Travels with a Sketchbook in...

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Shad Thames, Tower Bridge and the Pool of London

Shad Thames, Guy's Hospital Tower, Tower Bridge and the Pool of London

from the Thames Path.
pencil and coloured pencil in double spread of daler rowney black hardback sketchbook
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

This is the view from the Thames Path just to the east of Wapping Pier Head. From the left it features: Shad Thames, Guys Hospital Tower, the buildings along Tooley Street (south of the river between Tower Bridge and London Bridge), Tower Bridge, HMS Belfast, the Post Office Tower and - in the foreground - various boat landings and the discharge of one of the undergound rivers into the Thames.

It was bright and sunshiney and blowing a gale while I did this - hence it's rather undeveloped format. I was hanging on to the rail to avoid being blown away and cursing the fact that I'd forgotten (yet again) to put bulldog clips into my backpack. I think I need bulldog clips for my brain cells at times as I so often forget them. If I'm sensible I'll do what I usually do and attach some on a permanent basis to this sketchbook. I added some coloured pencil to the sketch when I got back home.

The location was so good that I fully intend to go back and there and do this one again when the weather is rather kinder.

Now for some details of the buildings and shapes in the sketch.

Thames Path
The Thames Path opened in 1996 and is about 184 miles long. It is a National Trail following the length of the River Thames from its source near Kemble in Gloucestershire to the Thames Barrier at Charlton. This section is on the north side of the river, south of Wapping High Street.

Shad Thames
This is the low block on the extreme left of the sketch. This is name of a street east of Tower Bridge on the south side of the River Thames. It runs west to east, The name is corruption of St John at Thames, a reference to the Knights Templar of the Order of St John who owned land locally.

In Victorian times, Shad Thames included the largest warehouse complex in London. Completed in 1873, the warehouses housed huge quantities of tea, coffee, spices and other commodities, which were unloaded and loaded onto river boats. In the 20th century the area went into decline, and the last warehouses closed in 1972.

However, Shad Thames was regenerated in the 1980s and 1990s, when the disused but picturesque warehouses throughout the area were converted into expensive flats, many with restaurants, bars, shops, etc. on the ground floor. Most notable in this regeneration was designer and restaurateur Terence Conran, who opened a number of now well-known riverside restaurants including Pont de la Tour, the Blueprint Cafe and the Butler's Wharf Chop House. Numerous other restaurants, cafes, bars and shops have also sprung up. Shad Thames' artistic character has encouraged a variety of other businesses to move to the area, such as architects, small art galleries and wine merchants; the thriving local property market means that there are also many estate agents. (Wikipedia / Shad Thames)

When I first came to London, my boyfriend and I were both very interested in the conservation of historic buildings and significant architecture and historical geography. We used to go for walks down Shad Thames which at that time - in the late 70s - was extremely grim and depressing, verging on derelict. The input made by the council, Terence Conran and other developers has made an astounding difference. This is the place to go if you want to eat and gaze at Tower Bridge. But I'm saving comments on the restaurants for a book!

The Design Museum is one of the world’s leading museums of modern and contemporary design and is located just off the left of the page - in a modern building in the part of Shad Thames which had to be cleared for development.

Guy's Tower

Guys Tower is the shape sticking up on the left. Guy's Hospital was founded in 1721 and in 1974 it added the 34 storey Guy's Towerto its site to the east of London Bridge and south of London Bridge station. At 143 metres (469 feet) high, it's the tallest hospital building in the world, and the 11th tallest building in London. I've been to many a function in the suite at the top of Guy's Tower and the views from there are simply amazing. I've even stood right on the very top - but that's another story!

The Pool of London
The Pool of London lies between London Bridge to just past Tower Bridge (more or less where I was standing for my earlier sketches). It is one of the most historic parts of the Thames riverside. Settlements on its banks go back to Roman times. You can read more about its history and what happened in the different historic periods here.

Tower Bridge
Tower Bridge, in the centre of the sketch, is close to the Tower of London which gives it its name. It is an iconic symbol of London but is sometimes mistakenly called London Bridge, which is actually the next bridge upstream (going west). It's the boundary between the Upper and Lower parts of the Pool of London. It was built due to pressure for a bridge east of London Bridge and adjacent to the expansion of population to the east of the City of London and around the Pool of London. It opened on 30 June1894 after eight years of construction. Its central section opens up to let ships through. The bridge lifting/opening dates and times can be found here - along with the name of the ship which will be going through.

Tooley Street
George Orwell (the author of 1984) sampled life as a tramp in Tooley Street in 1930 and then wrote his notes up in the Bermondsey Library and published his book based on these - "Down and Out in London and Paris". Tooley Street used to be my route home when I used to work near London Bridge.

HMS Belfast
HMS Belfast is the shape sticking up just beyond Tower Bridge. It's a Town Class Cruiser launched in 1938 and has been a museum ship permanently moored next to Tower Bridge since 1971. Great fun for small boys!

