Greenwich & Lewisham Cinema / Theatre / Education / Arts / Music / Food & Drink / Family / Property Weekender September 7 2022 • www.weekender.co.uk Don’t miss the final week of the International Festival DANCELASTTHE
ADVERTORIAL www.royalgreenwich.gov.uk @royal_greenwich royalgreenwich royal_greenwich News from the Royal Borough of Greenwich
NOVEMBER
Contamination is when the wrong items – like bags of general rubbish, nappies and dirty fast-food packaging – are put into a green food and garden waste bin or the blue recycling bin. When a blue or green top bin is contaminated, it can mean that none of the contents can be recycled and they have to be incinerated instead. That means everyone’s efforts to recycle go to waste.
FROM 2022
Some easy tips to help avoid contamination
THE ROYAL BOROUGH OF GREENWICH WILL NO LONGER COLLECT CONTAMINATED RECYCLING WHEELIE BINS.
• Use separate bags/bins in your kitchen for recycling, and a caddy bin for food/garden waste. You can then easily sort items as you use them.
• Check our website regularly to make sure your recycling knowledge is up to date. If a resident puts an incorrect item in their bin, a red tag will be put on it, and they will be sent a letter explaining why. The item will need to be removed so our recycling crews can empty it when they return the following week. If this happens a second time, the same process will happen. The third time a bin is contaminated, it will be permanently Atremoved.blocks of flats where communal recycling bins are frequently contaminated, our Waste and Street Advisor Team will be on hand to share tips and advice on recycling with residents.
We’reMoving
To find out more about changes to your waste collections, visit royalgreenwich.gov.uk/towardszerowaste
BECOME A RECYCLING PRO
• Rinse out any recyclable household items when you wash your dishes.
By ensuring we put the right thing in the right bin, our recycling rates will increase, which will make a big difference in the fight against climate change.
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The 27th InternationalGreenwich+DocklandsannualFestival(GDIF) isdrawing to a close, but there’sstill a chance to catch some free, outdoor performing artsthis weekend before its final bows are taken. Here are the highlights to catch this week, writes
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Dancing City September 10 & 11 | 1pm - 6pm | Canary Wharf
September 9 & 10 | 1pm | Rathbone Market, Royal Docks
The Relaxerette
One of just two paid-for events in this year’s festival, Peaceophobia tickets cost £10, but are free to local residents.
September 1 - 10 | 8pm | Limmo Peninsula, Royal Docks
Fairground fun meets mindful meditation in The Relaxerette, a slow and steady ferris wheel with hammocks instead of seats, created by Dutch multidisciplinary artist Arjan Kruidhof. Lie back and revolve while listening to soothing words, local stories and poetry fed through a set of headphones. Dubbed the most relaxing fairground ride in the world, The Relaxerette has already proven popular with festival goers in the Netherlands. For two days only, it’s popping up in Canning Town’s Rathbone Market.
First seen at Burning Man festival in America, Peter Hudson’s monumental installation Charon is a 32ft rotating zoetrope mounted with replica human skeletons – a nod to the ferryman in Greek mythology, who would row the recently deceased across the river Styx to the afterlife. Animated at dusk and set dramatically against the fading light, Charon is operated by a team of volunteers – and you can either join them or simply watch the spectacle.
Curtain calls for + Festival Guy J Sanders Relaxerette by Sophie Sijpheer-Terluin Guy J Sanders Karol Wyszynski Holly O’Mahony…
6 September 7 2022 www.weekender.co.ukeditorial@weekender.co.uk ARTS & ENTS
Bradley says: The Relaxerette is a mindful fairground ride. It’s a chance to take a break from urban life, though lying back and being transported somewhere else, while listening to stories
Greenwich
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Peaceophobia September 7 & 8, 8pm | September 9 & 10, 6pm & 9pm | Here East, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park Multi-Storey Car Park
Bradley says: Charon is an ingenious object encouraging us to reflect on mortality, something it’s important we have the opportunity to do after the times we’ve just lived through.
Peaceophobia is playwright Zia Ahmed’s response to rising Islamophobia around the world.
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Docklands International
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Charon
Back by popular demand, Dancing City is a two-day dance extravaganza spread across Canary Wharf’s piazzas, parks and waterfronts. Performances in afrobeat, ballet, stilt-walking and traditional Indian dance all feature.
GDIF artistic director Bradley Hemmings says: We’ve run Dancing City since 2002. It’s a hugely popular event that brings together a whole range of companies and creates a truly international feeling.
Staged in a multi-storey car park in Stratford, it’s an immersive show that uses cinematic lighting, electronic music and cars to tell the story of Ali, Sohail and Casper, who are on a mission to take back control of their identity and how they express their religion.
