by Thomas Howard, the fourth Duke of Norfolk, who was arrested in the house and in 1572 he was beheaded for his part in the conspiracy of Mary Queen of Scots. The house was then owned by the Earl of Leicester, and became Leicester House. After his death, the property passed to his son-in-law, the Earl of Essex during the reign of Elizabeth I, and the house became Essex House.

Originally facing directly onto the Strand, by the time of the above map, we can see that houses and shops had been built between the house and the Strand, reflecting the slow decline in the importance of the large houses built along the Strand.

The house was pulled down around 1682, the same year as the map of William Morgan, however it is always difficult to be sure of exact publication dates, when the streets were surveyed for the map etc.

This may also answer why the gap of the water gate is shown without an arch as the William Morgan map may have used the plans for the area, rather than as finally built.

The 1677 map shows some interesting comparisons and features:

comparing the shoreline between the Thames and the land in the 1677 and 1682 maps, and after Bourbon’s development, an area of the foreshore appears to have been recovered – Barbon’s wharf development as mentioned in the Historic England listing
this would then put the current arch / water gate at the location of the original stairs at the end of the gardens, to the river
the slight north west angle of the gardens is roughly the same as the alignment of Essex Street today, so as we walk along Essex Street, we are walking along what must have been the central pathway through the gardens of Essex House
although not named in the map, Milford Lane is running to the east of Essex House, in the same alignment as the lane today (although in 1677 it did not have the bend round the base of the stairs. Milford Lane once formed the boundary between Essex House and Arundel House to the west

An extract from the 1677 map is shown below, covering the boundary with the Thames:

There are two boats moored at the end of the stairs down to the river at the end of the gardens of Essex House, where the water gate stairs are today.

There are two other sets of stairs shown on the map. On the left, there is a cluster of boats around Milford Stairs – named after the lane on the east of Essex House, and a lane we can still find today.

On the right there is a large cluster of boats around Temple Stairs.

Three stairs in a short distance shows just how many stairs there once were between the land and the river. Many still survive, but stairs such as Milford, Essex and Temple have disappeared beneath the land reclamation for the Embankment.

Temple Stairs appear to have been of a rather ornate stone design. The following print shows the Great Frost of the winter of 1683 / 4:

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Temple Stairs are on the left edge of the print, and they appear to be a stone, bridge like structure, probably over the most muddy part of the foreshore, with a set of steps then leading down to the river, where a passenger would take a boat to be rowed across or along the river.

The print has a pencil note “Taken from the Temple Stairs”, but other British Museum notes to the print state that the print is from near the Temple Stairs.

The following photo was taken from the southern end of Milford Lane, where it joins Temple Place:

The above photo is looking across what was Nicholas Barbon’s wharf development, which the houses at the end of Essex Street were meant to screen, and before Barbon’s work, this would have been the Thames foreshore, with the stairs leading down from the gardens of Essex House to the river, where the gap of the water gate can be seen.

In the following photo, the entrance to Milford Lane is on the right, behind the red phone box. The building on the left is Two Temple Place:

Two Temple Place gives the impression of being of some considerable age, however it is built on what was the Thames foreshore, and dates from the early 1890s, when William Waldorf Astor commissioned the gothic revivalist architect John Loughborough Pearson to create the building.

One of the stand out features is the gilded weather vane, made by J. Starkie Gardner, a representation of Christopher Columbus’ ship, the Santa Maria:

The water gate is today an interesting architectural feature at the end of Essex Street. Perhaps more importantly, it is reminder of a long lost landscape, which dates from Essex House and the gardens which led down to stairs to the Thames. After the demolition of Essex House, Essex Street was built on the same alignment as the gardens, and the stairs then led down to Barbon’s commercial wharf on what had been the Thames foreshore.

Today, the 19th century Embankment has further separated Essex Street and the stairs from the river, and Two Thames Place is a symbol of late 19th century building on the recently reclaimed land of the Embankment.

The stairs are also a reminder of a time when there were very many stairs along this part of the river, important places in the daily lives of many Londoners.

Very much, a lost landscape.

alondoninheritance.com

Bell Watergate Stairs – Woolwich

15 Replies

It has been some months since I last wrote about a set of Thames Stairs, so for today’s post, I am visiting another of these historic places that for many years connected the river with the land, and were once an essential part of life in London for very many people.

This is Bell Watergate Stairs, Woolwich:

Bell Watergate Stairs are listed in the Port of London Authority’s guide to Steps, Stairs and Landing Places on the Tidal Thames, although there is not much information provided, just the name, that they consist of stairs and a causeway, and that the concrete stairs and handrail are in poor condition. They are also confirmed as being in use.

Bell Watergate Stairs look in pretty good condition today, still with concrete stairs leading down to a causeway, with a handrail to the side. The causeway runs across a wider open space, and on the right is a sloping approach to the foreshore lined with stones, and along the upper part, there are wooden bars bolted to the stone surface to provide grip.

It was a very low tide on the day of my visit, leaving the causeway fully exposed, with green algae on the stairs, and along the side walls showing how far the water reaches:

The stairs are shown within the red oval in the following map, just north of Woolwich High Street, with a small street – Bell Water Gate – linking Woolwich High Street and the stairs. The jetty for the Woolwich Ferry is the feature on the left of the map (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

The stairs are shown on the 1897 revision of the OS map, where the feature looked then, much as it does today, with the stairs and causeway within a wider entry into the river. The South Pontoon of the Woolwich Ferry is on the left and on the right is a Steam Boat Pier, originally used by the two steam ferries of the Eastern Counties Railway, the “Kent” and the “Essex”, to link Woolwich with the new railway station across the river at North Woolwich:

(Map ‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland)

If we then look at the same area, almost 60 years later, the following 1956 revision of the OS map shows Bell Watergate Stairs in the centre of the map. The old steam boat pier has been removed (there was a charge to use this cross river ferry, and it could not compete with the Woolwich Free Ferry).

If you look to the right of the above map, I have used a blue arrow to point out a similar feature to Bell Watergate Stairs, where there is an inlet to the Thames, with stairs leading up to land. Sixty years later, this feature had disappeared, with the expansion of the industrial premises along the river.

(Map ‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland)

The street leading up to the stairs was not named on the 1897 map, but in the 1956 revision, it is named as Bell Water Gate (I have used the single word Watergate in the title of the post, as this aligns with the Port of London listing – not that this means that it is correct and most references use Bell Water Gate).

As I have mentioned when writing about other Thames stairs in previous posts, whilst the physical feature of a set of stairs is fascinating, they are also important as they provide small snapshots of history and individual events which can be tied to a specific place.

They can illuminate different aspects of life in London over the centuries.

In the past, the river was a far more a part of many Londoner’s lives than it is today. Whether for work, travel, or just for play and entertainment. On the day of my visit, the stairs were quiet, however this has not always been the case, as “E.T.” was complaining about to the Woolwich Gazette on the 9th of August, 1901, when the hot summer weather was causing problems at the stairs:

“RIVERSIDE BATHING. Sir, – Surely measures can be taken to prevent this disgusting practice which takes place daily during the summer months at Bell Water Gate, Woolwich. The place in question is situated in close proximity to factories where young girls are employed. The language used by the lads is of the vilest description, and should not for one moment be tolerated. I sincerely hope that the authorities this should apply to will see these few lines, and in the name of decency stop once and for all the nuisance complained of.”

All along the river, Thames Stairs were places where children would play. The following is an extract from one of my father’s photos of Wapping Old Stairs, taken in 1948, and shows some children at the bottom of the stairs, alongside the water:

For children, the river could be a very dangerous place, and there were numerous reports of drownings, as well as many rescues. The following is from the Daily Mirror on the 9th of August, 1933:

“BOY OF 12 RESCUES A CHILD – A heroic rescue was made by a boy of twelve, Terence McNulty of Woolwich High-street, at Bell Water Gate, Woolwich, last night.

While playing on the steps leading down to the Thames, Peggy Ramsey, aged six, of Borgard-road, Woolwich Dockyard, fell into the river. Seeing the girl in difficulties, Terence plunged in and brought her to the bank. The girl was taken to hospital.”

Another example was in September, 1916, when: “A gallant rescue from drowning was effected yesterday morning at Woolwich by the Rev. C.W. Hutchinson, priest in charge of St. Saviour’s Mission, Woolwich. It appears that Arthur South, 12, Paradise Place, Woolwich, was playing on the steps leading to the river at Bell Water Gate when, on reaching for a box which was floating by, he overbalanced and fell into the river, being carried away by the tide.

Attracted by the screams of his companions, Mr. Hutchinson, whose mission house is close to the spot, ran out, and seeing the boy about 50 yards away, dived into the water, fully dressed, and succeeded in rescuing him. The boy was little the worse for his immersion, and after being treated at the Mission House, was able to go home.”

The Mission House was one of the establishments that was in Bell Water Gate, the street running up to Woolwich High Street.

The source of the name of Bell Water Gate Stairs is difficult to confirm, but the street leading from the stairs was also called Bell Water Gate, and in the street there was a Bell Public House, which dated from at least 1655, so the name of the stairs may come from the pub, along with the existence of a parish gate at the stairs. Bell being a common name for a pub, I think it is safe to assume that the stars were named after the pub, rather than the pub being named after the stairs.

The following 1907 report is typical of some of the mentions of the Bell public house: “At the Woolwich Police Court on Friday, William John Leonard, of the Bell public house, Bell Water Gate, Woolwich, appeared on an adjourned summons which charged him with permitting his premises to be the habitual resort of prostitutes for a longer time than necessary to obtain reasonable refreshment.

For the defence it was urged that the licensee was totally unaware of the character of the women who used the house, and maintained that it would have only been fair had the police notified him and given him warning first.

In giving evidence, John William Leonard, brother of the defendant, swore that he did not know that women pointed out by the police were prostitutes.”

I suspect that William Leonard, the landlord of the Bell, did know who was in his pub.

Bell Watergate Stairs could well have also existed when in the 17th century, and the stairs were once the main landing point for traffic between the river and the town of Woolwich, and they are the last of this type of stairs to survive in Woolwich.

A very early form of the Uber Thames Clippers operated from Bell Watergate Stairs, as in 1845, adverts in the Kentish Independent were informing the people of Woolwich that “Fast and Splendid Boats of the Waterman’s Company leave at the Waterman’s Pier, Bell Water Gate, Woolwich, every hour and half hour”, running to and from Westminster.

The boats offered an extensive number of stops, to, and as they returned from Westminster, calling at the Adelphi, Temple, Blackfriars’s and City Pier, and at the Thames Tunnel and Limehouse.

The following print dates from 1922 and is by Edward Arthur Evacustes Phipson. The view is looking down the street Bell Water Gate, towards the stairs at the end of the street, with the river and North Woolwich in the distance:

Attribution and source: Edward Arthur Evacustes Phipson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The above view has been replaced today by a very short street from the stairs up to Woolwich High Street with the Waterfront Leisure Centre on the western side, and new blocks of flats on the eastern side.

The stairs from the river showing the new flats on the left and leisure centre to the right. The buildings behind the stairs are in Woolwich High Street:

One of the reasons for the reduction in use of the stairs, as well as the redundant steam boat pier, is the Woolwich Free Ferry, which can be seen from the end of the causeway leading from Bell Water Gate Stairs into the river:

Although the area is rapidly developing with new apartment buildings, and the leisure centre has been here for a number of years, the location of the stairs was for many years surrounded by industry.

As an example, in 1893, the wharf next to the stairs was to be sold at auction, and was described as “This old-established concern, comprising a most valuable Wharf on the Thames at Bell Water Gate, Woolwich, with frontage of 180 feet, steam crane, large hopper, overhead tramway, large stores holding 2,000 tons, offices stabling for 20 horses, workshops, spacious yard with two entrances, capital residence etc. horses, vans, carts, machines and all the suitable trade fittings as a going concern.” Everything you would have needed to continue the coal merchants business.

On the western side of the stairs, Woolwich Power Station was one of the major developments, and is the feature labelled as “Works” in the 1956 extract from the OS map earlier in the post.

The electricity infrastructure alongside the stairs was the subject of one of the strangest newspaper stories about Thames stairs, when in April 1949:

“EXPLOSION AND FIRE CAUSED BY CAT – A cat caused an explosion and slight fire when it short-circuited a 33,000 volt transformer in the London Electricity Board’s transformer station in Bell Water Gate, Woolwich, early today.