BT / "Post Office" Tower
The BT / Post Office Tower, a very slim, very tall telecommunications hub, can be seen popping up on the horizon on the right of the sketch. I was a bit surprised to see it there - but I've noticed before it pops up when you're not epecting it! ;). This could be to do with the fact that apparently until the mid 1990s it was an official secret and never actually appeared on any map! I'm sure there must be a word for phenomena like that!

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Monday, March 19, 2007

Wapping: the Pier Head and the Old Custom House

The Old Custom House, 3 Wapping Pier Head

pen and sepia ink and coloured pencil
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

For my next sketch, I walked down Wapping High Street past Wapping Station (the other end of the Thames Tunnel), the "Town of Ramsgate" and Wapping Old Steps to Wapping Pier Head just east of St Katherine's dock and the Tower of London and south of what used to be the London Docks. My two sketches of Wapping Pier Head show (top) No. 3 Pier Head - the Old Custom House and (below) the East side of the Pier Head.

Wapping Pier Head
pencil and coloured pencil
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

The Georgian houses at Wapping Pier Head are probably the best Georgian dwellings overlooking the River Thames in the whole of London. They certainly come with a hefty price tag anytime one comes on the market - which isn't very often.

The large houses were originally built around 1812 for officials of the London Dock Company. They now form, in effect, a square - with the river being the southern edge and Wapping High Street being the northern edge. Running through the middle used to be the original lock entrance to the London Docks - hence why one of the houses (No 3 in the drawing below) was the Custom House for the London Docks - where officials examined all goods being imported through the Docks.

By the 1930s however the lock had become far too small for the size of the ships operating then and the lock was filled in later in the 1960s - at which point the whole of the London Docks were used for new housebuilding which was a priority after the amount of bomb damage in the area during the second world war. The lock is now a garden between the two terraces of fine houses.

The East London Postcard Company website) has several images of the Thames and the docks.

This one shows a stretch of the Upper Pool of London and part of the riverside at Wapping at the beginning of the 20th century.
this link is to what Wapping Pier Head looks like from the other side of the River.

A couple of websites (Wikipedia and Exploring East London) provide a lot more information for people wanting to find out more about Wapping. It's probably been one of the most 'transformed' areas of London - from the excavation for the London Docks to the intense bombing of the second world war to the infill of half of the docks and its regeneration during the back end of the twentieth century which I used to be involved in many many moons ago.

Wapping also has its quirky and somewhat infamous past. For example, Wapping used to be the site of 'Execution Dock', where the Admiralty executed pirates and other criminals active on the water by hanging. Since the Admiralty only had jurisdiction over the water/sea, their gibbet had to be constructed below the low water mark (ie in the water) which meant that the bodies of executed men would be left dangling until they had been submerged three times by the tide. The gibbet can still be seen on the foreshore in front of the Prospect of Whitby Pub at the other end of Wapping High Street. One of the people who like visiting the pub was Judge Jeffries, the hanging Judge. However he was recognised, caught and then hanged at the Tower because he stopped in a nearby ale house - doubtless for a 'swift half' - before his planned escape to the continent and from retribution. In more modern times, Fortress Wapping was the nickname given to the Murdoch's News International Printing Plant, built on the infilled docks after vacating Fleet Street. Many is the time I drove down The Highway past the plant, the strikers and the police during the big (and violent) Wapping Dispute/strike in 1984/5 which changed the print industry in the UK forever.

You don't get information like this with every sketchbook blog you read! ;)

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Rotherhithe: the Mayflower and Brunel

Rotherhithe: the Mayflower Inn, St Mary's Church Brunel's Engine House
8" x 10", pencil and coloured pencil in Moleskine
copyright Katherine Tyrrell

The first of my sketches on the 13th Internationl Sketchcrawl is this view done from the Thames Path in Wapping. On the south side of the River Thames is Rotherhithe and a site associated with the start of a famous journey. The ship called the Mayflower which carried the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. was based in Rotherhithe. In the summer of 1620. she was hired to transport a group of colonists and set sail from close to the very small white building just to the left of centre - which is the Mayflower Inn. The ship's co-owner and captain, Christopher Jones, lived in Rotherhithe and was buried in the churchyward of St Mary's Church in 1622. You can see the church steeple to the right of my sketch. You can also see the chimneys associated with the Brunel Engine House and the Thames Tunnel which Brunel built under the Thames between Rotherhithe and Wapping.

Rotherhithe
Rotherhithe is nearly a peninsula on the south side of the Thames in the London Borough of Southwark. In the past it's always had a very close association with the sea. Seafaring, ship building, and ship breaking were major industries in the area for centuries and its maritime heritage still dominates the area.

Many great voyages started or finished here, including Drakes’ circumnavigation of the globe between 1577 and 1580 in the Golden Hind (a replica of which is now at Bankside where I sketched for the July 2006 Sketchcrawl).

