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In Old Deptford

July 5, 2022
by the gentle author

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In Albury St

Today Contributing Writer, the distinguished historian, Gillian Tindall goes in search of old Deptford

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In my distant childhood, Deptford, with its unfair resonance of ‘debt,’ figured to the outside world as a place of sinister poverty. On that south side of the Thames, Bermondsey and Rotherhithe sounded faintly exciting, with overtones of putting out to sea. Greenwich, just downriver, with its park, Palace and College, was a different world. But Deptford, lost in between, lodged in many people’s minds, and in children’s stories, as a classic London slum. Nor, of course, was this image helped by the severe bombing it suffered in World War Two nor by the dreary estates built by post-war planners.

Yet Deptford, long ago, was a place of fertile green water-meadows, facing the Thames and adjacent to a creek. Here Henry VIII established his Royal Dockyard, in the days when he was a popular young sovereign rather than an obese tyrant. Ships built in Deptford went out all over the world for the next three-and-a-half centuries. By Shakespeare’s time, the scattered country village that had been medieval Deptford had expanded into a riverside settlement. Well-to-do Londoners came down by river to drink there on summer evenings. The fact that one such evening ended in the mysterious death of Shakespeare’s fellow playwright ‘Kit’ Marlow gives a false impression – Deptford was the Maidenhead or Henley of that time, a gentlemanly place to reside, and remained so for the next two centuries.

Marlowe lies buried somewhere in the flowery churchyard of the ancient parish church of St Nicholas. Two generations later, a regular attender at the church was John Evelyn, land owner, man of letters, diarist and courtier (the equivalent of a modern high-ranking civil servant). Through marriage, Evelyn had acquired Sayes Court Manor House, the largest house in Deptford, and from here he went back and forth to visit Charles II in Whitehall palace, often on naval business. Yet wealth and privilege could not protect against an all-too-common grief, also buried in St Nicholas churchyard are three of Evelyn’s children who died young, including one particularly bright little boy over whom his father mourned much. Evelyn wrote in his diary of ‘our extreme sorrow,’ and that ‘This evening, after the service, was my baby buried near the tower with his brothers. All my dear children.’

Evelyn, a great horticulturalist, laid out a splendid garden at Sayes Court, with evergreen and hawthorn hedges and new tree-species imported from abroad. He was one of the first to understand the role of trees in keeping the environment clean and he advised a mass planting operation across London – advice which, unfortunately, was not taken. Late in life, when he and his wife had retired to the Evelyn family country seat at Wootton, in Surrey, he rented his house and gardens at Deptford to a series of tenants, most notably to Peter the Great, the Russian Czar, who wanted to study English ship-building in particular and English life in general. Peter the Great, in spite of some brutally medieval habits towards his enemies, real or supposed, saw himself as a great innovator and the one who was going to drag Russia into the West and the modern age. He was responsible for founding St Petersburg on the western edge of his vast country, and employed European architects to design its palaces.

A statue of Peter the Great, looking oddly elongated in a heavy European coat and a tricorn hat, stands today on an elevated platform on the Thames path not far from the site of Sayes Court, beside a new estate overlooking the river and Deptford creek. Inexplicably, he is flanked by a dwarf and an ornate empty chair in which passing walkers love to sit. The inscription states that he arrived in England in January 1698 and stayed in Evelyn’s house for four months – ‘This monument is erected near the Royal ship-yard where Peter the Great studied English science of ship-building. The monument is a gift from the Russian people and commemorates the visit of Peter the Great to this country in search of knowledge and experience.’

But exactly what experience? It is not mentioned that, during the months he was at Sayes Court, Peter confirmed the common British perception of Russians as a barbaric, backward people by doing a great deal of damage both to the house and the garden. In particular, it is recorded he trashed a number of Evelyn’s carefully tended hedgerows by driving through them for fun in a barrow. The Russian oligarch as hate-figure is clearly not a new phenomenon in this country.

The Royal Dockyard declined in importance in the nineteenth century with the advent of large new warships too big for the Thames, and was closed in 1869. Various uses were found for it and by the twentieth century, when its Tudor vestiges were gradually destroyed or buried, its final use was as a paper-wharf for International Newspapers. Today, under the name ‘Convoys Wharf,’ it is scheduled for redevelopment with high tower blocks, in which few of the flats will be ‘affordable’ in any real sense.

A vestige of the Sayes Court garden does remain. In the mid-nineteenth century, when Deptford was being covered in small terrace houses for dockers, the Evelyn family, who still owned the land, gave a piece of it to the local authority to create a public garden. It survives today, though a refuge for drunks now. Better tended than it was a few years back when I first discovered it, the garden is currently on the World Monument Fund’s list of endangered spaces – presumably because of the looming Wharf development. In the centre of the garden, surrounded by railings, stands a giant mulberry tree, its knotted limbs trailing on the ground. I am sure it dates from John Evelyn’s own high summer of planting, and is another for the Gentle Author’s short list of ancient London mulberries.