The cat, which was chasing a rat, was killed. The explosion set light to the transformer housing, but no one was injured and the fire was out within half-an-hour.”

Events at places such as Thames Stairs can reveal society’s approach to domestic abuse and how someone who had attempted suicide was treated as a criminal rather than someone in need of help. There are a number of examples of this at Bell Water Gate Stairs, with the following being typical:

“MARRIED MISERY AY PLUMSTEAD – WIFE’S ATTEMPTED SUICIDE. Alice White, 31, married, 14 Barnfield Road, Plumstead,, was again before Mr. Disney at Woolwich, on Monday, charged with attempted suicide in the Thames at Bell Water Gate, Woolwich. Police Constable Falla found her with her hat and coat off, about to jump into the water, and she said she would do it again when she got the chance, alleging that her husband was the cause of the trouble.

Frederick White, the husband, said that the prisoner did not drink much, but she was upset about her son, who was away in a sanatorium for tuberculosis. he had had no words with her on the day in question.

Prisoner: He threatened to pull everything off me if I went out. When I was out with my boy, his brother threatened to break every bone in my body. They have both beaten me.

Husband: When I have words with her it is over the beer.

Wife: It’s you who has the beer.

Magistrate: You must both keep away from the beer, and try to agree. I will bind you (the woman) over for twelve months, and your husband must be surety.”

The following photo is looking back towards the land from the end of the causeway. To the left can be seen a small part of the new apartment buildings. These are built on the site of a large council car park, which in turn occupied the site of Woolwich Power Station, which closed in 1978:

One of the more unusual feature of Bell Watergate Stairs, compared to other Thames stairs can be seen in the above photo, where to the left of the stairs, there is a slopping, paved area running between foreshore and land, and this sloping area has some horizontal wooden treads bolted into the ground.

These can be seen in detail in the following photo:

These were used as foot holds when pulling a boat out of, or lowering into the river.

They may also have been used to reduce the friction between the bottom of a boat and the surface, with the keel of the boat running across the wood, rather than the stone surface. The bolts holding the wood to the ground are recessed, so would not have damaged any craft being pulled across them.

The impact on wood of regular covering with water as the tide rises, followed by drying out as the tide recedes can be seen in the following photo, where the wooden treads end at roughly the tide mark, with the wooden treads below this level having rotted away, with only the metal bolts showing that they had continued down to the foreshore:

As with so many other Thames Stairs, they are rarely visited these days, and I doubt are used to get between the river and the land.

These are still dangerous places, the damp algae on the steps was extremely slippery on my visit, and the Thames tides would still easily pull someone out into the river.

They are though important places to act as a reminder of how much Londoners were once dependent on the river, and of the countless thousands who have come into contact with Bell Water Gate Stairs. I will leave the last words to Mary Ann Carney, who in 1898 was up before the Magistrate for being drunk and disorderly at Bell Water Gate, with this little exchange:

Prisoner: Whenever I begin talking Irish the police think I am drunk and lock me up

Magistrate: I think your accent rather pretty but you are fined 5s or five days

Prisoner: God bless your Worship and long life to you.

alondoninheritance.com

York Buildings Stairs and the Watergate

8 Replies

The following photo is from the 1890s book, “The Queen’s London”, and shows the Water Gate between Buckingham Street and the Embankment Gardens:

The caption underneath the photo reads: “In a corner of the public gardens on the Victoria Embankment, at the foot of Buckingham Street, is the ancient Water Gate to York House, a mansion begun by Inigo Jones for the first Duke of Buckingham. It is a beautiful monument of the famous architect’s skill, and can challenge comparison with similar work by any of the Italian masters. The old Water Gate is the earliest ornamental archway in London. It is interesting, moreover, as showing the former level of the Thames. This part of town was a very different place once, when the nobles fancied it for their mansions, or even prior to the making of the Embankment, when it was regularly lapped by the tide.”

The above description, written around 130 years ago applies equally today, and the Water Gate has been a regular feature in books that covered the key features of the city at the time of publication, and the Water Gate made another appearance in the 1920s volumes of “Wonderful London”:

Apart from the architecture, the really fascinating thing about the Water Gate is that it shows how much of the Thames was taken up by the construction of the Embankment, and with a walk up Buckingham Street, it demonstrates the topography of the area, and how we can still see the relatively steep descent from the Strand down to the foreshore of the river.

Rocque’s 1746 map shows the Water Gate and surrounding streets as they were in the middle of the 18th century. They are shown in the following extract, in the middle of the map, where the Water Gate is part of York Buildings Stairs:

The map shows that the Water Gate faced directly onto the Thames foreshore, and whilst the Water Gate was an unusual feature for Thames Stairs, York Buildings Stairs were just another of the Thames Stairs that lined the river, and looking along the river in 1746, we can see other stairs. Salisbury Stairs, Ivy Bridge, Black Lyon Stairs and Hungerford Stairs, all lost with the construction of the Embankment.

The Embankment was built between the mid 1860s and the early 1870s (there are various dates either side of these dates, dependent on exactly what start and completion meant), and around 15 years before the start of construction, John Wykeham Archer created the following water colour of the Water Gate:

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

The Thames was much wider before the construction of the Embankment, and the foreshore would have been a much shallower slope down to the centre of the river.

The above image shows grass growing across part of the foreshore, and a sunken boat to the right.

The sunken boat must have been just one of thousands of old wooden boats that were abandoned on the river and gradually decayed, sank, and became part of the river’s story. This has been happening from at least the Roman period, and on the southern side of the river, a Roman boat was discovered when excavating the ground ready for the build of County Hall.

I wrote about the County Hall Roman boat in this post, and it again illustrates how much wider the river once was, on both northern and southern sides of the Thames.

Also in the above image, there is a brick wall along the back of the Water Gate. Whilst this may have been to keep back very high tides on the river, its primary purpose seems to have been to create a terrace along the side of the river, as the street was called Terrace Walk.

In the 1746 map, the stairs are called York Buildings Stairs, and this name tells of the building that the Water Gate was once part of, and that once occupied the streets behind the Water Gate in the 1746 map.

The building was York House, shown in the following print, with the Water Gate shown with steps down to the river:

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

The building that would eventually become known as York House was built around 1237 for the Bishops of Norwich, and was then known as Norwich Place. This was the time when Bishops from around the country had a London town house as a London base, to be near the Royal Court, in which to entertain etc. (for another example, see my post on Winchester Palace).

The Bishops of Norwich maintained ownership of the house until Henry VIII gave the house to the Duke of Suffolk in 1536, granting the Bishop a smaller house in Cannon Row, Westminster.

Mary I then took the house and gave it to the Arch Bishop of York, and this is when the house took the name of York House. From then on, the house went through a series of owners who seem to have gained or lost possession of the house at the whim of Royal favour.

The Water Gate dates from George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham’s ownership of the house, when he carried out extensive repairs and had the Water Gate built in around 1626.

The caption to the photo from the Queen’s London at the top of the post, attributes the repairs and the Water Gate to Inigo Jones, however there is doubt about this and the Historic England listing for the Water Gate (Grade I) states that it was “executed by Nicholas Stone but the design also attributed to Sir Balthazar Gerbier”, and that the alterations to York House carried out at the same time were also by Gerbier, rather than Jones.

The Water Gate and stairs down to the river would have provided a private landing place, enabling the occupants of York House to take a boat along the river, or to return home, without having to use the streets, or a public landing place. The Water Gate would also have stood out along the north bank of the river, and would have been a statement, and an impressive place for visitors to arrive.

York House was demolished in the 1670s, with only the Water Gate surviving. The land behind was developed by Nicholas Barbon into the network of streets we see today.

George Villiers, the 2nd Duke of Buckingham imposed a rather unusual condition on the redevelopment, in that the streets that were to be built spelled out his full title, so if we go back to Rocque’s 1746 map, we can see his full title, including the “of” with Of Alley. I have numbered the street in the order in which they appear in his full title:

Only part of the Duke’s title remains today. Duke Street is now John Adam Street, George Street is now York Buildings, and part of Of Alley has been lost under the development of the land between John Adam Street and the Strand with only half remaining now as York Place. All as shown in the following map (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

The Water Gate today:

The Water Gate lost its connection with the River Thames with the construction of the Embankment between the mid 1860s and the early 1870s. This created the roadway, the Victoria Embankment, walkway along the river, with large retaining walls along the river.

Between the Victoria Embankment and the Water Gate are Embankment Gardens, and part of the gardens and Victoria Embankment are built over what is now the Circle and District Line, along with the sewage system designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette, which was much needed to avoid sewage being discharged directly into the Thames.

The Water Gate is now a considerable distance from the river, and if the distance measure feature on Google maps is accurate, the Water Gate is now 129 metres from the river – a distance which shows the considerable size of the construction work that formed the gardens and Victoria Embankment.

After the construction of the Victoria Embankment, and the gardens, there was concern about the future of the Water Gate, which by the end of the 1870s was in a very poor state, and in urgent need of restoration.

There were also proposals that the Water Gate should also be moved to sit on the new Embankment wall, facing onto the river. Whilst this would have continued the gate’s original purpose, it would have been completely out of context, and there was no need for such a water gate onto the river as using a waterman to row you along the river was by the late 19th century a redundant mode of travel.

Building News of November 1879 covered the issues with, and proposals for the Water Gate:

“The Metropolitan Board of Works have at last turned their attention to the deplorable condition of York Stairs, or Buckingham Gate, as it is sometimes called, now half buried in the newly made slopes of the Embankment-gardens.

Designed to face with its best aspect the fashionable highway of the day – the river, the building became almost forgotten when that time passed away, until the Embankment again brought the public to its proper front. It is undoubtably a relic worth preserving on account of its artistic merits, independent of the historic interest attached to it.

We wait with interest to learn of the Metropolitan Board of Works with regard to its ‘restoration’. It is hoped that better judgement will be exercised by that practical body than has been in some similar instances.

There can be little question that to allow it to retain its original site must be the best plan. Under some circumstances it might be desirable that such a structure should follow the retreated river margin; but the lines of the modern Embankment, however beautiful in themselves, would be utterly discordant with the old-style water gate. And again, the river is no longer the highway from which the majority of people view our public buildings.

We are glad to see that something is to be done. As we pointed out in a former number, it is quite time the neglected ornament was reinstated to a position of the dignity it deserves.”

One of the proposals for the water gate, to reunite it with the river whilst maintain it in its original position, was to run a pipe from the river, under the Embankment, over the rail tracks of the new cut and cover railway, and to a large pond around the water gate.

This would bring river water to fill the pond, and the construction of the sewer under the new Embankment was expected to ensure that the river water would now be clean. This proposal did not get carried out.

Rather the water gate was restored, and the surroundings of the water gate landscaped, to bring it to a similar state that we see today. The work was carried out by the London County Council (who took over the responsibilities of the Metropolitan Board of Works), and completed in the early 1890s.

A look behind the water gate, and we can start to see the difference in land levels, with steps up to the southern end of Buckingham Street:

In the above photo the railings and steps are all Grade II listed, and are described as “Mid C.18. Cast iron and Portland stone”.

What was Terrace Walk in 1746 is now Watergate Walk, here looking to the west, and steps up to Villiers Street:

And to the east towards York Buildings:

The rear of the Water Gate:

The rear of the Water Gate in 1862, as painted by John Wykeham Archer in 1862, just before the construction of the Victoria Embankment and gardens:

Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Buckingham Street is one of those London streets where the majority of the buildings that line the street have listed status.

In the photo below, the end of terrace building is a 1679-80 town house, built as part of Barbon’s development of the area. It was somewhat rebuilt later in the 17th, and again in the 18th centuries:

A plaque on the building states that Samuel Pepys lived in a house on the site, which must have been the original Barbon development:

Next to the houses in the photo above, is the house shown in the photo below, Grade I listed, with the listing dating it as “c.1676-77 with early C.19 and later alterations”, and as being again part of Barbon’s development of the land formerly occupied by York House:

This house also has a plaque claiming Samuel Pepys as a resident, and it appears he lived in the house between 1679 and 1688, when he stayed with William Hewer and that the house was partly in use as the Admiralty Office:

Looking up the full length of Buckingham Street, we can see the way the land gradually rises in height, up to the rear of the building at the very far end, which has a frontage onto the Strand:

One of the very few buildings on Buckingham Street which is not listed, is this building on the south east corner of the street:

The building that was originally on the site was once the home of William Smith – the father of English Geology:

The rear of the water gate from the southern end of Buckingham Street, which again shows the height difference between the street and the gate:

Another house from Barbon’s development of the area. Grade II* listed as a terraced town house, and dating from between 1675 and 1676:

As we approach the northern end of Buckingham Street, where John Adam Street crosses, we can better see the height difference with the rear of the building at the far end, which has a frontage on the Strand. Steps run up from John Adam Street, and the remaining section of the now renamed Of Alley is at the top of the stairs:

One of the interesting aspects of walking the streets between the Strand and the Embankment is the wide variety of architectural styles we can find. The result of the redevelopment of small plots of land over the centuries.