Island Gardens
© Trey Radcliff Haron
For those of us lucky enough to stay healthy throughout it, the horrors of the Covid-19 pandemic might already feel like a long time ago. But what about those left grieving loved ones taken by the virus? Writer Sudha Bhuchar has curated four audio stories recounting real people’s memories of losing their loved ones to the deadly virus that swept across the world in 2020. Audience members are invited to listen to them as they wander through the Isle of Dogs with the help of a map. A limited number of Mp3 players are available for those without their own devices, but audiences are encouraged to bring their own phones and headphones if possible.
For those happy to travel outside the borough for more festival highlights, Unfurl in Bethnal Green Gardens is not to be missed. One for night owls: this multi-coloured light show sees nature, art and soft robotic technology combine to create enchanting, alluring installations visitors can get up close to and manipulate with their movements.
© Mitzi Peirone
*conditions apply Book now for great value tickets including Kids for £2* and GroupSave* thameslinkrailway.com H IS tor YARTS & ENTS
Go all out on days out with day trips by train
Greenwich+Docklands International Festival (GDIF) runs from August 26 - September 11 with events taking place in various locations. Admission: FREE. www.festival.org/gdif-2022/
Unfurl September 9 & 10 | 8pm | Bethnal Green Gardens
Final Farewell September 10 & 11 | 12pm, 1:30pm, 3pm & 4:30pm |
In a summer that’s seen football victory won by the England Lionesses, when better to refresh our memories of 2002 hit comedy Bend It Like Beckham, about a young Sikh woman, Jess, who defies her conservative parents’ wishes and joins the local football club. And where better to watch it than in the immersive location of Charlton Athletic Football
8 September 7 2022 www.weekender.co.ukeditorial@weekender.co.uk FILM
The line-up includes films old and new, and locations range from outdoor sites to pubs and national properties – making it an opportunity to explore unusual venues across the borough, too. All films showing are free to enjoy, although viewings operate on a firstcome-first-serve basis, so it’s worth arriving in good time in order to bag a comfy seat.
Another screening brings the chance to watch Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s complex sci-fi novel Dune, one of few films to hit cinemas in 2021, which stars Hollywood heart-throb Timothée Chalamet opposite the ever mesmerising Zendaya. You’ll find it showing outdoors under the stars at St George’s Garrison Church in Woolwich (September 17, 8pm).
Festival highlights this year include a screening of 2021 hit Summer of Soul, about the 1969 Harlem Culture Festival, which celebrated African American identity and music, but was overshadowed for years by memories of nearby Woodstock Festival. The documentary is showing at artFix Woolwich (September 10, 8pm).
Charlton O’Mahony…writeslocalatthefavouritesseeafestival9from2022.returnsFilmWoolwichandFreeFestivalforRunningSeptemberto17,themarkschancetohouseholdonbigscreenanumberofvenues,Holly © Grant Walker WoolwichandinscreeningsmoviePop-upCharlton
Those craving the nostalgia of a classic family comedy should head to Charlton House, where Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s 1971 sitcom Dad’s Army is showing (September 13, 7:30pm) in the Old Library. The evening begins with a talk from war historian Clive Harris, who will put the show’s more serious backdrop in context.
9www.weekender.co.ukeditorial@weekender.co.uk Box office 020 8463 0100 • blackheathhalls.com • SEP/OCT 2022 GEMMA SUMMERFIELD GARETH BRYNMOR JOHN, ABI HYDE-SMITH & JOCELYN FREEMAN MON 24 OCT 7.30pm WEST SIDE STORY THUcert.12A15SEP MONMAYA7.30pmIRGALINA12SEP1.10pm Tickets £23 | Concessions £19 | Under 12s £6 020 8463 0100 | blackheathhalls.com Tuesday 27 September | 7.00pm Thursday 29 September | 7.00pm Saturday 1 October | 2.30pm Sunday 2 October | @OperaBH@Blackheathhalls2.30pm#CandideBH Blackheath Halls OperaHalls2022 2.30pm CANDIDE Music by Leonard Bernstein, Book by Hugh Wheeler after Voltaire MARK SATBRASSBOLLYWOODSATSCIENCETHOMPSON'SSHOW15OCT2pmBAND22OCT7.30pm H IS tor FILMY Club (September 15, 6:30pm).
Over at Shrewsbury House Community Centre, James Bond lovers can watch Roger Moore’s second outing as the titular spy, as The Man With The Golden Gun gets the big screen treatment (September 16, 7pm). Swat up on some trivia, because there’s going to be a Bondthemed quiz, and have a cocktail dress ready for the Bond disco taking place after the screening. Championing diversity is central to the festival too, and this year, cinephiles can catch a screening of Stephen Beresford’s 2014 film Pride, about the lesbian and gay activists who raised money to help those affected by the British miners’ strike, at The Star in Plumstead (September 12, 8pm). Over at The Stables in Greenwich Carers Centre, visitors are invited to watch Jack Thorne and Genevieve Barr’s new movie Then Barbara Met Alan, the real-life story of cabaret artists and disability activists Barbara Lisicki and Alan Holdsworth.
