Current Projects
The Survey is currently working on three very different projects. The first of these, a monograph on the Charterhouse to be completed in 2009, will complete the survey of Clerkenwell. Two new major parish surveys, on Woolwich and Battersea, bring the Survey back to South London after many years’ focus on areas north of the Thames. Both are riverside parishes, but present a striking contrast in terms of historical patterns of development and present-day character. Battersea, with a rich industrial history and a large residential hinterland, working-class and middle-class, is famous for its park, power station and dogs’ home. Woolwich has a long and distinguished association with the military and boasts an outstanding concentration of civic and municipal buildings.
Charterhouse
The Charterhouse - correctly Sutton's Hospital in Charterhouse - is remarkable both as a complex of buildings and as an institution. As the name implies, it was originally a Carthusian priory, and substantial fragments of the monastic buildings are incorporated in the present fabric (though little of the original layout survives intact). Founded in 1371, the priory was dissolved by Henry VIII in the 1530s, notable savagery being meted out to the prior and a number of the brethren.
Most of the Charterhouse was pulled down after the Dissolution and redeveloped as a mansion for one of the king's henchmen, Sir Edward (later Lord) North, and this was adapted in the early 17th century as an almshouse and school, famously portrayed by Thackeray in The Newcomes as 'Grey Friars'. In 1872 Charterhouse School moved to rural Surrey, but the almshouse remained. This haven for elderly gentlemen is named after its founder Thomas Sutton, once the wealthiest commoner in the country.
Devastated by fire during the Blitz, the Charterhouse underwent extensive restoration and reconstruction in the 1950s. The work, a pragmatic but sensitive scheme, constrained by post-war shortages of materials and a tight budget, was carried out by Seely and Paget, the leading conservation architects of the day.
Battersea
Along with Woolwich, Battersea has been chosen for a forthcoming volume of the Survey of London in part to redress a long-standing bias within the series in favour of districts north of the Thames. As a riverside parish with a rich industrial history, but an up-river one, it will act as a foil and a contrast to the Woolwich volume and build on expertise amassed by the Survey team over the last two decades in volumes on Poplar and Clerkenwell.
Battersea today is strikingly varied in character. Until the early nineteenth century there was a small village nucleus around the parish church, which was rebuilt in the 1770s, and a smattering of industry along the Thames. Behind the river lay marshy land, then a mixture of market gardens and small villas stretching back to Clapham and Wandsworth Commons. From about 1840 railways, industry and large-scale housing erupted, taking the population from 4,000 to 120,000 in half a century. The handsome Battersea Park was laid out just in time to prevent the whole of the area besides the Thames being engulfed by building. Social conditions in the north were severely impoverished, while street after street of better suburban houses rose within reach of the commons after 1870. The criss-cross of different railways and their works was exceptionally tangled, leaving the topography of northern Battersea permanently scarred, though it is still marked by memorable sites such as Battersea Power Station and Clapham Junction. Further south and west the smarter Victorian streets are now fashionable and prized.
The Survey of London is responding to the special challenge of Battersea by departing from its traditional topographical arrangement and tackling the area thematically. Public, municipal, educational buildings, places of worship, places of entertainment and hospitals will each have their own chapter, with introductions bringing out their history, interrelationship and architectural character. The housing will be dealt with more conventionally, but with an eye always to the broad view and the handsome illustrations for which the series is renowned.
Woolwich
Woolwich is an atypical and highly distinctive London district. Though now engulfed by suburbia, it is not historically speaking a suburb. A riverside settlement with Romano-British or earlier origins grew from the early 16th century to become a military-industrial satellite town that long maintained what Ian Nairn called ‘thumping self-centred vitality’. There was massive investment in military establishments that were among the nation’s most important. This was reflected in substantial buildings, some of which still stand near the Thames, a few in the former Royal Naval Dockyard that was founded in 1512, many more at the former Royal Arsenal, which emerged from origins in 1671 as an ordnance storage depot to become an immense arms factory. Pressure on space led the military to move away from the river, up the hill onto Woolwich Common to the south, where there are the imposing complexes of the Royal Artillery Barracks, begun in 1775 and with a façade of awesome extent, and the turreted Royal Military Academy of 1805. There is also the somewhat mysterious training and recreational landscape of Repository Woods, with John Nash’s eye-catching Rotunda, re-erected here in 1819.
Growing up between riverside and common, the town of Woolwich benefited from the military presence and industrial prosperity, but also struggled with poverty. Local pride and mutualist provision produced their own major monuments, ranging from one of the first polytechnics, founded in 1890, an impressive town hall of 1903–5 that is the set piece in a remarkable conglomeration of municipal buildings, on to vast co-operative department stores of 1903 (proclaiming ‘Each for All and All for Each’) and 1938, and two splendid 1930s cinemas. Shops thrived along Powis Street, still a lively ‘high street’, and Woolwich has always been an important point for crossing the Thames – its Free Ferry has operated since 1889. Some 19th-century houses remain, but most housing is of post-war date. From 1950 Woolwich had London’s first comprehensive redevelopment area; therein and beyond lies an interesting range of approaches to public housing.
Military and other manufacturing departed in the 1960s and Woolwich became badly run down. It is now beginning to see vigorous regenerative investment. A gradual eastwards shift in London’s centre of gravity, with initiatives ranging from Thames Gateway to the 2012 Olympics, has brought intense development pressure, with the promise of genuine improvements. Amid great change, the historic richness of Woolwich is not nearly as well known as it should be
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