On the corner of Buckingham Street and John Adams Street is the following Grade II listed corner house and office, built around 1860 by R. P. Pullan:

Walking back to the Embankment Gardens, and this is the view towards the west. The Water Gate can be seen lurking low down on the right:

The above view shows just how much the area in front of the Water Gate has changed.

For roughly the first 240 years of the water gate’s existence, it was looking out directly onto the River Thames, and was used as a placed where people could catch a boat to travel across or along the river.

For the last 155 years, the Water Gate has lost contact with the river, now 129 metres to the south, and it looks out across a very different view.

The York Buildings Stairs / Water Gate are also another example of how we have significantly reduced the width of the River Thames over the centuries, and how the river now runs in a channel, rather than a river with a gradually descending and wider foreshore.

For more on this area, you may also be interested in my post on the Embankment Gardens Art Exhibition and the Adelphi.

alondoninheritance.com

Two Tree Island – The Last Landing Place on the Thames

9 Replies

There are a couple of tickets left for two new walk dates. Click on the links for details and booking:

Over the last couple of years, I have been writing about a number of the Thames stairs in central London, however for today’s post in my weird obsession with these places on the river, I am visiting Two Tree Island in Essex, to find the last landing place on the Thames.

I need to clarify the definition of last landing place. I am using the list of steps, stairs and landing places on the tidal Thames, as listed in the book on access to the river published by the Port of London Authority:

The book lists all the landing places, steps and stairs on the tidal river, which is the area of the PLA’s responsibility, so from Teddington in the west, to near Southend in the east.

The definition of the last landing place could be at either extreme of the tidal river, depending on which way along the river you were heading, however for the last landing place, I am using the location on the last page in the book, and furthest east on the maps within the book.

And using that definition, the last landing place on the River Thames is a causeway on Two Tree Island in Essex, the location of which is being pointed to by the arrow in the following map (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

A couple of weeks ago, we were going to a concert in Southend, so it was the perfect opportunity for a diversion to find Two Tree Island, and the causeway.

Two Tree Island is, as the name suggests, an island, and is located between Southend and Leigh-on-Sea, and Canvey Island.

The island nature of the place can be seen on the one road to the island, with the need to cross a bridge which takes you over the channel which runs to the north of Two Tree Island:

Looking west as you cross the bridge, and the nature of area becomes clear, low-lying, channels of water, and subject to the changing of the tide:

Looking over the eastern side of the bridge, there is a small marina on the left. This often dries out when the tide is low, but during my visit, the tide was coming in and the width of the channel was widening:

Having crossed the bridge, and we can look back and see the edge of one of the housing estates that surround Leigh-on-Sea, on the high land that centuries ago was the natural barrier to the Thames:

Two Tree Island has not always been land. It was reclaimed from the river in the 18th century and used as farmland. In 1910, a sewage works was built on the north east edge of the island, and for parts of the 20th century, it was also used for landfill.

Two Tree Island was flooded during the major flooding of the east coast and Thames estuary during 1953.

Once over the bridge, there is a sign welcoming you to Two Tree Island, and the sign indicates the current use of the land as it is managed by the Essex Wildlife Trust:

I can find no confirmed source for the name of the island. There are may trees on the island today, perhaps when the land was first reclaimed, when it was farmland, there may have been two distinctive trees. The first written reference to the name I can find is from 1967, when the site was included in a list of reserves set-up by the Essex Naturalists’ Trust.

The site was also called Leigh Marsh, and there are older references to this name, for example in 1836, when the the owner of the land had died, and their executor was selling the farm and farm land that the deceased had owned, which included: “Also 179 acres, 1 rood, 36 perches of valuable marshland, situate in the parishes of Leigh and Hadleigh, called Leigh Marsh, with a dwelling house and out-buildings, which is let until Lady-day next, £120 per annum.”

The land was valuable as it was good grazing land, and the mud flats and sea bed of the estuary off Two Tree Island was also used as shell fish beds, so the whole area was a valuable, agricultural site.

There has always been the threat of development in places along the river. In 1973, Maplin Airport, further east, off Foulness Island, was being considered as a new London Airport, and Southend Council put forward Two Tree Island, and the surrounding marshes, as a new nature reserve to compensate for the loss of land at Foulness and in the Thames Estuary.

The previous year, 1971, a “massive yacht marina” was proposed for Two Tree Island, however this was thrown out by Southend Council.

The majority of the island is now nature reserve, with plenty of tracks to walk, there is a small air strip for a model aircraft club, and a slowly decaying Pill Box as a reminder of the threat of invasion along the estuary in the last war.

The remains of the old sewage works are now providing a haven for birds, including nesting Egrets.

I have now reached the southern side of the island to find the causeway, where there is a Port of London information sign:

With the map showing the area in detail, and a helpful “You Are Here”:

And it is here that I find the causeway, the last landing place on the River Thames, within the area of responsibility of the Port of London Authority:

Not that impressive, compared to many of the stairs in central London, however this is a simple, functional place which is still in use. A concrete strip running out into the water from which boats can be launched and recovered.

The land in the distance in the above photo is Canvey Island, and as we look around, we can see other infrastructure that is only there because of the River Thames.

Looking to the east, directly over Canvey Island, are the container cranes of the London Gateway, the latest port on the river, having opened in 2013, and offering a deep water channel, and mooring along side, for the very large container ships that use the river today:

And looking to the south, the storage tanks for liquefied natural gas (LNG) are on the Isle of Grain on the southern side of the Thames. LNG is brought by ship from across the world to be stored in these tanks before being distributed to homes and industry across the country, or via undersea pipe to Europe:

The Thames Estuary has been the entry point for goods and commodities for centuries, and today this includes gas to power the country, and container ships full of all manner of products.

Looking east, and in the distance, we can see the City of Southend-on-Sea:

A look back along the causeway:

Although the causeway is a firm stretch of concrete, it is always good to remember just how far and how quickly the tide comes in along the Thames, and the tide was rising and washing over the causeway:

And within a few minutes, water was covering half of the causeway:

So that was the last place of access to the River Thames, according to the Port of London Authority listing – just a few hundred more to go along the river.

I have written a number of posts about this area of the river. You may be interested in:

As a postscript to the post, all my posts on Thames stairs have attempted to show how important the River Thames has been in the history and development of London, and how the river was once such a key part of the life of the so many Londoners.

We have tended to loose that connection with the river. The Thames is the reason why London is located where it is, and also why London has developed as much as it has.

There is not that much traffic on the river in central London, however towards the estuary, the docks at Tilbury and London Gateway are still busy.

The river is much cleaner than it was when industry lined the river and so much of London’s rubbish entered the river.

Although today, the river is a good way to travel on Thames Clippers, views along the river are good, and the river adds value to the properties built along side, it is also a river that is viewed as a potential risk from rising sea levels and flooding, it is used as a dumping ground for sewage from sewer overflows, and we have built into the river so it is channeled for much of its route through the city.

Whilst writing today’s post, I had BBC Radio 4 on for a change, and by chance there was a fascinating programme on the rights of natural features such as rivers, and how a number of rivers have been give the legal rights of personhood, which basically states that rivers have certain rights, such as the right to flow, the right not to be polluted etc.

It is a fascinating concept with a number of rivers in places such as New Zealand, India and Mexico having already been granted similar rights to that of a person.

In the UK, there is currently an initiative to develop a Rights of River motion for the River Ouse in Sussex.

It is a fascinating concept, and interesting to consider how this could apply to the River Thames, and how the river could be considered as an end to end entity, with rights, from source to estuary.

Some background on the River Ouse initiative can be found here

And the BBC programme Rivers and the Rights of Nature is here

alondoninheritance.com

Hanover Stairs and The Ship – Rotherhithe

20 Replies

For this week’s post, I am continuing with one of my favourite London subjects – Thames Stairs, and I am in Rotherhithe to find Hanover Stairs, and also to check whether the stairs confirm my theory that nearly every Thames stair had an associated pub.

This was the view, early on a sunny morning, walking along the footpath beside the Thames, with Hanover Stairs signposted next to the steps down to the river:

There is a gate at the top of the stairs, with a warning sign showing someone falling down the stairs, along with the danger warnings of Slippery Steps, Sudden Drop and Deep Water – all of which make sense for these stairs:

A look down the stairs reveals that they are in very good condition and consist of brick steps leading down to a sandy foreshore:

The Port of London Authority list of access points to the River Thames has very little information about these stairs. It just states that they were in use in 1977, consisted of concrete stairs and were in good condition.

Hanover Stairs are in Rotherhithe, and I have marked their location with the red arrow in the following map (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

Hanover Stairs are rather unusual in that there is a ship moored at the foot of the stairs. A scene that was probably rather common when the river was in use and ships would have moored in the river and along the foreshore.

Presumably a house boat, and equipped for permanent occupation as there are a range of pipes plumping in services between the ship and the shore.

During my visit it was a low tide and I could walk out for a reasonable distance across the foreshore. In the following photo, I am looking back from the water’s edge to the shore line, and the photo shows how the shore here drops considerably away from the edge of the land:

Looking east, with Shadwell and Limehouse visible across the river:

On the right of the photo, just along the foreshore from Hanover Stairs, is the jetty that once served Rotherhithe Gas Works, which I explored in this post.

Looking across to Wapping on the northern shore of the river, and we can see New Crane Wharf:

There is a gap to the left of New Crane Wharf. This gap is to allow access for another set of Thames Stairs – New Crane Stairs, which I wrote about in this post.

The narrow gap for New Crane Stairs, between two large buildings, shows the importance and persistence of Thames Stairs.

The following photo is looking west along the river, and in this photo we can clearly see how steep is the drop in the foreshore from the edge of the river out towards the centre:

I have marked the location of Hanover Stairs with a red arrow in the following extract from the 1894 edition of the Ordnance Survey map (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

Next to the stairs, where the house boat is today, there was a small pier. On the foreshore, there is the abbreviation M.P.s – This stands for mooring posts and shows that ships and boats would have been moored along the foreshore at Hanover Stairs.

Large buildings line the river, warehouses and industrial sites, with a small number of terrace streets leading back in land.

To the upper right of the above map, is the pier for the Rotherhithe Gas Works, and these works can be seen running back in land, where the circular feature of the gas storage tanks can be seen.

I have a theory that nearly all Thames Stairs in populated and industrial areas, had a pub located next to the stairs, and Hanover Stairs continues to confirm this theory.

In the above map, I have ringed the PH of Public House which was opposite the stairs, where an alley led between two adjacent large buildings, down to the stairs.

I found the name of the pub by doing a newspaper search for Hanover Stairs, and found the pub had a good Thames related name of the Ship.

A typical example of where the Ship was mentioned in relation to the stairs, and an advert which shows how these pub were important for more than just drinking is the following advert which appeared in the Kentish Independent on the 24th of January, 1852, where an auction was being advertised for the “Stock of Mr. Little, Timber Dealer, who is retiring from business”.

The auction of Mr. Little’s stock included a very large quantity of timber, a “capital nearly new Timber Cart”, and rather strangely “a Sow and Four Pigs”.

The advert then goes on to list where the catalogue for the auction could be had, and this is where I found the reference to the Ship:

“Catalogues had: the Lord Duncan and Dover Castle, Broadway; Bratt’s New Cross Inn: Shard’s Arms, Old Kent Road: The Ship, Hanover Stairs, Rotherhithe; Prince of Orange, Greenwich; Three Tuns, Blackheath: Tiger’s Head, Lee: Dartmouth Arms, Sydenham Common; of Mr. Little on the premises, and of Mr. Rogers, Auctioneer, Valuer, Estate and House Agent, Lewisham.”

