Green Chain Walk D2.1: Woolwich - Falconwood

 

Woolwich Royal Arsenal Pier, octagonal guardhouses and Assembly sculpture.

The next phase of my tour of the complete Green Chain begins with this relatively short but fine walk climbing from one of London’s most impressive collections of heritage buildings, beside the river at Woolwich Royal Arsenal, to the summit of Shooter’s Hill, one of London’s loftiest points, and on into the luxuriant leafiness of Oxleas Wood with its much-loved café. Along the way there’s a sampling of Plumstead Common and a succession of breathtaking views from Salisbury Park, Eaglesfield Park and Oxleas Meadow.

The walk starts by the Thames Clippers pier at Woolwich Royal Arsenal, with an easy link to the Woolwich Ferry pier too. Shortly after the start you pass Woolwich Elizabeth Line station and Woolwich Arsenal National Rail and DLR station, which provide alternative ways to access the walk. There’s not another handy station until Falconwood (National Rail) at the end, but you’ll pass several bus stops. You might need them, as this is also one of the Green Chain’s more rugged stretches, with over 130 m of ascent, including some steep streets and paths and a flight of rough steps.

This walk covers all Green Chain Section 4a running roughly north-south from Waverley Crescent on Plumstead Common, where it leaves Section 4, to Oxleas Wood Café where it links with Sections 3 and 5 and the Capital Ring. I’ve topped and tailed it, starting at Woolwich then following Ring and Green Chain station links and parts of the (unsigned) Green London Way, except for a brief shortcut across General Gordon Square, to head south for the Fox and Hounds on Plumstead Common Road. Here you’ll pick up Green Chain Section 4 for a short distance east, duplicating part of my walk D3, to the start of Section 4a at Waverley Crescent.

At the other end, I use Section 3 (duplicating D4.1 and the Capital Ring) to Oxleas Wood Junction and Section 6 (duplicating D1.1, D4.1 and the Ring) to Welling Way bus stops, then a short unofficial station link to Falconwood. The walk is shorter than usual as, when combined with the second leg along the Shuttle Riverway to Bexley, there is no convenient station for breaking it into more even portions. But with so much to look at in Woolwich and all that climbing, it feels longer than it is.

See the Ramblers guide for directions on the central portion on Green Chain 4a, and my information sheet for the rest. The routes and places mentioned are shown on my Google map.

The Royal Arsenal

River Thames by Woolwich Royal Arsenal Pier: note the remains of various earlier piers.

London Underfoot has been to Woolwich before: it’s the official start and end point of the Capital Ring, so I’ve already gone into historical detail on Ring 1. But to summarise: a Celtic oppidum or fortified town stood on a modest rise beside the Thames at Woolwich from the Iron Age, the only one of its kind known in the London area. It was re-occupied in the later part of the Roman era as a fort protecting the approaches to London. In Anglo-Saxon times the place was most likely a quiet fishing village and officially became a market town in 1618. It was long considered a distinct sub-manor of Eltham, but had its own parish church likely from pre-Norman times. Historically, it was in the Blackheath hundred and the Sutton at Hone lathe of the county of Kent.

The overwhelming influence on the shape of the modern town is its long association with the military and the navy. Henry VIII chose Woolwich as the location in 1512 for one of his naval dockyards, and his flagship Henry grace à Dieu or Great Harry was built here in 1515. An area of riverside historically used as a rabbit warren to the east became a ropeyard which served the dockyard and by the 1650s a wharf next to this was used by the Board of Ordnance to store guns, which were tested on the warren. A gun battery was installed to protect the river in 1667, and in 1695 the site began producing explosives, fuses and shot.

Production of arms and explosives continued to grow over the following century, and in 1805 George III renamed the facility the Royal Arsenal. By then, as explained on D1.1, the site had already begun to expand downriver into Plumstead and Erith, occupying marshes drained by the monks of Lesnes Abbey, until the arsenal controlled practically the whole riverside between Woolwich and Crossness. World War I saw the Royal Arsenal at its peak, with more than 80,000 people working on a 5.3 square km site.

Activity declined in the interwar years, and though the arsenal also played a major role in World War II, it began downsizing soon afterwards in response to decline in demand for armaments, new technologies changing the way wars were likely to be fought in future, and new plants opening elsewhere. Some of the production facilities initially switched to making railway wagons and knitting frames, and the first patch of land sold off as surplus to requirements became an industrial estate in 1953. Subsequent disused chunks were used for social housing and industrial estates, and in the late 1960s the Greater London Council began developing most of the rest into a massive new town, Thamesmead, also explored on D1.1.