The big commercial docks area in the Rotherhithe area fell out of use in the second half of the twentieth century and the area declined before being regenerated over the last twenty years. Many of the old Wharf side buildings such as the ones in the sketch have been converted to residential use and now contain expensive apartments.

The Mayflower
Between 1609 and 1622, the Mayflower was based at Rotherhithe and used primarily as a cargo ship, involved in active trade of goods (often wine) between England and other European countries and was mastered by Christopher Jones, who would command the ship on the famous transatlantic voyage of the Pilgrims between Plymouth on the south coast of England and Plymouth Massachusetts. You may think that everybody has always known where the Mayflower came from but that's not so. According to the Plimouth Foundation this fact wasn't in fact known until early in the twentieth century

a researcher named R.G. Marsden searched the English High Court of Admiralty Records in 1904, looking for a matching vessel that could have traveled from London between July 1620 and May 1621. This proved to be a lengthy operation as "Mayflower" was a popular ship's name, but he eventually reduced the number to six, and finally to one, the Mayflower of Harwich, whose master was Christopher Jones. (Plimoth Planation, Press Rlease re. Mayflower II)

Although the The Mayflower returned to Rotherhithe, Project Mayflower was created in 1955 to construct a reproduction of the Mayflower and sail it to America as a symbolic gesture of Anglo-American friendship. This ship is now docked at the State Pier on the waterfront in Plymouth Massachusetts.

The Mayflower Inn
The small white building in the centre is the inn known as "The Mayflower"

THE MAYFLOWER PUBLIC HOUSE 117 Rotherhithe Street SE16 Tel: 0207 237 4088 Rotherhithe, Bermondsey 47 188 225 P11
The Mayflower is near to where Captain Christopher Jones moored his ship Mayflower before sailing to America with the Pilgrim fathers. The ship returned in 1621, and Captain Jones is buried in the churchyard of St Mary’s. The Mayflower is one of the few pubs licensed to sell stamps and also has permission to sell American ones. It was rebuilt in the 18th century as the Spread Eagle and Crown. It was re-named Mayflower in the 1960s. (From Southwark Council: Discover Southwark - Rotherhithe)

St Mary's Rotherhithe
Christopher Jones, Master of the Ship, lived in Rotherhithe; his children were baptised at St Mary's and his body is buried in the churchyard although the exact site of his burial plot is unknown. This BBC webpage provides some interesting information about the construction of the chuch and its links to the Pilgrims. It was originally built in the twelth century and was rebuilt in the Georgian era and includes timbers from the Temeraire - the ship featured in Turner's very famous painting "The Fighting Temeraire" voted the greatest painting in a British Art gallery in 2005. I'd never thought before about where the event that Tuner depicted actually happened - but it must have been somewhere around about where I sketched.

This is Turner's lament for the passing of the age of the great sailing ships. The Téméraire was a grand ship who had played a distinguished role in Nelson's victory at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, and who now suffered the indignity of being towed away to a ship breaking yard by a modern steam tug bellowing smoke. (Tate Britain: Turner Online Gallery)

Brunel's Engine House
The sketch shows the chimneys associated with Brunel's Engine House and the very first tunnel underneath the Rover Thames in. The engine house held steam powered pumps used to extract water from the tunnel. The Thames Tunnel was the first tunnel to be dug under a navigable river through soft earth using a tunnel shield. The tunnel was constructed so as to permit pedestrian traffic between the north and south banks of the Thames without obstructing the very busy river and its commercial traffic. It is still in use carrying the East London Line below the River Thames, part of the London Underground network.

The Thames Tunnel was also the very first project of Isambard Kingdom Brunel who worked on it with his father Marc Brunal although it nearly killed him when there was a tunnel collapse

BRUNEL ENGINE HOUSE Tunnel Road, Rotherhithe, London SE16 4LF Tel:020 7231 3840 Rotherhithe Bermondsey Tel: 020 7231 3840
In building the Thames tunnel (the world’s first tunnel under a stretch of water), Sir Marc Brunel had to overcome considerable geological, engineering and financial difficulties. Brunel Engine House is the restored pumping house that Sir Marc built for the steam engines, which drained the tunnel. Packed with information about this amazing engineering feat, it is also one of the most important industrial archaeology sites in London.. (From Southwark Council: Discover Southwark - Rotherhithe)

Thames Path
A National Trail which follows the Thames for 184 miles from its source in the Cotswolds to the Thames Barrier. It is signposted and in London runs along both banks. There is an official guide book. There is an online guide and the 2007 fifth edition of the The Thames Path (National Trail Guides) with maps written by David Sharp, giving information on places to stay, facilities and services along the Path, is now available.

Finally, the shape on the left is a high-speed sketch of one of today's river boats which ply up and down the Thames carrying tourists. It's a bit of a change from the Mayflower and the Temeraire!

I've learned a lot from doing this sketch - mostly about how rewarding it can be to dig behind the basic facts you know about places in the area where you live. Plus I think I'm going to go back and do a much better drawing of this VERY historic site!

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