Another advert which mentions the pub was from June 1825 shows the type of excursion you could have taken on a summer’s day, early in the 19th century:

“GRAND NOVEL EXCURSION. A. READ, Captain of the FAVOURITE, Steam Packet, begs to inform his Friends and the Public that he has engaged the above elegant and commodious Vessel for an EXCURSION round the ISLE of SHEPPY, passing the Nore, Whitstable, Queenborough, and his Majesty’s Fleet at Sheerness, on Thursday, the 29th Instant, and return the same evening. A grand Band of Music will be provided. refreshments may be had on board at the usual moderate charges.”

Tickets for this “Grand Novel Excursion” were 5 shillings and 6 pence each, and the Ship was one of the places where you could buy tickets, and in this advert, Mr. Rounce was mentioned as the landlord of the Ship. Tickets were for sale widely across London, from the Rose by the Old Bailey, pubs in east London, both north and south of the river, a grocer in Tower Street, and offices in Fenchurch Street.

Both of these adverts show the importance of these local pubs to other commercial activities. They were places where you could advertise to the local community and use as local distribution hubs.

The importance of the relationship between the Ship and Hanover Stairs is that in these two examples, and many other reference I found, although the pub is in the street opposite the stairs, the name of the street is not mentioned, just the name of the pub and the name of the stairs.

The Ship closed around 1960, and sadly I cannot find any photos of the pub.

The majority of the Thames Stairs have lost their associated pub. A few still exist in Wapping (Pelican Stairs next to the Prospect of Whitby and Wapping Old Stairs next to the Town of Ramsgate).

In Rotherhithe, a surviving example is the Mayflower, where to the left of the pub can be found Church Stairs:

21st century detritus washing up on the foreshore at Hanover Stairs:

The earliest written references I could find to Hanover Stairs dates from the 1790s, where for example, on the 11th of January, 1796, in a list of Dividends to be paid to Creditors, there was the following “Alexander Christall and James Church of Hanover Stairs, Rotherhithe, Surrey, Sail-makers”.

On the 28th of November, 1761, it was reported that “The John and Thomas, Blickenden, loaded with Corn, is sunk in the River near Hanover Stairs”.

Hanover Stairs can be seen in Rocque’s map of 1746 (underlined in red):

The map shows that in the 1740s, whilst the river’s edge was developed, a short distance inland it was still orchards, farmland, fields, marsh and streams. The section of the road that is now Rotherhithe Street was then named Redriff.

One of the few streets that leads inland from Redriff is directly opposite Hanover Stairs, and is named Hanover Street. I suspect the street took the name from the stairs, as these were probably a much older feature than the street.

I cannot find the source of the name Hanover as used for the stairs. Possibly there may have been local merchants from Hanover in Germany, of it may have been after George I, who became the first British King from the German House of Hanover who was on the British throne between 1714 and 1727.

Hanover Street changed named to Heston Street, and in the rebuilding of the area over the last few decades, the street that was one of the first running inland from the river, was built over and is now one of the many lost streets of the area.

So the stairs along the foreshore have been here for at least 275 years, and features from the long industrial history of the area can still be seen along the foreshore, for example, large stretches of consolidated stone and concrete, much eroded by the river:

Looking along the foreshore from Hanover Stairs to the pier that once supplied the Rotherhithe Gas Works with coal arriving along the river:

Looking back at the steps of the stairs, with in the foreground some of the chains and weights used to keep the house boat securely moored alongside the river wall:

Cables and pipes carrying services to the house boat and tyres to protect the side of the boat:

There are frequent mentions of Hanover Stairs in newspapers up to the 1930s, when the last two reports are about an 11 year old boy who drowned after falling into the river when he and his friends were playing on barges next to the stairs, and a thief who was caught in Rotherhithe Street with a sack full of Gin bottles, which had been stolen from a barge lying next to the stairs.

After the 1930s, there seems to have been very little happening at the stairs (or at least anything that was considered newsworthy). That may have been due to the level of bomb damage at the stairs and the surrounding streets, which was considerable.

After leaving the stairs, I walked along the river path to take a closer look at the former gas works pier:

The pier is in good condition, and is a suitable reminder of the connection between the river and the industries activities that once occupied so much of Rotherhithe:

I have often wondered what the metal structure is on the rivers edge at the centre of the pier, shown in the photos above and below. I assume it is part of the equipment which once carried coal from ships moored alongside the pier to the gas works, however now standing isolated of any other infrastructure, it almost looks like a work of art.

Seen from head on, the curves of the shaped metal on either side almost give the whole thing the appearance of a bird flying in from the river:

Another set of Thames Stairs ticked off the list, and one that continues the link between a local pub and stairs.

They were an important combination in the day to day life of the working river. The stairs provided access to the river and the barges and ships moored nearby, the watermen that would take you to your destination along the river, a place where those working or travelling on or along the river would have known well.

The stairs were also a landmark, referenced whenever you needed to refer to something happening on the river, on land, or to get to this part of Rotherhithe.

The pub was not just a place to buy alcohol, it was an important part of the local community, a place where other commercial activities could take place, such as selling tickets or distributing auction catalogues, where inquests to those who died on the river were held, where those working on the river probably went in for a drink after returning via the stairs, a local meeting point next to the stairs etc.

And that relationship is strengthened by the names frequently given to these pubs, which often referred to some aspect of river life, as with the Ship next to Hanover Stairs.

alondoninheritance.com

The Prospect of Whitby and Pelican Stairs

18 Replies

For today’s post, I have another of my father’s photos, taken on a boat trip along the River Thames in August 1948, this time looking across to Wapping, the Prospect of Whitby and Pelican Stairs:

The same view in 2024, some 76 years later:

The 1948 photo shows an area just three years after the end of the war, and the bombing that badly damaged the whole area of the docks. It was a dirty, industrial place, still important in supporting the trade of London and the country, with imports and exports through the docks.

Only a few buildings have survived the intervening 76 years. The Prospect of Whitby pub, today a brightly painted white building along the river. The brick building behind, the steeple of the church of St. Paul’s, Shadwell, and on the left edge of both photos is a warehouse (1948) now converted to flats.

The following extract from the 1949 edition of the OS map shows the area along the Thames featured in the photo, as well as the area behind (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

The Prospect of Whitby can be seen roughly in the middle of the map, and to the left of the pub is Pelican Stairs and Pelican Wharf. Just to the left of the P in Pelican is a square which marks the position of the chimney seen in the photo.

An extract from the photo provides a closer look at the Prospect of Whitby and surrounding buildings:

On the left is Pelican Wharf, then the Prospect of Whitby, with Pelican Stairs descending immediately to the left of the pub, then in the background, the large brick building of the London Hydraulic Power Company.

The same view today:

A new apartment building has been built over Pelican Wharf. The first mention I can find of Pelican Wharf dates from December 1866, when the wharf was mentioned in an article about a collision in the river opposite the wharf.

Many of the apartment buildings in my 2024 photo were part of the late 1980s development of the area, and there is an article in the Brentwood Gazette from the 22nd of April, 1988 which mentions Pelican Wharf, and provides a reminder of the transformation of the 1980s:

“Six months after Black Monday the Docklands property market is experiencing a ‘new realism’, says Stephen Miles-Brown of estate agents Knight Frank & Rutley.

The Essex bookmakers and the South London car dealers – the ‘Top Gun’ speculators of yesteryear – have all but disappeared, says Mr. Miles-Brown. In their place has come the traditional buyer with a mortgage, a career and even a few children.

Docklands developers are in the middle of the strongest buyer’s market for years. They have responded quickly and imaginatively. Immediately post Black Monday, there were incentive schemes, buy-backs, chain breaking and mortgage discounts, now the latest and perhaps best news of all is the return to good old fashioned ‘value for money’, a code word for keen prices, more space and upgraded specifications.

These developments with a large degree of space and higher specifications are far removed from some of the earlier ‘little boxes’ and are to be found throughout Docklands in such places as Timber Wharf on the Isle f Dogs, Greenland Passage in the Surrey Docks, Lime Kiln Wharf and Duke Shore Wharf in Limehouse, Pelican Wharf and Eagle Wharf in Wapping and Millers Wharf by St. Katherine Docks.

April marks the start of the 1988 ‘Docklands Season’ with no less than 10 major residential developments coming forward over the next few weeks.

They offer the choice of over 500 new homes, from first-time buyer studios at under £100,000 to – only for the seriously rich – 3,000 sq. ft. penthouses at £1.5 million !”

The later half of the 1980s and into the 1990s really was a development rush along the banks of the Thames, and although the article described the situation as a buyers market, prices for river facing properties in the 1980s were expensive. A first time buyer’s studio for under £100,000 may seem really cheap today, but in 1988 this was expensive.

In the above 1948 and 2024 photos showing the Prospect of Whitby, a set of stairs can be seen running down to the foreshore to the left of the pub. These are Pelican Stairs.

Pelcian Stairs are listed in the Port of London Authority listing of access points to the Thames as being in use in 1708, and they are certainly old stairs. Their location next to a pub is typical of many of the stairs in Wapping, as many users of the stairs, whether arriving back, or waiting to leave via the stairs, would have headed to the pub, and the combination of stairs and pubs were centres of local activity.

The Prospect of Whitby was originally called The Pelican, but it is not clear where the name was used first, either the stairs or the pub.

The PLA listing (published around 1995) recorded that the stairs then had “Steps missing dangerous, derelict”.

As can be seen today, the stairs are now very much in use:

The first written reference to Pelican Stairs I could find was from the 30th of August, 1746, when the Kentish Messenger reported that “On Tuesday Evening, a Fire broke out in the House of Mr. Pelham, near Pelican Stairs in Wapping, occasioned by a quantity of Okum taking Fire; which burnt with such Violence, that the same, and the House of Mr. Beane, a Distiller and Grocer, were consumed, with their Stocks in Trade, which amounted to several hundred Pounds; two other Houses, both inhabited, and other small tenements were much damaged.”

It is remarkable the number of fires that occurred, but perhaps not surprising when you consider that there were many houses, warehouses and factories where highly inflammable goods were stored, and where both building and working practices lacked the approaches needed to prevent the start and spread of fires.

The entrance alley to Pelican Stairs alongside the Prospect of Whitby:

The large brick building behind the Prospect of Whitby can be seen in both 1948 and 2024 photos. This was the Wapping pumping station of the London Hydraulic Power Company.

The London Hydraulic Power Company (LHPC) was formed in 1884 by Act of Parliament, although the provision of hydraulic power by the company had started in the previous years with a station at Bankside, as the Wharves & Warehouses Steam Power & Hydraulic Pressure Company.

The aim of the company was to provide hydraulic power (water under pressure), across London, and the docks were a major consumers of this form as power, as there were numerous cranes, lifts, swing bridges, dock gates, windlass etc. which needed a reliable source of power to operate.

The LHPC established a network of pipes across London, interconnecting their pumping stations and their consumers – much like the electricity network of today – and as well as the London Docks, the company provided power to the numerous, power hungry industries and businesses across London, even extending to the raising and lowering of theatre safety curtains in the West End.

The Wapping pumping station was built between 1889 and 1892.

The station was equipped with up to six steam engines which used coal delivered via the adjacent Shadwell Basin, and took water from boreholes below the station and from the water in Shadwell Basin.

The large brick building we can see in the photos was were the accumulator tanks were located. These held water at pressure, so the hydraulic pressure across the distribution system could be delivered at a constant pressure, and the London system was at a pressure of 750 psi (pounds per square inch).

The Wapping station transitioned to electric pumping rather than steam and coal due to the Clean Air Act which had been brought into force due to the smog’s of the 1950s.

Remarkably, the Wapping station did not close until 1977, as hydraulic power was still being used, however by the 1970s, the reduction in the use of the London docks, and the transition to electric power for remaining uses of hydraulic power resulted in the closure of the station, and the network used to deliver the hydraulic power delivered by these stations.

With the 1980s liberalisation of telecommunications, and the forming of Mercury Communication as a competitor to BT, Mercury purchased the pipe network of the London Hydraulic Company to use as a ready made distribution network for their cables.

Although Mercury as a brand name disappeared in 1997, the pipes continued to be used by Cable & Wireless, and they still carry fibre optic cables today, so rather than distributing hydraulic power, the pipes are distributing voice and data across London.

The Wapping pumping station has had a number of temporary uses since closure, including activities such as an art gallery and café / restaurant, and there have been proposals for long term use, but as far as I know at the moment, there are no firm plans for the building.