The Ministry of Defence continued to occupy most of the historic western portion of the site, closest to Woolwich Town Centre, until 1994. From 2003, this was progressively turned into an upmarket residential, commercial and cultural neighbourhood, which boasts one of the greatest concentrations of listed buildings converted for residential use in the UK. For all my reservations about the politics of privately led development on public assets and the legal status of ‘public-private’ space, the results here are splendid, at least in the core of the site which we’ll explore today. Much of the original fabric of this important historic location has been kept and is open to everyone’s view. If, like me, you remember it as a no-go area surrounded by forbidding walls and appearing as a blank space on A-Z maps, it’s a major revelation.

Strictly speaking, though the Capital Ring, Jubilee Greenway (which follows the same course as the Thames Path upstream from the foot tunnel portal), Thames Path and England Coast Path run through, there’s no Green Chain branch starting from Woolwich. But there is a north-south link, Section 4a, running from Plumstead Common, not too far away, to Oxleas Woods.

To bring this leg in line with the other riverside starts, I’ve suggested an extension from Royal Arsenal Pier to the common, passing some of the arsenal’s most important heritage buildings. It almost entirely follows part of Bob Gilbert’s unofficial Green London Way, which splits from the ring here on an extended loop through several Green Chain spaces. As far as Woolwich Arsenal station it shares the path with one of the Ring’s station links and from there it tracks an official Green Chain station link a short distance south of the town centre.

Thames Clippers catamarans, currently branded Uber Boat, regularly serve the pier, so this is a grand opportunity to arrive at the start by river, an ideal way of setting the context given the Thames’s importance to our story. You’ll need the RB1, which can be caught from Westminster, the London Eye, Embankment, Blackfriars, Bankside, London Bridge, Tower, Canary Wharf, Greenwich, North Greenwich and a few other piers, and continues to Barking Riverside. If this is inconvenient, or you’d rather not shell out the additional fare, the nearest station is Woolwich on the Elizabeth Line around 400 m away, with Woolwich Arsenal on National Rail southeastern and the DLR around 250 m further, though you’ll end up retracing steps in both cases if you don’t want to miss any of the heritage assets.

Royal Arsenal Pier is a modern structure, installed in 2002 to serve the redeveloped site, though between 1815 and 1931 there was a water gate here with steps. You can still see the remains of the steps under the pier if you look over the adjacent river embankment. But their role as the main riverside gateway was eventually superseded by three piers a little downstream which were rather bigger than the current one.

The T-Pier, constructed in the 1850s and named after its shape, was demolished in the 1990s though some of its supporting pillars still sprout from the river next to the current pier. The other two are still partially standing and visible if you look downstream, though derelict: the Iron Pier, also T-shaped, was added in 1869 for loading heavy iron guns onto ships, and the L-shaped Coaling Pier opened in 1917 as a delivery point for the 1,500 t of coal the arsenal was then consuming in an average week.

The steps were a recognised weak point in the security cordon, thus the two octagonal guardhouses that once flanked them (Grade II), also dating from 1815. The western one (building A41) was for officers, the eastern (A42) for artillerymen. Today, they’re used as a dog grooming salon and a café respectively. As first built, they had open bays, but were later enclosed. The body of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (1856-79), Prince Imperial of France and son of Napoleon III, lay in state in the western guardhouse after he was killed by Zulu forces near Ulundi in what’s now Zululand, South Africa, while fighting for the British army during the Zulu Wars. Though it was his own idea to join up, his death triggered rumours in France that the wicked British were to blame.

Also eye-catching is the Assembly sculpture installed in 2005 in front of the guardrooms, a small crowd of 16 partial body casts of human figures, made from gently rusting cast iron and arranged within a circle. It’s often assumed to be the work of Antony Gormley, who is also fond of simplified human figures, but it’s by Peter Burke (b1944), who intended to evoke both the human form and the heavy engineering and mass production that once went on in the surrounding buildings. To me it oddly combines a certain sombreness, particularly evident on dull days when few people are around, with a surprising sense of fun, as evidenced by its popularity with children and selfie-takers.

Along No 1 Street

The Royal Arsenal's only Grade I listed building, the former Royal Brass Foundry.

Your way is straight ahead along the main thoroughfare of the area, prosaically named No 1 Street. A patch of grass with a collection of mounted guns on the left (east), on a site previously occupied by a military police station, is called James Clavell Square, after James Clavell (1921-94), the Australian-born writer and film maker, who wrote the screenplay for The Great Escape (1963) and wrote and directed To Sir, With Love (1967) among others.

