The Eastcombe Estate covers what estate agents call the “Charlton Slopes”
If you live in an area roughly bounded by Eastcombe Avenue, Wyndcliff Road and Charlton Road, then there’s a chance to find out about the history of your patch with the Charlton Society tomorrow (Saturday).
If you’ve ever dealt with certain estate agents, you may know this area as the Charlton Slopes… The talk is from local historian Barbara Holland.
Barbara Holland began her local history research when she retired after 30 years working for Greenwich Council. She has given talks to local groups on a variety of subjects including Charlton builder ‘Mad Jack’ Ellis, Charles Heisch and Charlton Gardens and Gardening. She is chair of the Friends of Greenwich Park History Research Group which explores some of the lesser-known facets of the park’s past.
Barbara has lived locally for more than 40 years and has a particular interest in telling the hidden stories of people and places in Charlton. In her illustrated talk about the Eastcombe Estate, she will look at its early history and ownership and how the estate was developed at the start of the 20th century.
She will highlight aspects such as the layout and housing design, the early occupants, and how the area has changed over the years.
Admission is £3 (£2 for members) and the talk at 2.30pm on Saturday at St Luke’s Church in Charlton Village.
This Saturday’s Charlton Society talk – held at St Luke’s Church – is from Julian Watson and covers the life of Abraham Colfe, whose eponymous school in Lee is one of the best-known in SE London.
Julian Watson was local history librarian for the borough of Greenwich from 1969 until he retired in 2003. He worked in the Local History Room at the old Blackheath Library in St John’s Park, then at Woodlands in Mycenae Road and finally at the Greenwich Heritage Centre in Woolwich.
In retirement Julian researches and writes about the history of Greenwich and Lewisham and edits the Greenwich Historical Society Journal. He is a trustee and former chair of the Lewisham Almshouse Charity of William Hatcliffe and Abraham Colfe. He has been churchwarden and lay chair of St Mary’s Church, Lewisham – Abraham Colfe’s church. Julian has written a history of St Mary’s and continues to research its fascinating past.
Abraham Colfe’s name is well known as the founder of Colfe’s School – the only grammar school to be founded during Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate. It was founded in Lewisham but admitted boys from the whole of the Hundred of Blackheath, which included Charlton. The school was just one of his achievements. He also founded an elementary school, a public library and left money for the building of almshouses in Lewisham. An extraordinary achievement was an intense year-long battle against James I to save 500 acres of woodland in Lewisham from destruction. His wife, Margaret, provided free medical services to all in Lewisham, rich and poor.
The talk is at 2.30pm on Saturday – admission is £3 (£2 for Charlton Society members).
The fate of The White Swan in Charlton Village will be up for discussion at the Charlton Society‘s regular monthly meeting this Saturday, together with a number of issues about improving the area.
The Swan closed suddenly in March 2020, just before the first lockdown, after a lengthy battle to pay the rent demanded by the Isle of Man-based property developer Mendoza, which bought the freehold from Punch Taverns for £900,000 in 2015.
The society has added the restoration of the Swan as a priority item to its Save Our Village Action Plan, which it will be discussing on Saturday.
Most of the (many) other items in the plan are to do with the public realm around the village, although it also includes the 20mph zone which was implemented two years ago, along with “continuous pavements” that were described as an “accident waiting to happen” on this website in March.
The meeting will be held at Charlton House at 2.30pm this Saturday; there is an admission fee of £3 for non-members and £2 for members.
Kathy is a keen amateur gardener, developing her own garden over the last 30 years. She joined the local Horticultural Society in 2014, finding it a very friendly group with a wide range of gardening knowledge. Her working life was in accountancy, and she discovered the considerable health benefits of gardening very early on. She is now Vice Chair of the Society and runs the admin side of the volunteer scheme at the walled gardens.
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett was published in 1911 and became such a popular book it has never been out of print. The walled gardens attached to Charlton House are 400-year-old gems that have been under-used and neglected in recent years, becoming a truly ‘Secret Garden’ on our doorstep!
The talk will tell you about the history of the gardens and how the local Horticultural Society and the Charlton community are helping the Royal Greenwich Heritage Trust to make them beautiful again.