Looking at another part of my father’s photo, and there was a bit of a mystery, but which shows how features remain hidden and then are revealed.

The following photo shows the area to the right of the Prospect of Whitby in my father’s 1948 photo:

And this is the same view today:

The 1949 OS map shows this section of the photo, as shown in the extract above, and the black cars parked in a line (possibly awaiting loading on a ship for export), are parked where the words “Mooring Posts” can be seen (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

The map also shows the low warehouse behind the cars and what also likes rather like a domestic house to the left of the photo.

The mystery is that in 1949 photo and map, at the side of the river there is a continuous and straight line of wooden posts forming the edge of the land, however if you look at my 2024 photo, today the wall along the foreshore is curved, and to the right there is a solid, curved, concrete wall.

If we go back to the 1897 OS map, we can see a very different place (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

We can still see the main entrance between the Thames and Shadwell Basin at the upper part of the map, but in 1897, below the main entrance, was “Shadwell Old Entrance”.

The London Docks were a continuous building site, and in Shadwell, the “Shadwell Old Basin” and the “Shadwell Old Entrance” were the first part of the docks to be built in Shadwell.

The success of these docks was such, that they were soon expanded and the much larger Shadwell Basin was built, just north of the Old Basin, which was included within the overall Shadwell Basin.

The old entrance would then be closed off, with the single main entrance shown in the 1949 map remaining as the eastern entrance to Shadwell and the London Docks complex.

I assume that the the original entrance was built over, probably not completely removing and filling in the entrance, rather building over it to complete the view we see in the 1948 photo and 1949 map.

When the area was redeveloped in the 1980s and 90s, this structure was then removed, and the curved concrete wall built across what remained of the Shadwell Old Basin entrance.

It is fascinating how across London, the evidence of former land use, industries etc. have survived and can still be seen today.

To see the street side of the Prospect of Whitby and the lifting bridge over the Shadwell Basin entrance, see this post from 2016, where I explored my father’s photo taken in Glamis Road.

alondoninheritance.com

Iron Gate Stairs

11 Replies

Underneath the northern tower of Tower Bridge, there is a late 19th century version of one of the old Thames Stairs, which has a name that refers to one of the gates that controlled access into the Tower of London. This is Iron Gate Stairs.

The stairs are shown before Tower Bridge was built in this extract from Langley and Belch’s, 1812 New Map of London (underlined in red):

Today, Iron Gate Stairs are reached via a tunnel which runs through the northern tower of the bridge, and comes out to a well maintained set of stone stairs:

As far as I can confirm, by checking and aligning a number of maps, the stairs today appear to be in the same location as the stairs shown in the 1812 map.

It shows the importance of these access points to the river, that they were included in the design of Tower Bridge, and it must have cost more, and been more complex, to route the access to the stairs through the tower, rather than relocate them to one of the sides of the northern tower of the bridge.

The Port of London book “Access to the River Thames, a Port of London Guide”. includes these stairs in the listing of all points of access to the river along the tidal Thames, and the PLA record for Iron Gate Stairs reads:

Stairs and Causeway
Constructed of Stone
A landing place in 1708 and 1977 and in use at the time of the book (around 1995)
Structure is listed
The stairs are gated
Bathing from these stairs is extremely dangerous

I cannot find a separate listing for the stairs on the Historic England website, so I assume that the stairs are included within the overall Grade I listing of Tower Bridge, as the access to the stairs is part of the structure of the bridge.

The name of the stairs is interesting, and it appears to refer to a gate that once controlled access to the south east corner of the area between the walls of the tower and the river.

In this 1852 plan of the Tower of London, there are a cluster of buildings in the lower south east corner, with a black line, indicating some form of gate, controlling access (red arrow):

© The Trustees of the British Museum Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Although not named, the stairs can be seen running down to the river, next to the gate.

After the construction of Tower Bridge, the name Iron Gate is retained, and although the stairs do not appear to be named (perhaps because they are under the bridge), iron Gate is used next to the tunnel underneath the approach to Tower Bridge, where today you can walk from the St Katherine Dock area, to the area between the Tower of London and the river.

In the following extract from the 1897 OS map, Iron Gate is shown just to the east of the bridge (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

And in the 1951 revision, the name is still in use, but on the western side of the bridge (not also the name Irongate Wharf in use in both maps) (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

So Iron Gate in the OS maps seems to continue to refer to a gate across this access through the wall created by the approach road to Tower Bridge.

As with all Thames stairs, there are references to the stairs in multiple newspaper reports over the centuries. For example, the following is from the Public Ledger and Daily Advert on the 9th of October, 1826, and unfortunately it does not record what Samuel Pearce did, which required such a public apology:

“CAUTION TO WATERMEN – I Samuel Pearce, Waterman, plying at Iron Gate Stairs, near the Tower, beg publicly to acknowledge and express my grateful feeling to John Morrison, Esq. for foregoing a prosecution against me, which I well merited, in consequence of an unprovoked and unwarrantable outrage committed on him on Friday evening; for which I cheerfully make this public apology, which he accepts, in consequence of the distressed state of my wife and infant family.”

Iron Gate Stairs were also the boarding point if you wanted to travel to “Harwich, Yarmouth and Places Adjacent”, as the 80 horse-power Steam Packet Swift sailed from the stairs on Sundays and Thursdays in the 1820s.

Indeed, Iron Gate Stairs feature in papers across the 18th and 19th centuries with all the usual stories of activities that happened at these places which formed a key access point between the land and the river.

As with other stairs, Iron Gate Stairs was a place where bodies recovered from the river were brought up to land.

The Historic England Monument Record for the Iron Gate refers to it being a gate tower constructed during the reign of Edward III (who reigned between 1327 and 1377), and that it was built to strengthen the defences of the Tower on the southern side of the complex, and that it commanded a “walled causeway through to the Develin Tower at the south east corner of the outer wall.“

Stow in the early 17th century refers to the Iron Gate as being “great and strong but not often opened”.

The Iron Gate was demolished in 1680 following a review of the Tower’s defences, and whilst looking for space to expand accommodation.

So whilst the gate tower was demolished, as shown in the 1852 map, a gate seems to have remained in place, although rather than the gate tower, just a standard gate.

After demolition, there also appears to have been a cluster of buildings around the location of the gate which seem to have been used for accommodation, storage and small industrial activity.

Construction of Tower Bridge cleared these buildings, and today we can see the area where the Iron Gate was located when looking towards the bridge, from the west:

And with some lovely historical continuity, the area of the Iron Gate is still gated, with a gatehouse and barrier across the road:

And looking through the walkway under the approach road to Tower Bridge, we can see gates part open across the walkway, as well as much larger and stronger gates set against the sides of the walkway:

In the following photo, the entrance to the walkway tunnel under the approach road is on the right, and the arch on the left provides access to the entrance to Iron Gate Stairs:

Which, as the PLA description of the stairs records, is gated:

Through the gate, and we can see the railings around the top of the stairs. The surrounding walls are covered in the white tiles that are common to the majority of the places where you can walk under the bridge:

View of how the tunnel exits the base of the northern tower of Tower Bridge, and the steps leading down:

As the PLA document records, a causeway is part of Iron Gate Stairs, and for the stairs this is one of the largest causeways to be seen. It covers a large space at the base of the stairs, both in terms of width and length into the river:

The stairs are part of the construction of Tower Bridge, and I assume that the causeway may well date from the same time (assuming it has been continuously repaired). I doubt whether the stairs would have had a causeway of such size prior to the bridge being built.

The need for a bridge at or around the location of Tower Bridge had been a pressing issue for many years prior to the construction of the bridge. In the later half of the 19th century, there was so much cross river traffic that an urgent solution was needed.

In 1884, the Southwark recorder and Bermondsey and Rotherhithe Advertiser was reporting that “The Corporation also propose to establish a steam ferry across the river, from Iron Gate Stairs, Little Tower Hill, to Horselydown Old Stairs, near Horselydown Lane. Another scheme for crossing the Thames is proposed by the Tower (Duplex) Bridge Bill. The structure would cross the river from Hartley’s Wharf, Horselydown, to Little Tower Hill, having in the centre of the river two loop bridges.”

The following year, the Eastern Argus and Borough of Hackney Times, was reporting about the construction of the new bridge, and that “the work will be done by the City Corporation which has set down five years as the period for completing it. It is to be formed from a point westwards of and near the Iron Gate Stairs to Hartley’s Wharf. The cost will be £750,000, and the structure will be of such a character as to admit of the passage at all times of the tide of vessels navigating the river. The bridge will be a great convenience to East London”.

The above report does call into question whether the current stairs were built on the site of the original Iron Gate Stairs, as the article states that the new bridge is to be built “westwards of and near the Iron Gate Stairs”.

A later article in June 1886 does though seem to confirm that the northern tower, and the stairs we see today are on the site of the original stairs, as when describing the works for the new bridge, the article states “On the north side, as already stated, it touches the shore at Irongate Stairs, from which a road will lead directly up to the Minories”.

In 1889, Watermen were complaining about the disruption to their trade “THE TOWER BRIDGE AND THE LONDON WATERMEN – The Select Committee of the House of Lords appointed to considered the Tower Bridge Bill proceeded to-day to hear the evidence of numerous watermen who claim compensation for disturbance of their occupation between Irongate and Horselydown Stairs in consequence of the construction of the works,. George William Shand was the first claimant”.

I would have thought that the watermen would have been far more concerned about the forthcoming loss of their trade between the two stairs once the new bridge had been opened.

Based on the majority of newspaper reports, aligning maps, and the Port of London Authority listing of Thames Stairs, I am as certain as I can be that the stairs we see today are in the same place as the original Iron Gate Stairs.

The railing by the side of the view over the stairs seem to have acquired evidence of many of the tourist visits to the site:

I had a good look around, however I could not find any signs that name iron Gate Stairs.

They are though yet another example of historical continuity, with the stairs being in roughly the same place after the construction of Tower Bridge, and being named after a gate dating back to the 14th century, located where there are still a barrier and gates in position, to close of the south eastern entry to the space between the Tower of London and the River Thames.

alondoninheritance.com

Horn Stairs, Cuckold’s Point and Horn Fair

26 Replies

If you wanted to visit somewhere in London on a very cold January morning, a bright day, but with ice having formed overnight on standing water, the last place you may think of is the Thames foreshore, however, on such a day, I went to one of my favourite places on the river – Horn Stairs and Cuckold’s Point:

Horn Stairs and Cuckold’s Point are in Rotherhithe, opposite Limehouse and the north-eastern part of the Isle of Dogs, on the inside of a bend in the river where it curves past Rotherhithe.

I have marked the location with the red arrow in the following map (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

Cuckold’s Point is the area of the river / foreshore slightly to left and right of the arrow head in the above map, and where, when the tide is low, there is a broad beach of sand and mud running down to the water.

I was walking from the west, and there were some stunning views across the river, and as I reached the stairs, the outline of the causeway running from Horn Stairs could be seen, with a pole towards the end of the causeway:

The steps over the river wall that lead to Horn Stairs:

From the top of these steps, we get a view of the remains of the causeway leading off across the foreshore from the foot of the stairs:

The upper part of the stairs, where they run over the river wall, are off concrete, with the main part leading down to the foreshore being a set of wooden stairs:

The upper part of the stairs look rather dodgy. From the top of the stairs it is difficult to tell how thick each of the steps is, and whether it will hold your weight if you walk down the stairs.

In the following photo of the top steps, you can see from the bolts on either side of each step, just how much appears to have eroded, or perhaps the wood has shrunk, also on the day I was at the stairs, there was ice in the hollows in each of the steps:

At the bottom of the stairs, we can see the remains of the causeway leading out towards the water:

The Port of London Authority (PLA) has very little information on the stairs in their listing of all the Steps, Stairs and Landing Places on the Tidal Thames (published around 1995), there is just a remark that the stairs are in “Reasonable” condition and that they were still in use.

The PLA does not record any early dates for when Horn Stairs were in use, and there are not that many references to the stairs, with Cuckold’s Point being the name used for any reference to the location.

In Rocque’s map of 1746, the stairs are not shown, but Cuckold’s Point is marked:

The earliest written reference I have found was in a newspaper article on the 25th of October, 1832 when the name Horn’s Stairs were used in a legal action against the owners of the Eclipse, a steam packet which ran between London and Margate, and was accused of running down a barge off Horn’s Stairs.