He was a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery during World War II and was taken prisoner by the Japanese in Java in 1942, later drawing on that gruelling experience for his novel King Rat (1962). He’s commemorated here as his widow sponsored the library attached to Firepower, which once occupied the adjacent building as explained below. The biggest weapon on display is the hefty 40 t Gibraltar Gun, installed as part of Gibraltar’s coastal defences in 1902. It was rescued from a scrapyard in the 1980s.

The surrounding buildings collectively formed the Royal Laboratory. The term is misleading to modern ears: when the first ‘laboratory’ was established at the Warren in 1695, it was a workshop making ammunition, the beginning of such manufacturing on the site. On the right is Building 41, otherwise known as New Laboratory Square, or the Pedimental Building after the pedimented style of the range facing towards us (formerly buildings A22, A25-32 and A34, Grade II).

There are three more ranges around a rectangular courtyard: the oldest is the west range on the other side, built in 1805, with the east (facing us) and north added five years later. When the south range completed the quadrangle in 1878, it was built with a cast iron frame, clearly visible when you poke your head round the corner: many arsenal buildings of the period used this technique but this is the sole survivor. By the end of World War I, the central courtyard had been infilled with workshops and a boiler house, since cleared.

Opposite, just beyond James Clavell Square, is Building 18 (formerly A44, Grade II), completed in 1856 as offices for the Royal Laboratory. Building 17, the yellow brick building south of this, part of the same block and built at the same time, is the former Paper Cartridge Factory (Grade II), which was later converted to make metal cartridge cases, some for early machine guns.

Royal Arsenal boardroom, with the cast iron-framed south range of the New Laboratory right.

Opposite this is an open square with a particularly handsome Grade II*-listed Baroque building at the far end, built as the Royal Arsenal Boardroom between 1718-20 on the site of the Lieutenant General of Ordnance’s official residence (Building 40). Part of it was used by the Royal Military Academy before this moved to Woolwich Common (Ring 1) in 1806. The architect is unknown, but it’s been attributed to two big names, Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736) and John Vanbrugh (1664-1726), who were both active on the site, and fits with both their styles. The lion and unicorn above the entrance originally stood over the northern entrance to the original Royal Laboratory around what’s now Pavilion Square, roughly where the single-storey part of the new flat block is, to the left as you look at the boardroom. They were transplanted here following various 19^th century developments.

In 2001, during the early stages of the current redevelopment, parts of New Laboratory Square and the offices became the Royal Artillery Museum, branded as Firepower and widely recognised as one of the most important military museums in the UK. The Greenwich Heritage Centre, also with a museum as well as visitor information and an archive, opened in the iron-framed southern range of the square in 2003. Firepower struggled to cover its costs and closed in 2016: it’s not yet found a new home and its collection is currently in storage.

Greenwich council subsequently converted the buildings into a ‘cultural quarter’ known as Woolwich Works which curiously didn’t include the heritage centre, kicked out at short notice in 2018.  New Laboratory Square now has various performance and events spaces, including the 900-seater Fireworks Factory, mainly used for music. Open air events are now held in the courtyard, which has been named Workers’ Yard, and there’s a recording studio in the west wing.

Immersive theatre company Punchdrunk is based at the Paper Cartridge Factory, while another theatre is under construction in the Laboratory Offices. The Royal Arsenal Boardroom is now Academy Performing Arts, a rehearsal and teaching facility. The council originally promised to return the heritage centre to the site after all the work was completed but then reneged on this amid considerable local protest. The collection is currently in storage in leaky Charlton House (Ring 1) with no future public facility yet confirmed.

The lengthy and imposing façade visible along Duke of Wellington Avenue, to the left after the Paper Cartridge Factory, is the north range of the New Carriage Store (Grade II), built between 1802-05 for making, maintaining and storing the carriages for big guns.

The oldest part of the Royal Laboratory is on the right just past this corner, the site of the original 1690s gunpowder factory, also arranged around a courtyard. Two 21^st century flat blocks now flank the north and south, known as Tyger House and Amphion House respectively, but a pair of historic pavilions (Grade II), built in 1695 and likely the oldest extant ordnance buildings in the UK, still stand to the east and west, with the former fronting onto No 1 Street. Note the range of five large windows intended to provide plenty of natural light to a top floor workshop. In 1855 the courtyard behind was roofed over to create what was then the largest milling machinery space in the world. It’s since been opened to the air again as Pavilion Square.

