Deptford

This week, I’m delighted to welcome a guest blogger – Helena Russell, secretary of the Build the Lenox project. I’ve blogged about this before on this site, but have recently become one of the project’s ‘champions’, and with its prospects currently at a crucial stage, I’m very happy to be able to provide this platform for a really worthy cause. Over to Helena!

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When it comes to the nation’s shipbuilding and sea-going past, few would dispute the significant role played by Greenwich in south-east London, which today is home to the world-renowned National Maritime Museum, the Royal Observatory and the restored Cutty Sark.

But the contribution of its neighbour Deptford, where Henry VIII established his royal dockyard in 1513, and where more than 400 ships were built and many more refitted, has long been overlooked. Deptford played a significant role in the development of wooden shipbuilding, yet visitors to the area will find little sign of its maritime connections, and most of the slipways and dockyard structures remain buried.

The Lenox Project charity aims to change this, and we have ambitious plans to build a full-size replica of the Lenox, a naval ship which was built and launched from Deptford dockyard in 1678.

The 70-gun Lenox represented the pinnacle of Restoration shipbuilding practice, being the first of Charles II’s thirty-ship programme to be built, under the direction of Samuel Pepys. By 1700, these magnificent and successful vessels were responsible for the Royal Navy becoming the world’s leading maritime power. A detailed record of the construction of the Lenox survives and has been painstakingly researched and compiled by the project’s historian Richard Endsor, as part of a 20-year study of the dockyard at the peak of its powers.

In the 17th century Deptford was second only to Chatham as a major centre for shipbuilding, and it was to Deptford that Tsar Peter the Great came for three months in 1698 to learn shipbuilding techniques. The yard’s proximity to the Navy Board Office in the City of London meant that it was frequently chosen for new or experimental construction.

The Lenox Project was formed in 2011, in response to proposals to redevelop the former dockyard site, now known as Convoys Wharf. We were inspired by the need to preserve and celebrate the heritage and character of Deptford and prevent it being lost.

As part of our ship-building scheme, we want to create apprenticeships and training in traditional and modern crafts, educate people about the area’s rich maritime past, and restore pride among residents in one of the city’s most deprived neighbourhoods. We have strong support in the local community and beyond, and having a base will give us the opportunity to build on this and expand our programme of events and outreach.

We are now crowdfunding for the first phase of the project, which will fund the establishment of a Deptford dockyard visitor centre and Lenox Project headquarters, bringing the disused undercroft of an historic riverfront building back to life.

The visitor centre will provide public space and workshops where volunteers and apprentices can get involved in building a scale model of the Lenox, alongside an exhibition focussing on the maritime history of Deptford. It will be a venue for a range of events, will host community group and school visits, and will enable people to find out more about the ship-building heritage that shaped this part of London.

It will bring into public use an historic premises which would otherwise be unused, and in a way which links directly to its history. We are working with the building owner to preserve and restore this listed building and its location will enable us to engage directly with local residents as well as those using the Thames Path.

The building owner, Hyde Housing, has agreed to let us have the space at a peppercorn rent for up to ten years. But it has been out of use for more than a decade, so funds are needed to install toilet and kitchen facilities, to set up a model-building workshop and equip it with tools and materials, to create an exhibition space with display facilities, and to make it accessible to everyone.

We want to offer training and apprenticeships, particularly in ‘eye-to-hand’ skills and heritage crafts, offering new routes to employment for those in the local area who may not otherwise have access to such opportunities.

In June we launched our crowdfunding campaign on Spacehive, and have already been successful in attracting a pledge of £50,000 from the Mayor of London’s Crowdfund London initiative, as well as more than a hundred personal pledges from our supporters and contacts.

But we still need to raise a considerable amount of money to create a public visitor centre and attraction for Deptford; support skills training in woodwork and wooden boat building; fit out a new event space and curate a programme of events; create a display space for Deptford dockyard and ship-building artefacts, and put together our Deptford-centric maritime resource library.