Towards the end of Evelyn’s life, the old church was substantially rebuilt, and a new, more elegant one, St Paul’s, just off Deptford High St, offered extra space for the district’s expanding population. A few rows of fine town houses went up also, including Albury St which was built on land belonging to the Evelyn family and was called after their country retreat. Fine brick, and an elegant variety of porches decorated with cherubs, angels, fruit and flowers, made these houses fit homes for the sea-captains, ship-builders and Honourable Company men who were the new affluent middle class of Deptford.

One side of Albury St alone remains as a precious survival in a district that has seen so much destruction through war and bone-headed planning decisions. This enclave at least is now being carefully looked after, while what were once the wastelands of abandoned dockside uses are filling up with tall buildings. Like it or not, regret it or not, Deptford is being hauled into twenty-first century London.

Deptford Dockyard, 1775

Albury St

Entrance to the churchyard of St Nicholas, Deptford, where Christopher Marlowe is buried

St Nicholas, Deptford, dates from the twelfth century

Door to St Nicholas

Charnel House at St Nicholas

Graves at St Nicholas

St Paul’s church by Thomas Archer, c.1720

Manze’s in Deptford High St

Wellbeloved, Butcher & Grazier

In Deptford High St

In Deptford High St

In Deptford High St

In Deptford Market

In Deptford Market

In Deptford Market

Peter the Great by Sir Godfrey Kneller

Peter the Great at Deptford Creek by Mikhail Shemyakin

John Evelyn, engraving by T. Bragg after Sir Godfrey Kneller (Courtesy Wellcome Library)

John Evelyn’s Mulberry at Sayes Court Garden

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11 Responses leave one →
  1. July 5, 2022

    So well written and well researched. A fascinating and in-depth history of the area. My heart aches for the talented John Evelyn.

  2. Greg T permalink
    July 5, 2022

    “Manze’s in Deptford” – the Walthamstow High St one is closed, but it looks as though a buyer might be found – people were examining it very carefully, when I walked past it, yesterday (!)
    No mention of one of Deptford’s best pubs: The “Dog & Bell” in Prince St

  3. Graeme permalink
    July 5, 2022

    A shame that Wellbeloved closed last year after nearly 200 hundred years of serving meat to Deptford. Their meat pies were delicious.

  4. Frances Donnelly permalink
    July 5, 2022

    I really enjoyed Gillian Tindall’s wonderfully researched article about Deptford. I am a great admirer of Charles Nichol’s ‘The Reckoning,’ his account of the murder of Kit Marlow in Deptford, ‘a great reckoning in a little room’ as Shakespeare eloquently puts it. Nicholls’ book gives a vivid picture of the Elizabethan spy world, in which Kit Marlow may have been involved. Ms Tindall, by her comparison of Elizabethan Deptford with modern day Maidenhead does explain why he might have been there for a day’s pleasure- a mistake to automatically confuse modern and historic Deptford! This piece made me determined to see Sayes garden and magnificent mulberry tree.

  5. Cherub permalink
    July 5, 2022

    Peter and Joan is just the sort of shop I love raking through. There are always great finds and bargains to be had. I loved places like this when I was getting things together for my first home 37 years ago. I actually still have some things like kitchen jars!

  6. Marcia Howard permalink
    July 7, 2022

    A fascinating insight into Deptford’s past, and an interesting comparison to Maidenhead (in Berkshire) which was my married family home for 34 years. Maidenhead is also not the place it once was either!
    Love some of the pictures on this post, especially of the displays of fruit & veg, street life, the markets, and the wonderful statues

  7. Stella permalink
    August 19, 2022

    What makes me sad when enjoying all these wonderful articles by the gentle author is how much of the past we have lost…the destruction of majestic homes, beautiful gardens, the old ways of life….or am I looking through rose-tinted spectacles?

  8. Krz Mazeika permalink
    October 26, 2022

    Nice overview of Deptford’s remarkable history.
    Note
    Albury Street was originally named Union Street, commemorating year of completion having stated c.1704. Evelyn’s country seat is called Wotton.

  9. Sarah Leedam permalink
    October 28, 2022

    The house in Albury Street with the cherubs is for sale

  10. Angela Beverley permalink
    October 29, 2022

    Generations of my father’s family lived in Deptford (which I believe is named from Deep Ford), although pretty much all of that history has been bulldozed away in favour of the tower blocks. Several of them died in Greenwich Workhouse. One of the more notorious characters was Hannah Mary Cromarty, known as Annie. She was linked to the Stratton brothers who were convicted and hung for the murders of the Farrows at Chapmans Oil shop in the High Street. The transcript of the trial is on the Old Bailey website.

  11. Shaun permalink
    December 7, 2022

    Sarah Leedam, I may be able to help you out. Contact me if needed

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