The only Grade I-listed building on the site has dominated the view ahead since leaving the pier. It has an imposing central block with a large door surrounded by contrasting brick and plaster bands and topped by an elaborate representation of George I’s coat of arms, with dormer windows emerging from a tower topped by a leaded cupola, flanked by two much lower single storey wings. This is the original Royal Brass Foundry, Building A4. Opened in 1717, likely to designs by John Vanburgh, it was the first arsenal building designed for making guns, in this case large field guns cast from brass.

According to its listing, it’s a ‘rare, early and little-altered example of a purpose-built foundry and workshop, reworked at the start of the industrial revolution’. It continued in its original use until around 1870, after which it was used as storeroom. It’s been the archive of the National Maritime Museum (based in Greenwich on D5.1) since 1972. Leaning against one of its side walls facing No 1 Street is a Roman sculpture of a barbarian known as Deus Lunus (‘moon god’), dating from between the 1^st and 3^rd century CE and looted by British troops in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1801.

Spoils of Empire: Deus Lunus casually leaning against the foundry wall.

You walk over the Elizabeth Line just before No 1 Street kinks slightly left in front of the foundry to pass another of the site’s older buildings, and one of its most idiosyncratic. This is the Dial Arch or Building A57 on the left. Built between 1717-20 as a frontage and machine shop for the later Royal Brass Foundry, which occupied the space behind, it’s almost certainly the work of Hawksmoor. It’s a fortunate survivor, as most of the foundry, known variously over the years as the Great Pile, Foundry Square or the Dial Arch Block, was demolished and rebuilt in the 19^th century, demolished again in 1969 and covered with flats in the early 2000s.

Dial Arch, Royal Arsenal Woolwich.

There are numerous delightful decorative touches to lighten what’s otherwise a solid industrial building, particularly around the central arch, which is flanked by two pylons topped with pyramids of shot and surmounted by the bronze sundial that explains the name, added in 1764. It now functions as a large pub and café, opened in 2010.

The Dial Arch overlooks the open space of Dial Square, a name familiar to historians of association football. In 1886, a group of arsenal workers formed the Dial Square Football Club, renaming it Royal Arsenal FC the following year. They played at various locations in nearby Plumstead before settling at the Manor Ground, adjacent to the arsenal site near Plumstead station, in 1888, and became the first London team to turn professional in 1891. Known for a while as Woolwich Arsenal FC, the club became simply Arsenal FC when it crossed the river in 1913 to a new stadium in Gillespie Road, Highbury, where it remains today. This history is commemorated by a modest memorial on the pub patio right opposite the main entrance, a plinth topped by a football, installed in 2005.

Dial Square monument, Royal Arsenal. North London got the Arsenal while south London got Millwall...

A little further along on the right is a much larger piece of public art, a sculpture of the goddess Nike by Greek artist Pavlos Angelos Kougioumtzis (b1945), gifted to Greenwich by the people of Olympos in 2012 to mark the London Olympic and Paralympic Games. It stands in the front yard of the 1788 guardhouse, Building A83 (Grade II), in stock brick with an outsized Portland stone Doric portico, now also used as a pub.

Opposite, across Dial Square, is Woolwich Elizabeth Line station, opened in 2022. It was a long time coming: the first known proposal to link main line railways west and east of the capital with a full-sized tunnel beneath central London was in 1941, and the idea was adopted in the utopian County of London and Greater London Plans in 1943-44. The Central London Rail Study recommended a ‘crossrail’ tunnel connecting Paddington and Liverpool Street in 1974 and the idea was subsequently promoted by British Rail and the GLC, but rejected in 1991 by a government hostile to public transport. The project was finally approved in 2008 with construction beginning the following year, though as often the work took rather longer and cost rather more than expected.

The section from Paddington through the central tunnel to Canary Wharf and Abbey Wood, passing under our feet, opened around 3½ years behind schedule, with the full service between Reading or Heathrow in the west and Shenfield or Abbey Wood in the east starting in 2023. It’s unique in London’s transport network: though managed by Transport for London and branded very much like a Tube line, it’s technically part of the National Rail network rather than the London Underground – like the London Overground, in fact, though it’s not part of that either. Woolwich station wasn’t in the original plans and was only added after the council lobbied hard and Royal Arsenal developer Berkeley Homes coughed up £162 million to pay for it. It’s notably more modest than the other new stations on the line, though has an attractive bronze-clad frontage and glazing to allow natural light to reach the platforms.