Charlton and Woolwich Free Film Festival is taking place between September 9 - 17, in locations across Charlton and Woolwich. All film screenings are free to attend, operating on a first-come-firstserve basis. org/filmfestival/charlton/www.freefilmfestivals.
The first Free Film Festival took place in Peckham and Nunhead in 2010. The concept has since spread to other boroughs across south London. Each Free Film Festival is run by its own group of volunteers –while equipment including projectors are shared – and the festivals aim to bring people together to enjoy films in local places they might not have previously been.
• Food bank vouchers • Access to grants to help heat your home • Help to manage debt • Help accessing benefits available
At The Heart Of The Community
Charlton Athletic Community Trust (CACT) would like to make you aware that Live Well Greenwich is there to support anyone impacted by the rising cost of living.
it can feel overwhelming. These additional pressures will impact the most vulnerable in our community.
Our Health Improvement Advisors are on hand 6 days a week to talk about any concerns you may have around the rising cost of living. Give them a call for free today.
• Support to improve employment prospects and find a new career • Support quitting smoking to put money back in your pocket
By calling the Live Well line, you can speak to an advisor about any issues you’re facing. Advisors will offer free, impartial advice, signpost to services and connect you with local support.
• Regular sessions with a Live Well Coach, to offer support long term. This wide range of financial support means you don’t have to cope with this cost of living crisis alone. Most importantly, Live Well is completely free. Call the Live Well line on 0800 470 4831 to be directed to whatever you may need.
Live Well advisors can direct you to financial support including:
September 7 2022 11www.weekender.co.ukeditorial@weekender.co.uk
NEWS FROM CHARLTON ATHLETIC COMMUNITY TRUST
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The Stay Warm, Stay Safe programme which offers grants to help you heat your home is just one of the ways Live Well can support you.
Live Well Greenwich, commissioned by the Royal Borough of Greenwich and proudly delivered by CACT, can offer a variety of help with financial struggles. It aims to provide support so you don’t have to sacrifice the heating, or cut back on the things you love, in order to survive the rise in the cost of living.
Charlton Athletic Community Trust (CACT) would like to make you aware that Live Well Greenwich is there to support anyone impacted by the rising cost of living. With the cost of essentials like energy, fuel, food and rent rising,
Cost of living crisis: Live Well Greenwich can help
General Steam Navigation were on the most easterly section of the wharf, alongside the Creek. Some readers will remember them. I am sure many of us oldies will remember the Royal Daffodil steaming across to France with day trippers in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Mary Mills
12 September 7 2022 www.weekender.co.ukeditorial@weekender.co.uk H IS tor Y
GSN’s founder, Thomas Brocklebank, is said to have first built a paddle steamer on Deptford Creek, then other vessels from other shipbuilder were taken over by them. Eagle built in 1820, was a wooden paddle steamer, used on the Margate Service, followed by Hero, Royal Sovereign, City of London and Brocklebank. Later Harlequin and Columbine were built here by a Mr Evenden. This Mr Brocklebank was a Deptford timber merchant and is not to be confused with the Liverpool shipbuilder of the same name who lived in Westcombe Park – my back garden was probably part of his park. General Steam was set up by a group of business men in 1824 led by the construction contractors Joliffe and Banks. By 1825 they were had a fleet of 15 Deptford-built steamers at Stowage. They used them for passenger transport and screw driven steamers for their cargo trade. They carried mails and pioneered a ‘coastal steamship services on which England depended’. They imported live cattle and sheep – a trade was lost with the opening of the Foreign Cattle Market on the Deptford Dockyard site. While they specialised in links with other British ports they also ran all those day trips to resorts down river and across the Channel. By 1837 they had 351 vessels. Originally in the 19th century Stowage Wharf was leased by General Steam from the East India Company, but from 1900 parts of the site were leased to the London Electricity Supply Company
I think it’s time I came to the end of this long trail of industries up and down Deptford Creek. I have quite a list of firms I haven’t covered –but either I’m not sure where they were, or I don’t know enough, or anything interesting enough to make up an article – but I will try and see that they get a mention in the follow up book I am planning.
I had intended to end with an article on General Steam Navigation who were on the last few wharves of Creekside before it joins the Thames –and who lasted into the 1970s. But I included an article on them way back in March 2020 when I was writing about Thameside and then again in the book I did on ‘The Greenwich Riverside: Upper Watergate to Angerstein’. So the following is a brief summary of what I put there for those of you who don’t remember the article and haven’t bought the book.
