Constance Street: The true story of one family and one street in London’s East End. Charlie Connelly
Читать онлайн книгу.
going to build our own, from nothing. Just here the new and largest works of S.W. Silver & Co are going to rise from these marshes and take the company into the future. These are exciting times, and this company is going to grasp the opportunity to not just capitalise on these times but to actively formulate them. Look again, gentlemen. I guarantee that within two years you will not recognise this stretch of river as the same which you see here today.’
Nobody spoke. Somewhere in the distance, back towards the city, a steam tug let out a mournful whistle. As Stephen Winckworth Silver looked across the brown water of the Thames towards his vision of the future there was a blue flash of colour from behind him as a kingfisher swooped low past the launch and plunged into the river. It emerged again with something in its beak and flew off low over the reeds towards the marshland and disappeared over the wall.
Half a century after the death of Stephen Silver and a little over half a century before the Brunner Mond explosion of 1917, Constance Street didn’t exist and Silvertown didn’t exist. Indeed, until well into the 1850s the north bank of the Thames between Bow Creek and Barking Creek was almost entirely deserted, a misty, marshy expanse of boggy land with a couple of ancient trackways occasionally used by shepherds and cattlemen the only hint as to any human presence at all. The area didn’t even have a name: when Stephen Winckworth Silver first took an interest the stretch of riverside land was referred to merely as part of Plaistow Marshes, ‘opposite Woolwich’ or sometimes, colloquially, as ‘Land’s End’.
That is, when it was referred to at all. It was a place as mysterious as it was anonymous, the source of whispered, wide-eyed tales of strange, moving nocturnal lights that hovered above the ground and unearthly sounds that could come from no human, and rumours of dark, wild beasts with fire in their eyes that roamed the marshes at night.
This was never a benevolent place. In 1667, as London to the west recovered from the dual traumas of plague and fire, Sir Alan Apsley was stationed on the north bank opposite Woolwich with his regiment in case of Dutch invasion. The invasion never came but Apsley complained of the constant ‘fevers and agues’ endured by his men and strange lights and noises at night that had the crew speculating openly about the Devil himself stalking the empty wastes. Given the twin disasters that had befallen the capital over the previous two years it was no wonder they felt a malevolence lurking in the marsh.
By the start of the nineteenth century there was just one building between the creeks, a rambling pile known as ‘The Devil’s House’ that dated back to the early eighteenth century. Far from being the domicile of the scourge of Apsley’s sailors the house’s name apparently derived from the man who built it, believed to be a Dutchman named Duval about whom we know nothing, let alone why he chose such a bleak location to build what was, by all accounts, a fairly grand property in its day (it was even used as a landmark in navigation guides to the River Thames). By 1769 Duval’s pile had become a ‘house of entertainment’, its remote location allowing perhaps entertainment that was not entirely moral or scrupulous. Either way, in hindsight the building was as mysterious, enigmatic and sinister as its surroundings.
But all that was to change. As the nineteenth century got into its stride, science and industry were on the march and it would take more than a few mysterious lights and noises to keep those twin facets of progress from the boggy land opposite Woolwich. A decade before Samuel Winckworth Silver’s arrival it would also take, in the first instance, another remarkable man to impose his will upon the place.
One night in 1810, when George Parker Bidder, the son of a stonemason from Moretonhampstead in Devon, was five years old he was in bed listening to two of his older brothers arguing over the value of a pig. Each had made his own calculation, based on the weight of the animal, and each was utterly convinced the other was wrong. The discussion grew more and more heated and, irritated by the commotion which was preventing him getting to sleep, young George hopped out of bed, went to the top of the stairs, called down the correct figure, asked them to be quiet and went back to bed.
This was the first recorded instance of a rare numerical gift that led to Bidder senior taking George on the road as the ‘Amazing Calculating Boy’. George, it seemed, had a precocious natural talent for mathematics, extraordinary in any youngster but especially so for a boy of the most rudimentary schooling from the wilds of Devon. As his father realised when testing young George, the youngster could perform mind-bending mathematical calculations on demand in his head, and all while still in short trousers. Such was George’s fame that he was even brought before Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III, who was both enchanted and astounded by George’s charms and mathematical abilities.
After a brief flirtation with a degree course at Edinburgh University, at the age of 18 George joined the Ordnance Survey and subsequently drifted into engineering. He then rekindled a friendship with the railway pioneer George Stephenson that had first flared in Scotland and joined him in 1834 in the construction of the London and Birmingham Railway. Three years later Bidder was instrumental in the founding of the Blackwall Railway, work which took him to the brink of the nameless marsh east of Bow Creek for the first time. One day, as the railway works clanked and hammered away behind him, Bidder must have looked out across Bow Creek and the tufty, boggy wasteland beyond to see Woolwich in the distance, and had an idea.
In 1838 the world’s first suburban railway line had opened south of river, connecting London Bridge and Greenwich, nearly the entire route passing along a purpose-built viaduct that carried the trains way above the heads and roofs of south-east London; a marvel of nineteenth-century vision and engineering. The plan was to continue the line beyond Greenwich to Woolwich, but the nature of the terrain meant going under rather than over the inhabitants. Such was the extent of the tunnelling required that the fruition of the project was years away when George Bidder, who as well as having a brilliant mathematical brain also had a pretty gimlet eye for the main chance, felt a light go on in his head.
Instead of waiting for someone else to build the connecting line to Woolwich from Greenwich, why didn’t he just go a different way? If they began at Stratford and took the line across the empty marshland and introduced a ferry crossing to and from Woolwich at the other end they could surely pip the tunnellers to the Woolwich connection and, with the land so undesirable and the fact that no tunnels or viaducts were required, at a minimal cost.
Work commenced in 1846 and by June the following year the line had opened, looping round to the north of where Silvertown stands today, across land now occupied by London City Airport. Two steam ferries connected the railway with Woolwich itself while a clutch of basic cottages was built at the terminus, officially christened North Woolwich, to house some of the railway workers.
The initial success of the line was short-lived, as the tunnels south of the Thames were completed and opened in 1849, barely three years later and well ahead of the initial projections. In response Bidder and his business partners landscaped and furnished the North Woolwich Pleasure Gardens by way of an attraction for travellers. They opened in 1851, with bowling greens touted as the equal of any in the land and with a pier ready-made to welcome the pleasure steamers that chugged up and down the river between London, Gravesend and beyond, but the pleasure gardens’ lofty aspirations were not matched by the clientele. The remoteness of the location made laws and regulations more difficult to enforce, and the gardens soon earned a reputation for drunkenness and debauchery. Disapproving moralists campaigned to put an end to the bacchanalian shenanigans by taking the park into public ownership and banning drinking, but this would not be achieved until 1890. The fledgeling community by the river was demonstrating an early stubbornness and reluctance to be told what was good for it that would prove to be an enduring feature of the locality.
In 1851, as Stephen Winckworth Silver was showing his fellow board members the frankly unprepossessing site of his planned new waterproofing works, two brothers named Howard had just secured a couple of riverside acres of land halfway between the creeks where they would build a modest glass factory and a wharf.