To the right of the station is Verbruggen’s House, Building A85 (Grade II), completed in 1773 as a home for the newly appointed Netherlands-born Royal Arsenal master founder Jan Verbruggen (1712-81) and his son and successor Pieter. Verbruggen had done a similar job for the Dutch admiralty and was also a noted painter of seascapes and shipping. The house, a smart two-storey building, later served as a boardroom and is now offices.

Our trail leaves the current Royal Arsenal site through Marsh Gate, where, just a few paces right and round the corner, one of the few surviving fragments of the early 18^th century wall can be seen behind the guardhouse. This wall originally continued in a straight line to connect with the original landward main entrance, Beresford Gate, still standing but now severed from the main site by the busy A206 Beresford Street ahead of us. The road opened in 1982 as one of the cumulative encroachments, replacing the previous much narrower Beresford Street which ran on the other side of the arch. To compensate a little for the redundancy of this ceremonial gateway, the more modest piers and gates of Marsh Gate, a subsidiary access point further east along Plumstead Road, were transplanted here.

You’ll appreciate Beresford Gate better once you’ve crossed the road and looked back at the side facing the town. The current Grade II-listed structure (Building A80) dates from 1829, with the bell tower added in 1859 and the upper parts in 1891. If you look carefully, you’ll see the insignia of George IV and decorative mortars on the parapets flanking each side. There are also two cattle troughs, but they were moved here in the 1990s.

The arch and the adjoining street and square are named after William Beresford (1768-1854), who rose to the rank of Field Marshal commanding the British army against Napoleonic France in Portugal during the Peninsular War, and in 1828 was made Master-General of the Ordnance, with overall responsibility for the arsenal. When the gate was detached from the rest of the site in the early 1980s, the interior was found to be so riddled with dry rot that it had to be entirely replaced. It’s since gone through two restorations and is currently being renovated again as part of the improvements to Beresford Square, which will enable its central gates to be opened for the first time in 25 years.

Woolwich town centre

We're with the Woolwich: General Gordon Square with Equitable Building, teacups, Keir Starmer on the telly and no more smoke.

I’ve covered Woolwich town centre, now largely a conservation area, in some detail on Ring 1. Historic Beresford Square, on the other side of the arch, has long been home to Woolwich Market. At the time of writing, it was in the final stages of an improvement project, with the provision of new seating, plantings and a water feature and the market traders shunted off to the west side, where our route runs. A new market pavilion café and toilets in a striking building designed by architects Studioweave is under construction adjacent to the arch. At the far end, the projecting single storey section of the Elephant and Castle pub obscures a much older two storey building with attic behind it, an early 18^th century Grade II-listed house.

Past this is the main entrance to Woolwich Arsenal Docklands Light Railway (DLR) station, opened in 2009 (see Ring 15 for more on the DLR). It’s notable for its colourful Street Life mural by Irish artist Michael Craig-Martin (b1941), covering two landings and composed of 2,500 individually screen-printed ceramic tiles.

Michael Craig-Martin's distinctive tiling brightening Woolwich Arsenal DLR station.

Reaching General Gordon Square, the roadway to your left covers the first railway to reach Woolwich, the South Eastern Railway’s North Kent Line, which we also crossed on the approach to Lesnes Abbey on D1.1. When first opened in 1859, it ran through an open cutting here, rapidly nicknamed ‘the Smoke ‘Ole’ as it was used for venting smoke from steam locomotives, much to the discomfort of residents, shoppers and market traders. The nuisance persisted until 1928 when the line was electrified and covered over, creating a small public square named after General Charles George Gordon (1833-85), who was born in Woolwich and died during the Siege of Khartoum. The imposing building running along the left side is Equitable House (Grade II), built as the head office of Woolwich Equitable Building Society in 1935.

The station link heads alongside Equitable House to Woolwich Arsenal National Rail station, the building with the glass rotunda ahead, which also has access to the DLR (and its own artwork, a 1993 relief sculpture called Workers of Woolwich by Martin Williams (b1954), alongside Platform 1). But if you’re continuing your journey into territory previously uncharted by London Underfoot, it’s simplest just to cross to the square itself.

The square is now much bigger than it originally was. The western part was built up until the 1970s when it was progressively demolished to make way for a redevelopment scheme that later collapsed. In 1983 the council decided to convert it into a temporary public space, but it rapidly became an informal focal point. Its status was confirmed as permanent in 2009 when it was refurbished and improved in preparation for the Olympics. The current layout dates from then: the giant telly in the eastern corner, a BBC Big Screen, was installed as one of the Olympic ‘live sites’ in 2012.