The name of the stairs did often appear as Horn’s or Horns rather than the singular Horn, and one of the possible sources of the name could be a Horns Tavern which was to be found near the stairs – although an unresolved question is what came first, the tavern or the stairs.

The name Horn is used in the majority of references from the late 19th century onwards, as shown in the following extract from the 1896 revision of the OS map, where Horn Stairs can be seen bottom left (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

In the above map, the causeway leading out from the stairs is labelled “Hard”, and would have provided a hard surface above the sand and mud of the foreshore, to walk to and from a boat at nearly all states of the tide.

Also in the above map a dotted line leading across the river to Limehouse Pier can be seen, and labelled as Limehouse Hole Ferry. This was a regular ferry that had run for a good few centuries between the two sides of the river. I wrote about the ferry in my post on Limehouse Hole Stairs and the Breach.

The fact that Horn Stairs does not appear in the 1746 map, and I can find no written references to the stairs earlier than 1832 does not mean that the stairs and a causeway have not been here for much longer.

The City of London Archaeological Society has a fascinating post on surveying stairs, which included a section on Horn Stairs, and in the post, 16th or 17th century hand made bricks were identified which may have formed an early hard standing on the foreshore.

The post can be found here.

Although I could not find the bricks exactly as shown in the photo in the City of London Archaeological Society’s post, (the foreshore is a constantly changing environment), I did find a number of this type of red brick, which can be seen in the photo below, to the right side of the causeway:

At the end of the causeway, and at the point just before where the Thames will recede to at low tide, is a pole labelled as a navigation marker on the PLA chart for this section of the river. The marker has a light at the top of the pole to ensure the marker can be seen in the dark:

At the end of the causeway:

Looking back to the river wall and the stairs down to the foreshore, which is a distance of some 50 metres, and the dark colouring along the river wall shows how high the water is when the tide comes in along Cuckold’s Point:

The naming of Cuckold’s Point is interesting, and the true source of the name cannot really be confirmed given the centuries that the name has been in use.

The word Cuckold means, according to the online Cambridge Dictionary “If a man is cuckolded, his wife has a sexual relationship with another man”, and the most repeated story about the use of the word Cuckold for the foreshore in Rotherhithe goes back to King John, who was on the throne between 1199 and 1216.

There are a number of variations to the story, but it generally goes that King John was hunting around Shooters Hill, Blackheath and Greenwich. He seems to have found himself in Charlton, and entered the house of a Miller, where he found the Miller’s wife alone.

The Miller soon returned home, but found his wife “in flagrante” with the King.

The Miller attacked the King intending to kill him, and to defend himself the King revealed who he was, and came to an agreement with the Miller that he could have all the land to the west that he could see from his house, which extended all the way to what is now Cuckold’s Point, where, at the time, there was a pole with a pair of horns mounted on the top.

The Miller, in some stories, also had to walk to Cuckold’s Point once a year, with horns on his head.

So the name Cuckold’s Point came from the position that the Miller had been put in by King John.

The King also gave the Miller the right to have a fair on the 18th of October, and this fair became known as the Horn Fair and was held in Charlton.

An early view of Cuckold’s Point can be seen in a painting by Samuel Scott in his work “A Morning View of Cuckold’s Point“, painted between 1750 and 1760:

Credit: Samuel Scott, 1750 – 1760 , Tate (N05450), Photo: Tate released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)

The challenge with confirming that this is Cuckold’s Point is that there are no features which can be found today, however there is a set of wooden stairs leading down to the foreshore, and the slope and shape of the foreshore is very similar to that of today.

The painting does though give a very good impression of what Cuckold’s Point probably did look like. There are two Waterman’s boats where the water meets the foreshore, and there is a third approaching the same point.

There are people on the foreshore walking down to the boats from the stairs, presumably either to meet the people arriving on the boats, or to take one of the boats along the river.

The ships on the foreshore are in the location of Mr. Taylor’s Yard, as shown in Rocque’s 1746 map.

The river appears to bend to the right, which indeed it does, as it heads along the eastern side of Rotherhithe towards Deptford.

The painting does provide some support to an alternative theory as to the name Cuckold’s Point. Just to the left of the stairs can be seen a wooden frame, and this is believed to show a ducking, or cucking stool, which was use to punish and humiliate women, who were labelled as a scold, or had committed some form of sexual offence, such as cheating on a husband.

As was usual, there was no similar punishment or humiliation for the man involved.

As the site of a cucking stool, where the wife of a cuckold would have been punished, this may also be the source of the name, however this story does not seem to have gained much support over the years.

The broad sweep of the foreshore at Cuckold’s Point, looking west along the river in the direction of the City of London:

Standing at Cuckold’s Point on a cold January morning is a lonely experience. There is no one else around, and the river is also very quiet, with just the regular Thames Clippers causing a run of waves up to the foreshore.

These places were once busy, both along the rivers edge, the foreshore, and along the river, and it is fascinating to stand at these places, thinking of all the people that have stood in the same place, and the events that have taken place here.

I searched newspaper records for reports mentioning Cuckold’s Point for three decades in the first half of the 18th century, the 1720s, 30s and 40s and there are many references. The following is a sample of what went on around Cuckold’s Point in these years:

17th June 1721 – On Thursday last in the Afternoon Mr. Bailey, a Coasting officer, and Mr. Purser, a Custom-House waterman, made a seizure in the River near Cuckold’s Point of 1900 Weight of Tea, artfully wrought up in the sides of a Mackerel Boat filled with Fish, and supposed to come of Ostend.
11th of May 1726 – The Execution of Capt. Jeane, condemned at the late Sessions of Admiralty for the Murder of his Cabin Boy, is appointed for next Friday, he will be hanged in Chains over against Cuckold’s Point.
6th of October 1736 – On Monday last a Fisherman caught in his Common Net, near Cuckold’s Point, a Salmon 38 inches long and about 17 inches round, and sold the same to Capt. Bond, who was in sight when the fish was caught, and was going on board the East-India Man at Gravesend. The Fisherman being unable to hold his net, begged assistance of a man in the Captain’s Boat, who accordingly went; but as he was helping he fell accidentally into the Thames, from whence it being low water, he took the Fish in his Arms and threw it into the boat. The Fish was sold for 36 shillings out of which the Fisherman gave the Waterman 6 shillings for his Trouble.
23rd April 1737 – On Tuesday last, the Wind being very high, and the Tide rough, two boats, overladen with Passengers, were cast away between Cuckold’s Point and Deptford, and 17 persons drowned. Two other boats, near the same place, with 16 persons in them, and another at the Isle of Dogs, with six and a Waterman, overset, and seven of the former and all the layer were drowned,
23rd October 1742 – Yesterday a new ship, of 220 Tons and 20 Guns, intended for the West India Trade, was launched at Mr. Taylor’s Dock at Cuckold’s Point, and named the Anna Maria (see earlier extract from Rocque’s map of 1746 for location of Taylor’s Dock)
10th December 1743 – Last Tuesday upwards of 1000 Pairs of French Gloves with some Skins, were brought to the custom House. They were seized by Mess. Smith and Harris, Customhouse officers, as they were attempting to land them at Cuckold’s Point.
4th February 1744 – On Tuesday 200lb of Cocoa Nuts, 200 Weight of Tea and 20 Pieces of Cambrick, with some Lace, were seized at Cuckold’s Point, and brought to the Custom House; This seizure is valued at £300. (Cambric is a finely woven, plain cloth that came from France)
7th of March 1747 – Tuesday in the Afternoon as a Boat was going to Greenwich with six Passengers, it was overset near Cuckold’s Point by running foul of a Ships Anchor, by which accident Mrs. Sims and her Daughter, of St. Catherine’s Lane, were unfortunately drowned.
27th of March 1749 – On Monday last thirteen prisoners were tried at Kingston in Surrey, three of whom were capitally convicted, viz. John Rayner, for Robbery on the Highway, Thomas Pattin and William Walker, two Watermen, for knocking down Mr. Alison, in a Boat on the River Thames, near Cuckold’s Point, and robbing him of a Silver Coffee Pot, a Watch, and a Guinea and Half in Money.

These quiet places along the Thames were once full of life, and also unfortunately, death.

Looking along Cuckold’s Point to the east and there is a pier that reaches out over the foreshore. This is where you can catch the Thames Clipper RB4 service that runs between this pier at the Doubletree Docklands Hotel, across the river to the pier at Canary Wharf – a brilliant way of crossing the river.

A rather good example of historical continuity in London, the Thames Clipper RB4 service has almost exactly the same route as the old Limehouse Hole ferry that ran from Horn Stairs.

Some of the long length of the causeway still has a layer of stones that would have provided the hard surface to walk down to catch your boat:

I visited Horn Stairs and Cuckold’s Point in January, and this was probably the left over of some New Year’s Eve celebrations:

Returning to the story of the Miller and King John, one of the rights allegedly granted to the Miller was the right to hold a fair in Charlton.

Whatever the truth in the story of the Miller and King, a fair was held each year, on St. Luke’s Day, the 18th of October, and the following article from The Sun on the 20th of October, 1846 hints at the antiquity of the fair, and also provides a good overview of the event.

There is also a reference to Cuckold’s Point towards the end of the article, which I have highlighted in bold:

“HORN FAIR – This scene of popular amusement was held yesterday, according to ancient custom, in the healthful and pleasant village of Charlton.

In former times it was generally distinguished by riot and obscenity. Some of the worst class in London made parties to carry out the vulgar joke of cornuted husbands and wives (cornuted means to bear or have horns).

Horn Fair (the common name) is now changed to Charlton Fair, and the visitors, more enlightened that their ancestors, seldom indulge in those disorderly transactions which bore the stigma of indecency. It was formerly a mart for various forms of utensils made of horn, and tradition ascribes the origin to King John. An armour carried out by that licentious and infamous Prince with the wife of an honest miller was the foundation for the fair. John, surprised by the enraged husband, would have perished under the uplifted dirk of the miller, had he not saved his life by promising to redress the injury. The compensation was a grant of land the miller could see westward from the top of his mill. Agreeable to the royal donation, a fair was to be held annually, on St.-Luke’s-day, for ever.

Such is the oral account of the fair from year to year, and there is, we believe, at the present day, an aquatic custom at Cuckold’s-point, where it is said the mill stood, which bears out the story. The waterman, as he passes the stairs, or landing place, frequently tells his fare that a spider is crawling on his hat. The person naturally takes it off his head, and then Old Charon, with a laugh, requests he will put it on again, having properly paid his respects to the Horns at Cuckold’s Point.”

Note in the above article that the mill is described as being at Cuckold’s Point, however the majority of references refer to the location being in Charlton, and that Cuckold’s Point, where horns were mounted on a pole, was the place furthest west that the Miller could see from his place in Charlton.

The article also mentions that Horn Fair was held on St. Luke’s Day. The connection with St. Luke comes from ecclesiastical art, where St. Luke is often painted with an Ox, an example being this early 18th century print which shows St. Luke seated at a desk, with a winged ox with horns, behind him.

© The Trustees of the British Museum Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

There are very many references to Horn Fare, including some which describe events such as the following from 1742:

“Monday being St. Luke’s Day, a large Body of Cuckolds, both real and reputed, attended the King, the Miller, and his Wife, from the Sun Yard in Bishopsgate-street, to Horn Fair, held at Charlton in Kent, according to annual Custom.”.

In the 18th century, the Press Gang took advantage of Horn Fair, as this report from the 27th of October, 1746 explains:

“Last Saturday Night a large Press Gang, with Horns on, and Music playing before them, came through Greenwich, Deptford and Rotherhithe, &c. from Horn Fair, which drew a great many Sailors out of their Retreats to see the Procession, several of whom were pressed for his Majesty’s Service, and sent directly on board the Tenders in the River.”

The stairs today look almost like archaeological remains, washed from under layers of mud and sand by a strong tide, a bit like Seahenge, discovered in Norfolk in 1998. I checked on the Historic England directory, and the stairs are not listed, and it is unclear who, if anyone, is responsible for these features. Sadly, they will probably continue to erode away. A great loss for future generations.

Temporary structures were erected for Horn Fair, and we can get a glimpse of these from reports about the fair, including one from 1819 where there was an unexpected heavy snow fall, which caused much damage to the fair, including temporary structures for “The Freemasons Tavern” and “The Crown and Anchor”, which had apparently been “fitted up with great splendor , and the proprietor had omitted to take down his lamps and lustres” – which along with bottles, crockery, furniture etc. were all badly damaged by the snow.