We have until 12th August to meet our target – for full details and to pledge, please visit our Spacehive page.

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The project’s website contains more information – D

268.

Two hundred and sixty eight.

I know football and rugby teams who’d be pleased with that sort of attendance. 268 people would comfortably fill a decent-sized airliner, or man a large destroyer. And, let’s face it, 268 MPs changing their minds would deliver Theresa May’s Brexit deal by a landslide.

Why, then, did this impressive number of people turn out on a cold Tuesday night in winter in south-east London?

To listen to two old buffers rabbiting on about seventeenth century naval history.

Let’s face it, my friends, if that can happen, then there’s still hope for humanity.

Seriously, it was a quite extraordinary evening. My old friend Richard Endsor and I had been asked to speak at an event to raise funds for, and raise awareness of, the project to build a replica of the 1677 Third Rate man-of-war Lenox within the historic dockyard site at Deptford. (Richard, of course, is the author of the book about her, Restoration Warship, which originally inspired the idea.) I’ve blogged about this before on this site, and hope you’ll all go and visit the project’s own website, where you can find out about ways to donate and help the cause. So we duly turned up at the venue, the wonderfully historic Saint Nicholas church in Deptford, close to the site where the Lenox was built and where Drake’s Golden Hind spent her last years. Saint Nicholas contains many historic memorials to local figures, such as those to the Shish family of shipwrights and to one of the most famous local residents of all, seventeenth century diarist John Evelyn (whose famous garden at Sayes Court is the focus on another terrific local project). An ideal venue, then, in which to deliver talks directly connected to the history of the building.

I’d spoken to a great audience at the maritime history seminar in Hull a few nights before: probably about fifty people, but an absolutely packed house, with standing room only, and I suppose I was expecting a similar sort of number at Deptford. Then people started arriving. The first arrivals were members of the ‘band’ that was due to be playing seventeenth century and nautical numbers at intervals during the evening. I suppose I’d expected something like a string quartet, or maybe a small chamber group…but still the musicians kept coming. This, it materialised, was the South East London Folk Orchestra, and what a splendid group they are, with a lively repertoire that had people singing along! So we had musicians, and very soon, we had an audience. Richard and I looked on in bemusement as more and more people poured into the church, and more and more seats had to be found. Yes, I’ve been in churches before when it’s a case of standing room only, but generally only for the funerals of popular people. But all these people had turned out to listen to us – and if you don’t believe me, there’s ample evidence on the ‘news’ page of the Lenox website! 

So Richard and I talked, with me providing a general overview of the history of Deptford dockyard in the Tudor and Stuart period, setting it in the context of the ambitions especially of Kings Henry VIII and Charles II, before Richard spoke on the women of Restoration Deptford – a tour through some of the racier episodes (such as Pepys’s successful pursuit of Mrs Bagwell, a shipwright’s wife) as well setting the record straight about the involvement of women in royal dockyards (much more than you might expect, with women in prominent roles as contractors or even serving in such posts as dockyard ratcatcher!). To be truthful, though, the evening passed in something of a blur, such was the buzz from the audience and the terrific atmosphere created by the orchestra. Even better, the event raised a significant amount of cash towards the Lenox project. So all in all, it was undoubtedly ‘a hit, a very palpable hit’, as somebody once said, and huge thanks to Julian, Esther, Reverend Louise, and the rest of the team for making it happen. I look forward to future events in Deptford, and if you’re within any sort of striking distance of south-east London, I’d strongly urge you to get involved. If you’re not within that striking distance, though, then I hope you’ll support the good folk of Deptford in the Lenox and Sayes Court projects in any way you can. These are genuine community efforts, very much ‘bottom up’ rather than ‘top down’, and in a time of austerity, when pretty well anywhere, but especially London, seems to be regarded as fair game for nothing but soulless development, then efforts to steer a different, historically aware, and much more inclusive course should surely be backed to the hilt.