Ich bin ein Woolwicher: Buddy Bear with appropriately nautical and military additons.

The most direct path across the square will bring you face to face with the Buddy Bear sculpture, a fibreglass Berlin mascot decorated by artist, musician and performer Michèle Petit-Jean (b1954) and students of Eltham Hill School. It was installed in 2016 to mark the 50^th anniversary of the twinning agreement between Greenwich and Reinickendorf borough in the northwest of the German city. The main artwork commemorates the area’s maritime heritage, while the surprisingly aggressive black images of guns on Buddy’s paws nod to the arsenal.

Turning left, the Tramshed theatre and arts centre is prominent ahead. It wasn’t originally a tramshed but an electricity substation built in 1910 to serve the LCC’s tram network. Doubtless it powered the last of the first-generation London trams, which departed Woolwich for New Cross in July 1952 on a route lined with grieving crowds. The council bought the redundant and now part-derelict substation 10 years later and converted it to a theatre, though it’s opened and closed several times since. Greenwich and Lewisham Young People’s Theatre was founded here in 1971, and in 2011 the company returned to take over the building.

The site on the right as you follow Woolwich New Road was for many years another temporary public space created by the collapse of development plans and would have made a pleasant extension of General Gordon Square, offsetting the hideous Tesco superstore that overlooks it. But as of spring 2025 it’s become a construction site for yet another private-shared ownership housing development. 89 Woolwich New Road, at the next corner with Anglesea Road, includes a fragment of a Georgian townhouse, although it’s been much rebuilt.

Our route skips to Brookhill Road, passing the substantial flat blocks of the Walpole social housing estate in their green, though private, surrounds. This was built in the mid-1960s on terraced streets demolished as ‘slum clearance’ in the previous decade. Opposite is the rear of St Peter’s Roman Catholic Church (Grade II), which fronts onto New Road. It’s a substantial example of its type, built in 1843 to designs by renowned Gothic Revival architect Augustus Pugin (1812-52), best known for the Elizabeth Tower at the Palace of Westminster, better known as Big Ben.

You leave the conservation area as you reach the crossing with Sandy Hill Road, where you also part company with the Green Chain station link. This is mainly intended for walkers approaching from the west from Charlton Park who want to break at Woolwich, so it stays on Brookhill Road to join Section 4 (D3) about 250 m west of where we do.  Our route sticks with the Green London Way for a while longer by turning left alongside the Victorian terraces of Sandy Hill Road. We’ve already been climbing modestly, but now the ascent begins in earnest. Across the mini roundabout, on the far corner of Frederick Place, you cross the old parish boundary from Woolwich into Plumstead.

Plumstead Common

Howitzer Brigade memorial on Plumstead Common.

Plumstead was only just east of Woolwich: indeed, most of the platform length of Woolwich Arsenal station is on land that was once in Plumstead. It was not just a separate parish but in a different hundred: Little and Lessness (introduced in D1.1) rather than Blackheath. It’s mentioned in 960 when lands in the area were gifted to St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, and it remained in the abbey’s hands until that institution was dissolved in 1539. It was particularly noted for its extensive common and its marshes, the latter subsequently occupied by the arsenal. Substantial fragments of the former survive today, as we’ll shortly see, though only because local people took action to save them in the 1870s. But as we’ll explore a lot more of Plumstead Common on D3, I’ll save a more detailed history until then.

The street name Burrage Road on the left is a reminder that this area was once part of the Burrage estate, which in the mid-14^th century was effectively a sub-manor of Plumstead that spilt into neighbouring Woolwich. It was held by royal councillor Bartholomew Burghersh the Elder (d1355), whose names comes from Burwash in Suffolk where he also held lands: round here the name was corrupted to Burrage. By the mid-18^th century, it was in the hands of the Pattinson family, who had links to the nearby Royal Military Academy, and there were commercial sandpits on the higher ground towards Plumstead Common Road, thus the street name Sandy Hill Road.

Nathaniel Pattinson sold the southwestern part to the Royal Board of Ordnance in 1808, and he and the Board jointly funded the laying out of Brookhill Road. His son James, a city merchant, capitalising on the demand for housing the ever-increasing numbers of arsenal workers, initiated the development of the rest. By the 1850s strings of terraces had begun to line the steep streets that climbed the hillside, many of them still standing today as we can see. Initially the area was promoted as Plumstead New Town but became known as Burrage Town. The remains of the country estate were parcelled out and sold by the last private owner in the early years of the 20^th century.