The Horn Fair was abolished in 1872. By then Charlton had ceased to be the “healthful and pleasant village of Charlton“, and was being rapidly developed.

Horn Fair did not fit in with the Victorian narrative of improvement, and riotous assemblies such as fairs, were seen as a threat to those living nearby, to law and order, and to the social structures of the time.

In the Morning Advertiser on the 27th of February, 1872, in between lists of the prices of coal, hops, potatoes, the cattle market, and an article listing the days of the arrivals of the mail from Australia, New Zealand, the Falkland Islands, Mexico, Egypt (all symbols of a new Victorian London), there was a brief article reporting on the official abolition of the Horn Fair at Charlton and the Blackheath Fair, both of which had “survived all other suburban pleasure fairs”.

Chalk on the foreshore at Cuckold’s Point, left over from a time when chalk was used to build a flat platform on which barges could be grounded:

The wooden steps of Horn Stairs. The condition of the individual steps seems to get worse with height, with those at the very top appearing to be in very poor condition. I assume this is because those at the top are much more open to the atmosphere, are washed by the river rather than being covered, and suffer more wave action.

Horn Stairs and Cuckold’s Point are wonderful places to take in the river, views across to Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs (but walk down the stairs at your own risk !!).

It is a place with a long history, shared with the history of the river, and a connection with a Miller and King in Charlton, and a historic fair held in the “pleasant village of Charlton“, which does still have a Hornfair Road near the original location of the fair

What ever the truth of the story of the Miller, his Wife and King John, it is a fascinating part of London’s long history, and tells much about life in London over the centuries.

alondoninheritance.com

Trig Lane Stairs and Thames Foreshore Erosion

10 Replies

Trig Lane Stairs lead down to the Thames foreshore, just to the east of the Millennium Bridge. Today, the stairs connect the foreshore with the walkway that now runs along the edge of the river, with apartments and offices between the river and Upper Thames Street.

Back in 1949 it was a very different place, a mix of wartime bomb damage and with many of the warehouses remaining from the time when this section of the river was busy with the movement of goods between barges and warehouses.

This is one of my father’s photos from 1949. The wooden stairs of Trig Lane Stairs lead down to the foreshore, warehouses either side with an open space between (not bomb damage, but an open space for movement of goods), and one of my father’s friends standing on the stairs:

I took the following photo from the south bank of the river. To the right of the Millennium Bridge, along the wall that runs alongside the river, you can see a dark rectangle, which is the entrance to Trig Stairs through the river wall, and the wooden stairs to the foreshore can just be seen below the gap:

As with the edge of the Thames through most of London, this area has changed dramatically in the 74 years between the two photos.

The warehouses have been replaced with new buildings, with a single block covering the space behind the stairs and along where several warehouses once stood.

Walking along the edge of the river from the east, and the Trig Lane Stairs can be seen in the following photo, just behind the group of people on the foreshore:

The entrance to Trig Lane Stairs in 2023:

The stairs go up, before going down to the foreshore are an indication of the height of the river wall now needed to prevent any flooding at times of exceptionally high tide.

Once over the stairs, we can get a view of the wooden stairs going down to the foreshore:

And this was the same view in 1949:

In 1949 the warehouses were still in use, and the loaded barges which can be seen in the background are probably holding goods that are waiting to be moved to the warehouses as these were mostly used for import.

According to the 1953 edition of “London Wharves and Docks”, published by Commercial Motor, the warehouse to the left of the stairs in my father’s photo was the warehouse of Crown and Horseshoe Wharf, which traded in general goods, and specialised in canned goods and chemicals. The warehouse had storage space for 100,000 cubic feet of goods.

The warehouse on the right of the stairs was Sunlight Wharf, owned by LEP Transport, and in 1953 was described as “premises particularly suited for storage of canned goods, having large basement accommodation at average low temperature”.

One of my photos is of the last days of Sunlight Wharf and is in my post “Baynard’s Castle, A Roman Monument And The Last Working Crane In the City”.

The following extract from the 1951 edition of the OS map shows Trig Lane Stairs just below the centre of the map, at the end of Trig Lane (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

According to “A Dictionary of London” by Henry Harben, the first mention of the name was as Trigge Lane in the 1603 edition of Stow’s Survey of London, and by 1677 it was Trigg Lane.

The first mention of the stairs was by John Strype, who published a new, expanded version of Stow’s Survey of London in 1720. Strype’s description of the stairs and lane was “Trig Stairs, so called from the Stairs on the Water side, which is indifferently well supplied by Watermen. The Lane is pretty open, reasonably well built and inhabited”.

Henry Harben states that the name came from John Trigge, the owner of property around the lane and stairs, and in the following centuries, the name has changed from Trigge to Trig. The “London Encyclopedia” (Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert) also repeats the source of the name, and that “the Trigge family were local residents in the 14th and 15th centuries”.

The street Trig Lane has all but disappeared. It no longer runs from Upper Thames Street down to the stairs. Development over the last few decades has obliterated the original route of the street, but the name remains in an east – west street, which is mainly an access route to the rear of one of the buildings that now faces onto the river.

Having photos from 1949 and 2023, looking down from the stairs to the foreshore allows comparison of the foreshore, 74 years apart.

The following photo is an extract from the 1949 photo, looking at the area where a number of wooden structures can be seen:

I have labeled what I assume is the top of the groyne line on the right. The groyne line is shown in the 1951 OS map, and apart from a gap opposite the stairs, it runs along the foreshore, a little distance out from the embankment.

The groyne line was probably a wooden wall used to retain the foreshore and create a reasonably flat surface on wich barges could be positioned and their cargo unloaded into the warehouses.

I have also labeled wooden posts that appear to be retaining a plank. There is a similar plank to the left and these two may have been where the groyne line returned to the river wall, or could have formed the edge to a causeway that ran out from the bottom of the stairs.

Looking at the same view today, and we can see just how much of the foreshore has eroded in the last seven decades:

The groyne on the right, the top of which was visible in 1949 has now disappeared. The groyne on the left which was just below the foreshore is now fully exposed.

We can also see the wooden posts which were once retaining the planks along the edge of the causeway.

Comparing these two photos shows that at the location of the groynes, the foreshore has eroded a good two to three feet.

The Thames foreshore is a very fluid space, in all senses of the word.

Trig Lane and the stairs date from the 17th century, and are probably much older and even if the name Trig dated from around that time, there were probably stairs here much earlier as stairs were such an important part of access between the land and the river, and along this part of the river, there has been port infrastructure for so many centuries.

The London Encyclopedia has the same view as it states that the stairs were earlier known as Fish Wharf.

Excavation at Trig Lane between 1974 and 1976, prior to major development of the area revealed remarkable remains of the medieval waterfront with significant wooden revetments and other infrastructure of the port between the late 13th and mid-15th centuries.

The following is an extract from William Morgan’s map of London from 1682, and shows Trigg Stairs. To the left of Trigg Stairs is Paul’s Wharf which also had a set of stairs. I do not know whether it was an artistic interpretation of the scene, or whether it was fact, but the stairs by Paul’s Wharf had a large cluster of watermen’s boats, but none at Trigg Stairs:

What I love above Thames stairs is not just the physical structure, but the stories you can find about what happened at the stairs. Just small glimpses, but they help with an understanding of what life was like at the boundary between river and City.

For example, from the Newcastle Courant on the 15th of July, 1721:

“Last Monday, Mr. Hargrave, who sometime ago killed one Capt. Wilkes, a half Pay Officer in Racket Court, Fleet Street, and fled, and coming off the water at Trig Stairs, drew his sword upon the Waterman, without any provocation, and stabbed him very dangerously in the Breast, for which he and his Companion were forthwith seized, and carried before the Lord Mayor, who committed them to Wood Street Compter”.

And from the Caledonian Mercury on the 1st of July, 1728:

“On Tuesday in the afternoon, a Barge Man was struck down by lightening as he was going up a ladder at Trig Stairs; and falling into the River, was drowned before any help could be got”.

From the Kentish Weekly Post on the 24th of January, 1759:

“A Journeyman Carpenter crossing the water from Trig Stairs, being a little in liquor, and imagining he was near the shore, jumped out of the boat and was drowned”.

The Reading Mercury reported on the 28th of July, 1783, that:

“The lighters of Mr. Rodbard, at Trig Stairs, Thames Street, having been lately frequently robbed, a guard was appointed to overlook them; and early yesterday morning three persons were discovered filling the corn into sacks, who being fired at by the guard, one of them was killed; the others immediately rowed off in a boat which they had stolen for the occasion, to Pepper Alley Stairs, where they escaped, leaving the body in the boat.”

The London Morning Herald reported on the 13th of October, 1837, that:

“Yesterday evening an inquest was held in the King’s Arms, Queenhithe, before W. Payne (City Coroner), on view of the body of Joseph Colcourt, a lighterman. It appeared from evidence that the deceased was in company with a boy bringing a barge down the river, on Wednesday morning last, about three o’clock, and had arrived alongside Trig Stairs, Queenhithe, when the barge struck against another which was moored off the stairs, and deceased, who was at the time standing on the gunwale, was, in consequence of the concussion, precipitated overboard, and sunk immediately. The boy made what efforts he could at the time to save him, but they were ineffectual. The tide was running down very strong, and it was impossible to render assistance. The body of the deceased was found next morning near to the spot where he fell in. Verdict – Accidental Death.”

Whilst all these stories are of assault, theft and accidental death (as today, the press only report the bad news), they are a common theme to all Thames stairs, and show the dangers of working on the river, of crossing the river, crime on the river, children also working in such dangerous conditions etc.

Standing at the stairs today, it is hard to imagine a guard firing and killing one of those trying to steal corn from barges moored by the stairs.

In Morgan’s map of London from 1682, the stairs were spelt Trigg, but by the time of Rocque’s map of London in 1746, the last “g” had been dropped, and they were just Trig Stairs, as they remain today.

It is interesting how place names change, and I suspect that it was usually a gradual simplification of the name, so the stairs started with the name of a local land owner as Trigge, then Trigg and finally Trig, so the name ends with a spelling that more accurately mirrors how the name is pronounced.

The groynes today still seem to form a boundary between the water and the foreshore at a typical low tide:

I assume that the rubble behind the groyne may have been used as infill to build up the foreshore on the land side of the groyne to create a platform where barges could be moored on some reasonably level ground.

And today we can also see where the eastern groyne ends, there is a gap where the causeway would have extended, and the wooden posts along the side of the causeway now project above the surface. It could also have been where the groynes returned to the river wall. This shows just how much erosion the foreshore has suffered in the last 70 years:

View along the foreshore to the west:

And to the east – the large brick building at the end of the run of modern buildings is the only warehouse that remains from the pre-war period:

In the Port of London Authority book: “Access to the River Thames. A Port of London Authority Guide, Steps, Stairs and Landing Places on the Tidal Thames” (published around 1995), Trig Lane Stairs is listed as having 9 stone steps and 18 wood steps, and that the condition was bad.

The stairs today have 16 steps. The stairs in the 1949 photo are longer as they went into the recess in the wall, so I do wonder if the stairs at the time of the PLA survey were the same as in my father’s photo, as they would probably have been in bad condition having been exposed to decades of Thames tides washing over them.

The PLA listing confirms that the stairs were in use in 1708, and at the time of the survey they were not in use.

The stairs today are in good condition, and whilst probably not in use as a landing place, they provide access to the foreshore:

The following photo shows the view across the river to Tate Modern, the old Bankside Power Station:

My father did take photos across the river from the top of the stairs at different times to the photos of Trig Lane Stairs.

The first shows dates from 1953 and shows the new Bankside Power Station when the first half had been completed and was in operation. The original power station is on the left, where the parallel rows of chimneys can be seen. I wrote about the view, along with other photos in the post Building Bankside Power Station.

And this view from 1949 shows the original power station on the left, and the Phoenix Gas Works on the right. I wrote about this view, along with a wider view of Bankside in the post A Bankside Panorama In 1949 And 2017:

Trig Stairs are in good condition, but the same cannot be said for the remains of the wooden structures on the foreshore, the groynes and the possible edges to a causeway leading out from the base of the stairs.

I suspect that erosion of the foreshore may have been speeding up over the last few decades, as the groynes and platform they protected are now not needed and are therefore not maintained, and that there are no obstructions along the foreshore or the river that would have slowed down water passing over the foreshore (for example, barges on the river and moored on the foreshore).