The talk will be followed by refreshments. We will be charging our usual entrance fee which helps towards room hire. This is £2 for members and £3 for visitors and we should be able to accept cash, cheque or contactless payments.
The talk is this Saturday, March 19 at the Charlton Assembly Rooms. It starts at 2.30pm.
The Charlton Society AGM will include a talk on Woolwich
The Charlton Society, the local amenity society for the area, is having its annual general meeting on Saturday, with both members and non-members welcome to come along.
There’s a lot to discuss in Charlton right now, but the society has opted to have a talk about Woolwich in the second part of its AGM.
It says…
The layout of the room will be slightly different to allow for social distancing. Wearing masks is optional but we ask that you use the hand sanitiser provided.
We will ask you to sign in but, for this special meeting, we will not charge for refreshments. We will also be accepting annual subscriptions and this year should be able to offer contactless payment, although you might like to bring cash with you in case there is a technical glitch!
The Meeting will take place in two sections. The first section will deal with the business of the Annual General Meeting (at which non-members will not be able to vote) and the second part will be a talk presented by David Gardner who will outline the “Challenges Facing Woolwich”. As ward councillor for Woolwich Common David is well placed to bring us up to date with the multiple changes facing the Town and district.
The event begins at 2.30pm on Saturday in the Grand Salon at Charlton House.
Aitch wants to build 188 homes close to the Thames Barrier
Greenwich’s chair of planning was ticked off by a former council leader on Tuesday night after he clashed with residents over what new buildings on the Charlton Riverside should look like.
Labour councillor Stephen Brain challenged members of local lobby groups who are insisting that a masterplan drawn up to redevelop the area, involving building thousands of homes but keeping tall buildings to a minimum, should be followed closely.
But Dave Picton, who led Greenwich Council for two years in the late 1980s, said he was “surprised” that Brain was not following a ruling made last year which defined 10 storeys as “high rise” for the area.
The exchanges took place as councillors on the planning board met to decide whether 188 homes in blocks of up to nine storeys should be built by the developer Aitch on land behind the derelict Victoria pub, close to the Thames Barrier.
Those same residents returned to the town hall last night to object to Aitch’s plans, which only include 40 affordable-rent homes and 10 for shared ownership – five percentage points short of the council’s target of 35 per cent “affordable” homes.
But in a meeting disrupted by Covid restrictions – the government has banned councils from holding their most important meetings online, despite the continuing pandemic – Brain and the residents started to fall out.
The masterplan suggests a maximum height of 10 storeys in the area to differentiate it from the Greenwich Peninsula and Woolwich’s Royal Arsenal, and to complement the low-rise nature of the wider Charlton area. But in the area where Aitch wants to build the new homes, the guidelines suggests three to six storeys. A further complication is that ground-floor housing is not allowed because of the risk of flooding around the Thames Barrier.
Roden Richardson, speaking for the Charlton Society, said that allowing a nine-storey block would be a “major departure” from the masterplan.
The “unacceptable heights” would set an “extremely worrying precedent” for the rest of the riverside area, he said, resulting in even denser development and the need for additional infrastructure.
The Aitch development site as it is now, viewed from Eastmoor Sreet
But Brain said: “What special character does the area have currently? From the Woolwich Road down to the river – in terms of scrapyards and people who will take your wheels off your car if you stand still for more than five minutes.
“I don’t think this development, in my experience, is high rise. Any definition in any architecture book would define high rise as being above 11 storeys.”
Richardson responded: “The character is Charlton as a whole, not just the riverside.”
“But the application is for the riverside,” Brain said.
An irritated-sounding Richardson said: “We’re going back a long way with the creation of the masterplan – one of the key points of the masterplan was the riverside’s integration with Charlton as a whole.”
Brain replied: “I don’t want to be argumentative, but I’m going to be because I’m the chair, but in that case you should be building three-bedroom Victorian houses. Or from what I was hearing last week, perhaps it should be an estate of bungalows? Or bungalows on stilts because they wouldn’t comply with the environmental safety regulation.”
He then cut Richardson off to move on to the next speaker.
David Gayther, from the Charlton Central Residents’ Association – which covers streets about half a mile from the proposed development – said he found Brain’s comments “disturbing”.
Denying that local lobby groups were looking for “three storey Victorian housing”, he said that the masterplan called for “reasonably high-density, mixed use, medium height development that promotes quite a different community … a blank canvas on which to build a new Charlton that avoids some of the mistakes of Woolwich”.
“I do understand masterplans,” Brain shot back at the end of Gayther’s contribution.
Aitch’s view from Westmoor Street looking south
Picton referred to a planning inspector’s findings when plans for 10-storey blocks off Anchor and Hope Lane were thrown out last year. “The inspector differentiated between Greenwich [Peninsula] and Woolwich, and Charlton riverside.
“He said explicitly that Charlton riverside was urban, it wasn’t metropolitan. In terms of height, he said very clearly that 10 storeys on Charlton riverside is high rise. That view was endorsed by the secretary of state and I’m surprised that you don’t seem to have picked that up.”
Contradicting his earlier remark, Brain said: “I thought mid-rise were defined as being between five and 12 storeys, and high-rises were 13 floors and above, and that’s my definition that I tend to work to.”
The levels of “affordable” housing also came under scrutiny, although one member of the planning board, Abbey Wood Labour councillor Clive Mardner, had to have London Affordable Rent levels explained to him – even though one of his other roles on the council is chairing the housing scrutiny panel.
London Affordable Rent is a policy of London’s Labour mayor Sadiq Khan. It sets levels at about half of market rent – higher than council or social rents offered to existing tenants, which are about 40 per cent of market rent – but are available to people on universal credit. The housing charity Shelter has questioned whether London Affordable Rent is set at a fair level, but it is usually the cheapest rent available.
When questioned why the development did not offer social rents, Greenwich’s principal planner Jillian Halford said that London Affordable Rent was “certainly affordable to borough residents”.
“We may disagree on that,” Mardner said. Greenwich Council itself uses London Affordable Rent for its new Greenwich Builds properties – schemes which Mardner has voted in favour of.
A view of the Aitch scheme looking east from Penhall Road
Asked by Glyndon councllor Sandra Bauer why “affordable” housing levels had dropped from 35 to 30 percent, Halford said that the cut had been made to keep the development viable after original plans for 10 storeys were dropped.
Brenda Taggart from Charlton Together, another lobby group, questioned the developer’s attitude to “affordable” housing after a series of upward and downward revisions, saying it “has more elasticity than my old grandma’s knickers”.
The planning meeting had to end after two hours because of Covid restrictions – the cramped 115-year-old Woolwich Town Hall chamber is he only meeting room fitted with cameras so meetings can be viewed remotely, and councillors can only meet for two hours with a 15-minute break to air the chamber.
The restrictions have played havoc with Greenwich’s planning meetings, which had been held online with only a few hitches until communities secretary Robert Jenrick and a court ruling stopped the practice for councils’ decision-making meetings.
Councillors will hear from the developer and resume their deliberations on 20 July.
The recently-demolished gas holder was part of the former East Greenwich Gas Works
If you’re still mourning the loss of the gasholder next to the Blackwall Tunnel, which was finally dismantled last year, and curious about the old gas works that used to stretch out across the Greenwich Peninsula, then you can find out more this weekend with an online talk from local historian Mary Mills.
The Zoom chat is part of the Charlton Society‘s monthly programme of Saturday talks, which would normally take place at Charlton House, but has been running virtually during the pandemic.
The early gas industry was a hotbed of fraud and scandal – and the scandals around Greenwich’s first gas works led to the collapse of the ruling party and resignation of the Town Clerk in the 1820s. There were other gas works in Woolwich – with more scandals – even one in Eltham. Eventually, as everyone knows, Greenwich ended up with the biggest, the latest and the most perfect gas works ever – plus, of course, the recent scandalous demolition of our largest-in-the-world gas holder.
Mary Mills, well known to our regular members, has been around in Greenwich for years and it was while working at Charlton Library in the 1970s that she became hooked on local industrial history and has written a lot about it since. She was one of the founders of Greenwich Industrial History Society and has a PhD in the history of the gas industry.
The talk begins at 2.15pm on Saturday for a 2.30pm start and is open to both members and non-members – you can join the session here.
To find out more about The Charlton Society’s talks and how to join, visit charltonsociety.org.
The Charlton Champion 