This Sentence No Verb Rich Cochrane's Blog

Yesterday we walked the lower half of the Ravensbourne River in South East London, recording our impressions as we went. We began at Lewisham DLR station.

The Silk Mill

The car park at the back of Lewisham Tesco can be reached by Silk Mill Path, its name a clue that a mill had previously stood close to the site. The same theme has been picked up by the new Silkworks development of apartments close by, whose marketing material suggests it is positioning itself as a luxury development. But silk, as it turns out, wasn’t the first thing to be milled on this site.

The mill was made possible by the existence of the River Ravensbourne, one of four waterways that flow through this part of South-East London, eventually converging at Deptford Creek where they meet the Thames. In the middle ages corn mills lined the river; there are said to have been eleven in the area by the time of Domesday, but by Chaucer’s time steel was being produced here. This is an early example of the industrial revolution that was to gradually transform the English economy between the late fourteenth century and the Civil War.

It represented a gradual erosion of the dominance of farming which had been, for centuries, the only way to amass wealth. Indeed, the feudal system was predicated on the idea that wealth and land were more or less synonymous, but steadly the extractive, chemical and manufacturing industries became more advanced and demand grew for their products, both domestically and for export. Lewisham’s corn mill gave way to the demand for steel.

As the nearby Armoury Road reminds us, Lewisham steel was primarily used to make armour and other military equipment. We might imagine Chaucer’s knight equipped by just such a place. Yet the irony is that Chaucer’s knight represented a nostalgic image of a feudal world that was already beginning to show signs of stress. By Tudor times, capitalism was already clearly encroaching on the old order; it threatened the whole social heirarchy, for the power lords held over their vassals was entirely due to the unique capacity of land to generate wealth. The enclosures of the seventeenth century, which led to so much hardship and created such strong antipathy towards landlords, were the final stage of Renaissance industrialisation. They represented, in my view, the birth of the English Baroque.

In 1530 Henry VIII acquired the armoury along with the manorial land in which it stood, and it became part of the Royal Armoury at Greenwich, grinding steel to produce fine armour for the wealthy and powerful. This was a typical gesture of the period, an attempt to subsume these industries into the existing social order. Like the granting of monopolies, it temporarily brought the wealth they generated into the existing power-structure that Feudalism had produced. It was not, ultimately, to be successful.

Pastoral

This industrialisation, like the more famous one of the late eighteenth century, produced a deep anxiety. The medieval world-view was rigidly heirarchical, a Dantean cosmos of crystal spheres characterised by a divinely ordained, cyclic repetition. The turning-over of parts of the land to industry and the growing roles of the cities (especially London) were accompanied by growing economic power among the lesser gentry. All of this threatened to overturn the picture England had of itself.

The Tudor period has its own form of Romanticism to combat these worrying changes. With the English Renaissance of the early sixteenth century came a renewed study of the Latin classics, including Virgil. John Rocque’s 1745 map of the area shows a Free School close by, but grammar schools — which taught Latin grammar alongside literature, mathematics and theology — had been flourishing since the early reign of Henry VIII. At the time the earliest known examples of pastoral were Virgil’s Eclogues, which told of shepherds playing music and falling in love in an Arcadian paradise.

The renaissance of the pastoral genre may have begun with scholarly imitations of Virgil but it soon took on a life of its own in English literary culture. It spoke to the anxiety of the time, the sense that the middle ages (as we now call them) had slipped away, and with them a coherent world had also been lost to the chaos and terror of the Reformation and the especially tyrannical reigns of Henry and his daughter Mary.

The most famous examples appeared in the reign of Elizabeth: the most celebrated are perhaps Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar and The Faerie Queene, but the genre appears in Sydney and Shakespeare as well as countless less well-known poets. These are the sixteenth century’s equivalents of Blake, Wordsworth and Keats: they resist the contemporary by inventing a mythic, rural past, just lost, to which they can return in literature.

The Ravensbourne between Lewisham and Deptford

The Ravensbourne, half of whose course we walked and attempted to photograph yesterday, is in part a contemporary pastoral. Largely man-made, its course has been changed in the past century and it is almost entirely hemmed in by concrete. One exception is the section just below Armoury Mill, where the concrete has been replaced by low wooden supports holding the banks in place. The effect is more “natural”, like the landscape gardens of the early Romantic era. It’s a simulacrum of a natural environment — indeed, of a place of rural beauty.

In many ways this is no different from the other strips of suburban parkland that litter London outside Zone 1. As you walk north you pass a nice playground, a duckpond turned bright green with algae, a flower garden and a fountain spouting stagnant, yellowish water. It’s an odd, postmodern pastiche of several conflicting historical styles. The river has been formed into serpentines recalling Regent’s Park and its banks planted with studied naturalness; just a step away one can find formal gardens, tiny Versailles like icons of the Baroque. Other fixtures — railings, climbing frames — are self-consciously postmodern, brightly-coloured and formally simplistic. The building of the Stephen Lawrence Trust is an angular, sheared reincarnation of Le Corbusier clad in punched steel.

Some areas of our cities look like this because centuries of history have formed them. The Baroque, Romantic and contemporary rub together because they arrived at different times. This section of the Ravensbourne, despite its long history of human occupancy, is a recent invention. As industry became heavier in the late eighteenth century it moved downriver to Deptford Creek; water mills were no longer adequate for its needs. It was turned over to leisure only much later, in the post-war period. The railways had brought a population boom to the area and the Blitz had erased the traces of the rural in the area, and a sentimental pastoralism had tried to recreate something of them here.

St Paul’s and St Alfege’s

At Deptford itself the river runs through industrial estates to which we were unable to gain access; walkers tracing the river are forced away from it for a while. We passed through Deptford High Street to St Paul’s church, built by Thomas Archer, the architect of St John’s, Smith Square. Its interior bears a strong resemblance to the contemporary St Martin’s In The Fields by Gibbs, although on a rather more muted scale. It was one of the famous Queen Anne Churches.

This is English high Baroque, the exterior full of swooping curves and multiple levels, oddly-shaped balusters and clusters of classical ornament that would have made a Tudor schoolman shudder. Inside it is, like St Martin’s, tranquil; clear windows and white stone make it airy and are offset by dark wood. Corinthian columns carved in wood and Portland stone wryly echo one another.

Later in the walk we visited Hawksmoor’s only South London church, St Alfege’s, built on a medieval site and another commissioned as part of the Fifty New Churches project. Thomas Tallis is buried beneath it.

Deptford Creek

When we pick up the Ravensbourne on the north side of Deptford we are in a very different space. The Ravensbourne, Pool and the Quaggy have converged onto the creek, which is suddenly a working river. The landscape is uncompromisingly industrial, as it has been since at least the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII created one of the largest towns in England by establishing the Royal Dockyards there.

The area offers a sharp contrast to the equivalent wharves on the north side of the river. There gentrification and redevelopment have turned the area into a kind of live-in theme park of the industrial revolution. This is a different, perhaps a new kind of pastoral, a fantasy of an earlier, simpler world of high industrial capitalism. It’s the world of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a world dominated by hardware rather than software, the actual as opposed to the virtual.

Here in Deptford we might believe, smugly, we are cutting through that fantasy to a gritty reality. But here, too, we are authenticity tourists. The rusting iron hulks and oily water make us feel as if we’re in touch with a more solid reality. In truth, of course, we’re engaging in a fantasy. The Docklands Light Railway, which also follows the river, hoves back into view again. Its chief purpose is to transport workers from the suburbs to Canary Wharf, reminding us that we live in the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth.

Soon we come to the point at which the creek empties into the Thames. The narrow, riverine view we’ve had for the whole walk opens up into a huge, grey vista.

Lewisham to Catford Bridge

We walked the lower half of the Ravensbourne out of order. We started at Lewisham, walked up to the Thames and crossed to Greenwich for lunch at the excellent Greenwich Union pub. We then took the DLR back to Lewisham and walked south along the Ravensbourne to Catford Bridge station.

This second leg of the walk passes mainly through municipal parkland, and the same observations apply as downstream of Lewisham. It begins at a bridge on which is based Adhesive Specialities Limited; London has few art deco buildings and none, to my knowledge, as ugly as this one. In Ladywell Fields a completely artificial stream has been cut from the Ravensbourne in a ludicrously sinuous route and miniature hillocks have been mounded up around it in a kind of exaggerated parody of Capability Brown. The river is hemmed in by raw concrete near the railway stations, giving it a brutalist quality.

Along the walk we did our best to photograph every section of the river that’s visible from publicly-accessible places. The pictures are available on Flickr in the sets Ravensbourne north of Lewisham and Ravensbourne from Catford Bridge to Lewisham. We hope to walk the upper half from the source in Keston to where we left off at Catford at a future date.