General Steam Navigation
And – look – in wrapping it all up I do think that the Creek is a vital part of British industrial history – and we need to say so. There was a lot of big industry here, very early - which must include the Dockyard which wasn’t of course on the Creek. There was also a very large population in Deptford and Greenwich –a riverside area which had no obvious centre but strung out along a riverside and up the Creek. here were some very major companies with a big emphasis on innovation – and this is something which is very, very typical of Lower Thameside and North West Kent generally.
Since I began to write about the Creek the Museum of Slavery and Freedom has been set up locally and slavery has become a big issue. I have tried to pick up on it where I can and there are a few firms who made tools to be used in the plantations where slave labour was used. I am also aware that if we need to look at the sources of much of the raw material for industry in the 19th century – and to keep in mind that many industries used material that was not grown, mine, or wharever by only slaves but also by indentured labour – dreadfully treated and expendable since as free men they had no value to the industrialist.
September 7 2022 13www.weekender.co.ukeditorial@weekender.co.uk H IS tor YH IS tor Y
and I found how the family had gone in a few years from an obscure windmill to this vast complex of state of the art milling. Then on and on past potteries and soap works – and the entire chemical works which I had covered in my PhD Thesis. And then to discover Greening’s Co-op Wharf, Cow Gum and so much else. Deptford really has had its fair share of eccentrics!!
I have also picked up on the terrible poverty that local workers lived in and the racism against the immigrant Irish.
General Steam ought to be better known. They lasted nearly a hundred and fifty years; provided a long lasting and efficient service.
for Deptford Power Station expansion – starting with Stowage Wharf. In the Great War General Steam’s yard was taken over by the Government and the Company lost 25 vessels on war service. In the Second World War when they had 45 ships they evacuated London schoolchildren. Later their vessels had a distinguished role at Dunkirk where eight of their ships are thought to have evacuated 31,000 troops. They also evacuated troops from smaller ports and much else. Deptford Yard was badly bombed on several occasions including a V2 in the Creek itself. Before D-day 303 smaller vessels were converted in various ways here, including landing craft and anti aircraft ships.
So – GSN is the final part of Deptford Creek and this is the 68th article I’ve done on the Creek and its industries. When I started I had no idea of how much I would find and how interesting and important so much of it would turn out to be. I thought it would be a few coal and aggregate wharves plus Merryweather’s, the Greenwich Railway, Bazalgette Pumping Station and Mumford’s Mill. I knew there had been a big chemical industry – and that probably I was the only person who had studied it, and I also knew about one shipbuilder, William Joyce (my paper on him to a Docklands Shipbuilding History Conference was cancelled because of the pandemic).
Walking round Glaisher Street and rest of the area you will learn nothing of this. The shipbuilding sites all eventually disappeared under an expanded Deptford Power Station – and there is nothing about that revolutionary structure either. I guess very few Deptford residents will realise what a distinguished ship building site this was.
So I decided to not stop at the obvious place – Deptford Bridge – but to carry on up to Lewisham. That way I could cover the Armoury Mill, which is another site of national importance we seem to choose to ignore. I’d wanted to cover Elliott’s since no one will ever believe that Britain once led the world on computer systems unless we keep saying it - loudly! I could also, by looking at the older course of the river, take in Penn’s engineering works – the world’s leading marine engine builder.
Then there was the Robinson Mill –
Next week I will start on a long promised look at the Charlton riverside. I have already been asking Julian for any ideas for sources on Lambarde’s Wall. See you there!
View previous editions of The Greenwich and Lewisham Weekender to find more articles by Mary https://issuu.com/southwark.news/stacksMills
My main source for all of this has been the late Christopher Philpotts’ unpublished study of the Creek. I know nothing about him, met him just once – and I generally look down on archaeologists - but that study is really, really amazing. My other big source has been the memory of ex-members of the old local history department at Woodlands.
After the war vessels continued to be built at Deptford where there was still a staff of about 300. This ended in the mid-1960s and men were laid off from 1967 and the yard became a lorry depot. General Steam was swallowed up into P&O in 1972, and then the last remains of the Deptford Yard closed.
I think the first sites where I began to realise we were going to find all sorts of new things were some way in – first some revelations on Rennie’s engineering works, amd then the maltings on Hope Wharf where I was amazed to find that 60 years after they closed it down that the company still makes ‘Greenwich Malt’ as one of its leading brands. Then on the same site the previous works was the Kamptulicon factory – of all things!
Since there really is no access to the Greenwich (or the Lewisham) archives the next best thing is the memory of the people who ran it for 40 years. Thanks– ever grateful!