I doubt whether the remaining wooden structures below the Trig Lane Stairs will be there in another 74 years time.

alondoninheritance.com

Limehouse Hole Stairs and the Breach

17 Replies

Limehouse Hole Stairs are one of the very old stairs between the land and the river. They are towards the eastern edge of Limehouse, in an area once known as Limehouse Hole, where the river turns south on its journey around the Isle of Dogs.

Today, the stairs are a wide and well maintained set of steps leading down from the walkway alongside the river, towards a very roughly rectangular area which is accessible when the tide is low:

On the foreshore at low tide:

The foreshore at Limehouse Hole Stairs has large sandy patches along with plenty of stone and brick that has found its way into the river from the buildings and infrastructure that once lined the Thames.

If you look closely, it is interesting how similar items can be found in lines along the foreshore. They were left when the tide went out, and form a line across the sand. I have no idea of the mechanism that leaves them in a line rather than randomly scattered, and on the foreshore at Limehouse Hole Stairs, a line of green glass / plastic / minerals (not sure what they were), was stretched across the sand:

The Port of London Authority list of the steps, stairs and landing places on the tidal Thames has very little information on Limehouse Hole Stairs, just recording that they were in good condition, with stone and concrete steps and in use. The PLA had not recorded whether the stairs were in use in their two key recording years of 1708 and 1977.

The stairs are old, but the stairs we see today are very different to what was there prior to the redevelopment of the area in recent decades, which I will show later in the post.

The following extract from the 1949 revision of the OS map shows the location of Limehouse Hole Stairs (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“)..

There is an area of foreshore that dries when the tide is low shown mainly within the red circle. Limehouse Pier extends into the river. Follow the pier back to land, and in the corner is Limehouse Hole Stairs.

You can also see in the above map, a line forming two sides of a square, with the river walls forming the other two sides. The two lines running across the dried foreshore in the map were a wooden surround, parts of which can still be seen today, as I will show later.

I will come to the relevance of the blue circle later in the post.

This area has a complicated naming history.

Written references to the stairs date back to the early 19th century, although these do not explicitly name Limehouse Hole Stairs. A typical advert in February 1807 was for the Schooner Anne which was for sale and could be seen “lying at Limehouse Hole, opposite the stairs”.

The name Limehouse Hole is also a bit of a mystery. It may refer to a form of small harbour or dock, although I find this unlikely as the larger Limekiln Dock is within the area traditionally known as Limehouse Hole.

I did wonder if the name referred to a hole in the river, perhaps a particularly deep part of the Thames, however in the area known as Limehouse Hole, the bed of the river is of a depth that is normal for much of this stretch of the river, typically around 6 metres deep at the lowest astronomical tide.

There is though a strange depression in the bed of the river not far to the west, in the middle of the river opposite the entrance to Limehouse Dock, where the river descends from a depth of 5.5 metres to a depth of 11.4 metres, all within a small area of the Thames.

To add to naming confusion, if we look at Rocque’s map from 1746, there are stairs in the rough location of Limehouse Hole Stairs, however Rocque calls then Limekiln Stairs, and he also names this stretch of the river Limekiln Holes rather than Limehouse Hole, so perhaps the name refers to some aspect of the Limekiln industry, and as this industry declined, the name changed from Limekiln to Limehouse Hole.

The Survey of London does though state that the name Limehouse Hole was in use for this section of the river by the seventeenth century, so perhaps Rocque was confused with the Limekilns and Limekiln Dock, or in the 18th century there were different names in use.

The extract from Rocque’s map is shown below:

The first references to the full name of Limehouse Hole Stairs start to appear around 1817, and there are multiple references in the 1820s onwards. All the usual events that make their way into the papers – accidents on the river, ships for sale, fires in the buildings by the stairs, rowing competitions, and tables of rates for Watermen to charge to row passengers along the river.

In the OS map shown above, there is a pier coming out from Limehouse Hole stairs. The earliest reference I can find to the pier dates from 1843, when there was an article in the November 5th edition of The Planet recording a court case, where “On Tuesday, Jonathan Bourne, a waterman, and one of the proprietors of the floating-pier at Limehouse Hole stairs, appeared to answer a charge of carrying passengers in his boat on Sunday, in violation of the rights and privileges of William Banks, the Sunday ferryman. The real question in dispute between the parties was as to the right of the watermen owning the floating pier to convey passengers to and from the Watermen’s Company steamers which stop there. When the tide is low there is not sufficient water for the steamers to come alongside the outer barge of the pier, and the watermen row the passengers to the steamers, and vice versa, but no money is taken.”

From the article, it appears that the pier was owned by a group of watermen. The article also shows how watermen were regulated, and had specific rights covering what they could do, and when. I did not know that the Watermen’s Company ran steamers on the river. This must have been a far more efficient way of conveying passengers along the river, rather than rowing as watermen in previous years would have done. Also, an early version of the Thames Clippers that provide the same service today.

The pier seems to have disappeared by the 1860s, as in the East London Observer on the 1st of May, 1869, there was a report on a public meeting of the parishioners of Limehouse “to consider what action should be taken in obtaining the construction of a pier on the Thames, for the convenience of the inhabitants of Limehouse”, and that “there were many persons who would far rather go to the city by boat than either rail or bus”.

A new pier was needed because “the old pier was never under the management of the Thames Conservators, but under that of the watermen, who let it go to ruin”.

A new pier was built in 1870 and this second pier lasted until 1901, when it was removed for the construction of Dundee Wharf, and a couple of years later, the London County Council built the third pier on the site.

Getty Images have some photos of this third iteration of the pier, with the following photos showing the pier stretching out across the foreshore, with Dundee Wharf in the background, on the left. Click on the arrows to the sides of each photo to see all images of the pier in the gallery. (If you have received this post via email, the photo may not be visible due to the way code embedding works. Go to the post here https://alondoninheritance.com/ to see the photo).

Embed from Getty Images

The photos show the wooden surround which was shown in the earlier OS map. The photo helps with the purpose of this surround, as it presumably held back a raised area of the foreshore to create a reasonably level space for barges and lighters to be moored.

The Survey of London states that this third pier “was removed by the PLA in 1948, but the stairs and Thames Place, though closed off in 1967, survived until 1990”. The survival of the stairs until 1990 presumably refers to the version of the stairs prior to that which we see today.

The result of multiple piers, along with the wooden surround to the area, means that there are still remains on the foreshore which we can see today:

Including plenty of loose timbers which may have been washed here from other locations along the river:

And when the tide is low, we can still see the wooden surround which once enclosed a flat area of the foreshore as can be seen in the Getty photo above:

The following 1914 revision of the OS map shows Limehouse Hole Stairs and the pier, and also shows Limehouse Hole Ferry running across the river from the pier. This was a ferry to the opposite site of the river which landed at Horn Stairs, and which provided a fast way of crossing the river, rather than having to travel to either the Rothehithe or Blackwall Tunnels (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

The following photo from Britain from Above shows the site in 1953 when the pier had been removed. I have marked Limehouse Hole Stairs, which at the time was simply wooden steps leading down to the foreshore. To get a closer view, the photo can be found here.

The pier had been removed just a few years before the above photo. Limekiln Dock runs inland towards the top of the photo, and, along with the shape of the river wall where Limehouse Hole Stairs is located, is the only feature that survives today. Almost every single building has disappeared.

Although Limehouse Hole Pier has gone, there is another pier, a short distance to the south, where the Canary Wharf pier can be found today, which provides access to the Thames Clippers, providing a similar function to the old steamers that once docked at Limehouse Hole pier:

Looking north from Canary Wharf pier, and there is another feature that survives. In the following photo, looking towards the location of Limehouse Hole Stairs, there is a straight row of metal piling, followed by a brick wall:

With a closer look, we can see that the brick wall turns inwards:

Returning to the 1949 revision of the OS map, I have marked the curved brick wall in the above photo, by a blue circle in the following map:

The curved brick wall was at the northern side of the entrance to a dock that ran alongside Lower Aberdeen Wharf.

The wall today looks as if it continues in land and I would love to know how much of the old dock, and the walls that once surrounded the dock, survive under the modern walkway that has been built as part of the redevelopment of the area.

We can also see the dock in an aerial photo, again from the Britain from Above web site, and dating from 1938:

I have highlighted the corner wall we can see today in an extract from the above photo, and have also marked the stairs and pier:

As well as Limehouse Hole Stairs, the other part of the title of the post is “the Breach”.

Much of the Isle of Dogs, and indeed much of the land alongside the Thames, is low lying, and over the centuries, it has been very common for there to be floods during high tides.

As London grew, and trade along the river developed, land was reclaimed, and river walls were built, but until the 20th century, these walls were often not of the height and strength we see today.

Nor far south of Limehouse Hole Stairs is an area of land where the river wall was breached, and was flooded, or in a state of marsh, for very many years. This was known as “The Breach”, and was shown on maps, including Rocque’s 1746 map, where it can be seen with a road running around what appears to be an area of marsh:

There is also a water feature in the above map called the “Poplar Gut”, and both this and the Breach were mentioned in an article in the East London Observer in 1903, when “Pepys in his diary under date of 23rd March, 1660, mentions that he saw the great breach which the late high water had made, to the loss of many thousands of pounds to the people about Limehouse. In Gascoyne’s map, the spot is marked by the explanation ‘Old Breach, the Foreland, now a place to lay timber’ and ‘The Breach’ is applied to what was more recently known as the Poplar Gut”.

The reason why the Breach happened where it did was down to the natural erosion of the land by the river at this particular point in its meander around the Isle of Dogs.

In time, and without any human intervention, the Thames would have cut through the northern section of the Isle of Dogs, leaving the part of the river around the south of the Isle of Dogs as an Oxbow Lake. The Thames has made subtle changes to its course over the centuries, and it is only in recent years that we have effectively put the river into a concrete and banked channel, and limited the natural forces of erosion.

There are also stories of people digging out ballast from the foreshore around where the Breach occurred, which would have contributed to the flood.

The view from Greenwich would have looked very different if the river had continued with the Breach.

in the quote from Pepys, he mentions that the Breach is now a place to lay timber, and this would have been a good place, as timber was often kept in a wet environment to stop the wood drying out and to allow gradual conditioning before sale.

In a parish map from 1703, the area is marked as a place to lay timber:

In Rocque’s map, there is an inland area of water called the Poplar Gut and in the above map it is labelled as the Breach. This was part of the area that flooded when the river breached the bank along the river.

This must have been a significant area of reasonably deep water, as on the 10th of June, 1748, it was reported that “On Saturday last, in the evening as Mr. George Newman, son of Mr. Newman, an eminent Linen Draper in Whitechapel, was washing himself in Poplar Gut, he was unfortunately drowned, although all possible means were used by a companion he was along with, to save him, to the inexpressible grief of his parents, and all who knew him”.

The Breach lasted for some years, and was still shown in the 1816 edition of Smith’s New Plan of London, which also included the recently completed West India Docks, which had been built over the Poplar Gut:

The Breach would soon be reclaimed after the publication of the above map, as the size and number of docks grew on the Isle of Dogs, and industry expanded along the edge of the river (the West India Docks and the channel across the Isle of Dogs will be the subject of future posts).

Nothing remains to be seen of the Breach today, although it was to the south of where the Canary Wharf pier is today, in the following view:

And almost as a reminder of when it was impossible to cross where the water of the Thames had breached the bank, during my visit, the path was closed, but this time for maintenance, rather than a flood:

This small area of Limehouse has changed dramatically over the last few decades, however there are still places where we can see traces of the previous industrial. docks and riverside infrastructure.

Wooden planks still poking through the foreshore, although being gradually eroded, a brick wall running along the river’s edge, and location and names of the stairs that bridge the boundary between land and the river.

You can find links to all my posts on Thames stairs in the map at this link.

alondoninheritance.com

A London Inheritance

A Private History of a Public City

Tag Archives: Thames Stairs

Essex Street Water Gate and Stairs

Bell Watergate Stairs – Woolwich

York Buildings Stairs and the Watergate

Two Tree Island – The Last Landing Place on the Thames

Hanover Stairs and The Ship – Rotherhithe

The Prospect of Whitby and Pelican Stairs

Iron Gate Stairs

Horn Stairs, Cuckold’s Point and Horn Fair

Trig Lane Stairs and Thames Foreshore Erosion

Limehouse Hole Stairs and the Breach

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: