Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
gives a vista like an old print, especially on evenings in the autumn when the sky is full
of strongly illuminated cumulus clouds, a view terminated by the huge globes on the gates
of Greenwich Hospital. There are one or two bow-windowed shops about here, somehow
with a maritime flavour, more junk shops, and an eel-pie emporium, all of which are worth
inspection, and the well-proportioned terraces at the corner of Nelson Road.
In Deptford once again, one of the most interesting experiences in connexion with this
book was my visit to the Royal Victoria Yard in its latter days - at least as a naval es-
tablishment, for the vast area is to become part of a redevelopment scheme, but much of
the old architecture is to be preserved and will be accessible to the public. Deptford was
the scene of Samuel Pepys' attempts to end corruption, to organise the Fleet for the wars
against the Dutch. At one time, the victualling of the Navy was carried on from a site on
Tower Hill, near where the Mint now stands. As this became inadequate, the Navy ac-
quired thirty-five acres of land from Sir John Evelyn in 1742, and it became the Deptford
Victualling Yard until Queen Victoria paid a visit in 1858 and commanded it to be called
'The Royal Victoria Yard'. There is a rich collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
buildings, for example the old bakery. The ovens, set in great arches of brick, are of cast
iron from the Regent's Canal Ironworks, and are dated 1855. The ovens were for baking
hard tack biscuits, and were used until 1906 when bread was introduced into the Navy. The
meal was ground in the yard. In those days, cattle were brought to Deptford from Ireland
and slaughtered in the cattle yard, the meat being salted and stowed in casks to await issue.
There was also a chocolate mill which produced the cocoa for the Navy, in use until the
last war. Bully beef was tinned here, too, in the nineteenth century. The whole group, sugar
stores, warehouses, bakery, rum store, and Governor's quarters, is still basically a Georgi-
an enclave with old trees and eighteenth-century terraces and a most interesting river walk
by the rum store. 'The Terrace' is to remain Admiralty property; one side of it has a fine
exterior staircase of cast iron. When I was there, the place was largely deserted. I pushed
open the door of the walled garden attached to the Governor's house. Old-fashioned Pais-
ley pinks, streaked purple and white, were in flower in the overgrown borders. The vine
was setting in green grapes in the conservatory. Innumerable sparrows were twittering in
the huge old mulberry, for the day was hot, and the whole garden, in fact, was full of the
song of birds, thrushes and blackbirds, mostly, and a steady burbling of unseen pigeons.
All this was against the background noise of bumping barges and wailing river boats com-
ing from the waterfront only a few yards away. There is an indescribable feeling of old
sea battles here - no wonder, after two hundred years of service to the Navy, a feeling that
Nelson and the Nile, Cape St Vincent and Trafalgar were only yesterday.
Leaving the Yard, you go down Windmill Lane, past the pre-fabs and by the waste land
where disused railway lines lead to nowhere and kids play in abandoned baths and old
sinks, over the Surrey Canal where all the exhausted soil is covered with the Indian yellow
