Comments on: Wapping Stairs

By: Caroline Graham

Caroline Graham — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 18:28:31 +0000

My ancestor (b. est 1670) Thomas Trumball’s first children were born in Queens Head Alley, Wapping (gone from maps since abt. 1870), which led into Meeting House Alley which still exists.

On my pursuit to find out more about this long-gone alley I find from old maps that it probably led onto Wapping New Stairs.

I read on Wikipedia that stairs were often built adjacent to a public house and it would seem that the pub on New Stairs then could have been a Queens Head, although I can find no reference to it.

Thanks for the pic of Wapping New Stairs. It’s wonderful to see it, and yours is the only pic I can find, so your recording of it is so worthwhile.

By: Edward BAGLIN

Edward BAGLIN — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 20:49:35 +0000

I was intrigued by Wapping Stairs as my grandfather,Sidney Skeat ,who was in the Home Guard had to watch over” the stairs” in WW2.
Looking at these pictures, guarding this location must of been pretty frightening especially during the height of the Blitz.

By: ALAN ADAMS

ALAN ADAMS — Sat, 24 Jan 2015 17:31:51 +0000

I have only just come across ‘Spitalfields Life’ and find it very interesting as I was born in Bethnal Green and brought up in the East End.
The item on Wapping was particularly of interest as my Adams family were in Wapping for over 100 years from about 1780. Jonathan Adams ,my Gt.Grandfather [x3] ,was born in Hackney and was apprenticed to a Wapping waterman. After finishing his apprenticeship he plied his trade from Wapping New Stairs and lived in Knights Court a short walk away behind St.John’s church. He was also a retained fireman for London Assurance.
His brother John was also known to another Wapping resident, Captain William Bligh and sailed with him on the notorious Breadfruit Voyage to Tahiti and after the mutiny never returned but established, as the last remaining Englishman, the community which still exists on Pitcairn Island.
More details are available on the website dividedbythebounty.com

By: Nat Cohen

Nat Cohen — Tue, 09 Dec 2014 15:41:32 +0000

I saw that Jane had mentioned our crowdfunding project with UCL above – please do get in touch with us if you are interested in the history and archaeology of the watermans stairs! There’s more information about the project here: http://www.thamesdiscovery.org/frog-blog/london-s-lost-waterway

By: Gary Arber

Gary Arber — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 17:06:44 +0000

Probably the last remaining part of Dickensian London.
Gary

By: Jane B

Jane B — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 16:47:15 +0000

“mossy old steps that glistened with the slap of waves” 🙂

And before that a modern love story…

“When Helen Mirren lost her ring throwing her grass clippings over the river wall from her Wapping garden, it was Steve [the Mud God] who found it for her in the river…”
http://spitalfieldslife.com/2010/09/28/steve-brooker-mudlark/

Truly, it’s a stairway to another world 🙂

The Sands of Time shift, but what is lost at The Tower in terms of foreshore playground is still daily revealed at Wapping.

Wapping beach — accessed via New Crane Stairs — discovered by the lucky few 🙂

https://www.flickr.com/photos/24792024@N00/9334091988/ — “Difficult to believe that this lovely little deserted beach is only one and a half miles from Tower Bridge”

Below, the PLA’s Thames tide-tables, just in case any Londoners want some winter sea, sand and ‘frothy wave’ closer to home

http://www.pla.co.uk/Safety/Tide-Tables
_________________________________________________________

And if anyone need a particular excuse to go there, or is wondering what to do with any photos once they have…

‘The Watermen’s Bus-stop Project’
— headed up by the UCL Institute or Archaeology’s Gustav Milne
on behalf of the Thames Discovery Programme
http://vimeo.com/93836041 [from 0:33]
http://www.thamesdiscovery.org

And for inspiration [for He is our source of many images and words that are to stay inside our heads forever 🙂 ] …

Peta Bridle’s dry-point etching, Wapping Old Stairs
“To reach the stairs you have a to go along a tiny passage to the side of the Town of Ramsgate. Originally, the stairs were a ferry point for people wishing to catch a boat along the river. I think they are quite beautiful and I like to see the marks of the masons’ tools, still left on the stones after all this time.”

http://spitalfieldslife.com/2013/09/05/more-drypoint-etchings-by-peta-bridle/

By: Jane B

Jane B — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 16:31:10 +0000

“And as the notes drifted from the boy’s mouth, so they entered his mother’s heart and took her back to her Past, back down to Wapping High Street and those mossy old steps that glistened with the slap of waves, where she stood, intoxicated, awaiting the shadow of the row boat and the grin of her man and the rough hand that led her up the steep incline, past the laughing singing voices from the Town of Ramsgate, over the cobbled road to the ancient wall of St John’s graveyard, where, giggling through the sacred dark they stumbled towards the broad trunk of a chestnut tree, and there, under the eyes of the Dead, they created life.”

http://spitalfieldslife.com/2013/12/27/song-of-the-long-gone/
— “this haunting vignette by Sarah Winman author of When God Was A Rabbit”

By: Mirabel Osler

Mirabel Osler — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 15:43:34 +0000

I was born in London in 1925 and though I’ve lived abroad and now live in Shropshire, I am increasingly homesick for the city as I haven’t been for 3 years. I love to linger over your superb photos, and although I came from Chelsea (fire watching for incendiaries on Battersea Power Station), I sometimes wish for a sight of old Chelsea before it became the posh place it’s become.
However a glimpse of the Prospect of Whitby, where we used to go sometimes, cheered me up.
Thank you.

By: Pauline Taylor

Pauline Taylor — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 14:32:02 +0000

I love these photos of the river and Wapping, thank you so much GA. I know that I have mentioned before that I probably have water from the River Thames mixed with the blood in my veins as I have so many ancestors on my family tree who were watermen, ferrymen and shipwrights not to mention the one who kept the pub in Wapping High Street. My earliest waterman ancestor was William Tero, who appears in a Transcript of the Admiralty muster or census of the Thames watermen 2 Feb 1628/9 at Lambeth. William was then 19 years old.

By: Joanne Lukacher

Joanne Lukacher — Mon, 08 Dec 2014 12:56:40 +0000

Evocative photographs. Readers who are intrigued by the spaces might also want read the Anne Perry crime novels set in Victorian London. One protagonist, William Monk, is a Wapping policeman and, later, head of the Thames River Crimes unit.