Constance Street: The true story of one family and one street in London’s East End. Charlie Connelly

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СКАЧАТЬ had a precocious natural talent for mathematics, extraordinary in any youngster but especially so for a boy of the most rudimentary schooling from the wilds of Devon. As his father realised when testing young George, the youngster could perform mind-bending mathematical calculations on demand in his head, and all while still in short trousers. Such was George’s fame that he was even brought before Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III, who was both enchanted and astounded by George’s charms and mathematical abilities.

      After a brief flirtation with a degree course at Edinburgh University, at the age of 18 George joined the Ordnance Survey and subsequently drifted into engineering. He then rekindled a friendship with the railway pioneer George Stephenson that had first flared in Scotland and joined him in 1834 in the construction of the London and Birmingham Railway. Three years later Bidder was instrumental in the founding of the Blackwall Railway, work which took him to the brink of the nameless marsh east of Bow Creek for the first time. One day, as the railway works clanked and hammered away behind him, Bidder must have looked out across Bow Creek and the tufty, boggy wasteland beyond to see Woolwich in the distance, and had an idea.

Chapter Six

      In 1838 the world’s first suburban railway line had opened south of river, connecting London Bridge and Greenwich, nearly the entire route passing along a purpose-built viaduct that carried the trains way above the heads and roofs of south-east London; a marvel of nineteenth-century vision and engineering. The plan was to continue the line beyond Greenwich to Woolwich, but the nature of the terrain meant going under rather than over the inhabitants. Such was the extent of the tunnelling required that the fruition of the project was years away when George Bidder, who as well as having a brilliant mathematical brain also had a pretty gimlet eye for the main chance, felt a light go on in his head.

      Instead of waiting for someone else to build the connecting line to Woolwich from Greenwich, why didn’t he just go a different way? If they began at Stratford and took the line across the empty marshland and introduced a ferry crossing to and from Woolwich at the other end they could surely pip the tunnellers to the Woolwich connection and, with the land so undesirable and the fact that no tunnels or viaducts were required, at a minimal cost.

      Work commenced in 1846 and by June the following year the line had opened, looping round to the north of where Silvertown stands today, across land now occupied by London City Airport. Two steam ferries connected the railway with Woolwich itself while a clutch of basic cottages was built at the terminus, officially christened North Woolwich, to house some of the railway workers.

      The initial success of the line was short-lived, as the tunnels south of the Thames were completed and opened in 1849, barely three years later and well ahead of the initial projections. In response Bidder and his business partners landscaped and furnished the North Woolwich Pleasure Gardens by way of an attraction for travellers. They opened in 1851, with bowling greens touted as the equal of any in the land and with a pier ready-made to welcome the pleasure steamers that chugged up and down the river between London, Gravesend and beyond, but the pleasure gardens’ lofty aspirations were not matched by the clientele. The remoteness of the location made laws and regulations more difficult to enforce, and the gardens soon earned a reputation for drunkenness and debauchery. Disapproving moralists campaigned to put an end to the bacchanalian shenanigans by taking the park into public ownership and banning drinking, but this would not be achieved until 1890. The fledgeling community by the river was demonstrating an early stubbornness and reluctance to be told what was good for it that would prove to be an enduring feature of the locality.

      In 1851, as Stephen Winckworth Silver was showing his fellow board members the frankly unprepossessing site of his planned new waterproofing works, two brothers named Howard had just secured a couple of riverside acres of land halfway between the creeks where they would build a modest glass factory and a wharf. Silver opened his works immediately next door in 1852, initially purchasing a single acre but soon adding five more and, when the Howard Brothers’ factory failed, snapping up their premises too.

      The year after Silver’s works opened came the development that would begin to establish and define the area when work commenced on the excavation of the Victoria Dock a short distance north-west of the Silver works. The growth of steam shipping meant the London docks further west were struggling to accommodate the larger vessels chugging and churning their way up and down the river. If London was to maintain its status as the world’s leading port then it was clear a larger capacity was urgently required and the land to the east between the creeks became the obvious location: it was certainly large enough and also more convenient as the ships didn’t have to sail as far inland. When ‘The Vic’ opened in 1855 it was easily the largest dock in the port of London. Flanked by vast new warehouses it was a marvel of maritime engineering and commercial ambition that would, within a decade of opening, be handling close to 850,000 tons of cargo a year, twice as much as the rest of the London docks combined.

      Stephen Winckworth Silver died within weeks of the dock opening but he’d lived long enough to see his bold move in setting up on soggy ground east of London entirely vindicated. He didn’t, alas, live long enough to see the Silver name truly make its mark as he’d wished. Two of his sons, Stephen William Silver and Colonel Hugh Silver, assumed control of the company on the death of their father and found a kindred spirit for their commercial ambitions in Charles Hancock, proprietor of the West Ham Gutta Percha company in Stratford. This mutual admiration led to Stephen William and Hancock taking out a new patent for producing waterproofing materials in 1862, and then two years later the amalgamation of the two companies into the India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Company based at the Silver works.

      When the waterproofing works had been established in 1852, construction also commenced on two purpose-built streets adjacent to the works providing housing for some of the workforce. Winchester Street and Twyford Street, muddy thoroughfares of very basic housing, ran north–south between Bidder’s railway and the river, the houses on the eastern side of Winchester Street backing right onto the works. The proximity to the river meant that at particularly high tides the streets were liable to flooding, but what they lacked in amenities they made up for in convenience: the residents no longer had to arrive by boat or pick their way along the river wall; they could now walk out of their front doors and be at work in barely two minutes.

      By the end of the 1850s the works and this couple of residential streets were being referred to colloquially as ‘Silver’s Town’. Before long this was shortened to Silvertown. The first published references to ‘Silvertown’ appear in newspapers from 1858, and as the area saw some of the most rapid industrial expansion in history the name would stick.

Chapter Seven

      The junior Silvers seemed to share their father’s instinct for opportunity. In 1859 the company staged a demonstration of submarine telegraphy, the use for which they felt their gutta-percha works might be best disposed. Two hundred ‘gentlemen’ travelled down the river by boat to see how undersea telegraph cables coated in gutta-percha would be totally protected from water damage. One contemporary newspaper report noted:

      ‘The company assembled had the pleasure of inspecting the extensive factory of Messrs Silver at Silvertown where they carry on their India-Rubber Works, which are not only remarkable for their extent but also for their arrangement both mechanically and socially. Besides the master-mind, there are a chaplain, a surgeon, a sick club and a school for the children of the workmen, and the evenings of the men and their families are enlivened and rendered instructive by lectures from men of first-rate ability.’

      How enlivening and instructive the lectures were considered by men at the end of a long, hard, dirty, noisy day is possibly open to debate. Charles Dickens’s Household Words magazine waved the flag in 1862, declaring that СКАЧАТЬ