The attractive former Sandy Hill Infant School, Plumstead.

As you climb the hill you may notice that the housing gets posher, as wealthier residents were prepared to pay a premium for the cleaner air that comes with height, escaping the fumes and smells of the arsenal and other industries in the valley. Past no 115 on the left is the rather attractive Grade II-listed building of the former Sandy Hill Infant School with its three elegant gables and the tall windows of the assembly hall in its central bay. Built in 1899 for the London School Board, it was the infants department of a larger school site which stretches east to Bloomfield Road, thus the central plaque reading Bloomfield Road School. It remained in school use until 1999, latterly part of Woolwich Polytechnic School, but has since been converted to flats.

Sandy Hill Road meets Plumstead Common Road, one of the old main highways through the area, by the Fox and Hounds pub in a modest Victorian corner building. There’s been a pub here since at least 1840, around when the development of Burrage Town began. Along the main road, now on Green Chain Section 4, you enter Plumstead Common Conservation Area, which largely retains its Victorian character. Trinity Methodist Church on the corner of Burrage Road, dates from 1863, but was badly damaged during the Blitz in 1940 and was largely rebuilt in striking modernist style in 1972-73. There are more handsome late Victorian gables ahead of you at the junction with St Margarets Grove: the imposing building there was once the Prince of Wales pub, closed in 2011 and now flats.

It’s here that you enter the common, which has an active Friends Group. The memorial (Grade II) commemorating the World War I casualties of the locally based 8^th London Howitzer Brigade was installed in 1923. A howitzer is a medium-sized artillery weapon somewhere between a field gun and a mortar: guns like this were made at the Royal Arsenal by Jan Verbruggen in the 18^th century and similar designs continued in use into World War II.

The Dog Rocks, Plumstead Common: even 50 million year old rocks can't escape the Lime bike.

Just past this, opposite the adventure playground, is a terraced shrubbery on the site of a quarry dating from before 1866. Here you can observe the so-called Dog Rocks, an exposed layer of Blackheath Beds puddingstone laid down in the early Eocene epoch around 50 million years ago when this area was under the sea. It consists of flint pebbles bonded by the calcareous remains of small sea creatures. The beds are similarly exposed just inside Beckenham Place Park on D1.2 but the examples here are more extensive. The rocks are clearly visible opposite the playground entrance, or you can climb the terraces for a closer look at the largest specimens.

Across Blendon Terrace is another section of common which takes you past Plumstead Common Nature Reserve on the left, a wooded ravine noted for its trees and butterflies that was part of the vicarage garden attached to St Margaret’s Church. The church itself was built in the 1850s to serve the increased population but demolished in 1974 when the costs of upkeep became uneconomic. A combined church, St Mark’s and St Margaret’s, was then built on the site of St Mark’s church further east: you’ll pass it on D3. A block of flats now stands on the St Margaret’s site, towering over the trees of the nature reserve.

Between tennis courts, a bowling green and a dog walking area, you reach a Green Chain junction on Waverley Crescent, on an area of common that’s particularly suffered from the incursion of roads. From here you can see a stumpy tower behind the Old Mill pub across the grass ahead. This is what is left of Plumstead Windmill, built in the early 19^th century but disused from 1848, after which the buildings became a brewpub and later just a pub. A crowd of around 1,000 local people gathered in front of the Old Mill in 1876 to protest efforts by the landowner, by then Queens College Oxford, to build a luxury estate on what was left of the common. This was an angry demonstration that, though it resulted in arrests and convictions for riotous assembly, triggered the political process that resulted in the conservation of the remaining open space under the Plumstead Common Act of 1878.

Surely one of London's best looking Coop stores: The Links, Plumstead Common.

Green Chain Section 4 continues ahead across the common: we’ll get to that on D3, but for now our way is southwest along Section 4a back to Plumstead Common Road. On the main road, slightly left, is a parade of shops sprouting a large and striking gable framing a two-storey bay window, decorated in mock-Tudor black and white half-timbering and topped by a clock tower. This stands on the site of a big house known as the Links, which in the late 19^th century was the home of a wealthy businessman, William Dawson, who owned an adjacent brickworks. He began building and selling upmarket homes on the extensive parkland surrounding his house, and at the start of the new century closed his works too, opening a wider area south of the road for development.

The Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society (RACS) built the present Links in 1905 as a smart shopping parade to serve the new housing. The RACS, founded at the arsenal in 1868, was the biggest and most active such coop in London and became a significant developer in its own right, as mentioned on D1.1. A short distance off our route, right (east) along the main road, is the Star pub, a modestly handsome part Victorian, part interwar structure that scrapes into the National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors thanks to its surviving 19^th century bar counter, back bar, dividing screen and gas light fittings.

Shrewsbury Park and Shooters Hill

The spectacular view from Shrewsbury Park, Plumstead.

On the other side of Plumstead Common Road, you soon leave the conservation area along Ennis Road, and begin climbing steadily alongside the terraces built on William Dawson’s land. A very sharp right takes you along Upton Road and up steps through the 2.38 ha of ‘emergent woodland’ that now tops Dot Hill. The land here, and for a long way south to Shooters Hill, was owned in the 18^th century by the Lidgbird family, who had grown wealthy from a claypit and pottery they operated a little west on the other side of Plum Lane.

In the 1930s, Dot Hill was still farmland, attached to Clay Farm which had also been part of the Lidgbirds’ property. Plans to develop it were interrupted by World War II, when it was given over to allotments as part of the Dig for Victory campaign. Some allotments remain on the western side, passed as we enter the site, but the rest was allowed to return to grassland following the war and eventually became managed as part of Shrewsbury Park, of which more below. In the 1990s it was designated as a community woodland and planted extensively, mainly with oak and hawthorn but also willow and cherry. It’s clearly still a young woodland but developing nicely. The site includes some older and possibly ancient woods to the east, off our route.

Approaching Shrewsbury Park from Dot Hill.

Crossing Dothill Road, at this point a path following an old field boundary, you enter the former country estate of Shrewsbury Park. This was the grand location of the Lidgbirds’ family home and became even grander in 1789 when Charles Talbot (1753-1827), the Earl of Shrewbury, leased the land and built a mansion, Shrewsbury House, surrounded by landscaped parkland.

Only a decade later, it passed to George, the Prince Regent (1762-1830), later George IV, who used it as a home for Charlotte, Princess of Wales (1796-1817), his three-year-old daughter by his estranged wife Caroline von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (1768-1821). The poor child became something of a pawn in a vicious marital dispute, but the house provided a neutral space where both parents could visit without bumping into each other, particularly handy for Caroline who lived in Blackheath. As his only child, Charlotte was George’s heir apparent, but predeceased her father, dying in childbirth and opening the succession to her cousin Victoria.

Shrewsbury House remained a private home until 1851 when it became a boarding school and then a children’s convalescent home in 1879. Some of the grounds had a more unusual educational use between 1908 and 1929, as the London County Council’s (LCC) Open Air School for ‘delicate children’ with heart, breathing and malnourishment problems. Intended to help prevent the spread of tuberculosis, this was one of the earliest such schools in Britain, following a model established in the Berlin borough of Charlottenburg in 1904 as the Waldschule für kränkliche Kinder (‘forest school for sickly children’).

Classes were held in open-sided temporary buildings known as ‘Döcker sheds’ after their Danish inventor, and there were numerous other invigorating activities including an open-air pottery workshop. The school moved to Charlton Park in 1929, by which time there were over 150 such institutions in Britain. The movement had declined by the early 1960s following overall improvements in public health, and the Charlton school closed in 1962.

Meanwhile Shooters Hill Golf Club began playing on part of the park to the east in 1903, later buying the freehold of this and adjacent land. The house was sold in 1916 to local businessman Fred Halse (1879-1966), later Mayor of Woolwich, who in 1923 demolished the old house and built a new one a little to the south. Halse was a keen supporter of public open space, so in 1928 was pleased to sell a tranche of the parkland to the LCC as what became today’s Shrewsbury Park. He then sold the house and its garden to Woolwich Borough Council in 1933 as a library and museum.

It never became a museum but is still in use as a community centre with a small library, now managed by an independent charity. It’s since been separated from the park and surrounded by residential streets developed by builders John Laing on the rest of the estate between 1934-36. Inspired by the Garden City movement, these were marketed as ‘unsurpassed for healthiness and beauty of position’. The neighbourhood still has a distinctive character and is now a conservation area: it reminds me a little of Hampstead Garden Suburb (Ring 11), though is notably less varied, mainly comprising big semi-detached houses with bay windows and gables. The Laing estate has a busy Residents Association, while the park has an active Friends Group.

We’ve been climbing for a while now and are soon to be rewarded with several excellent views. The path follows the edge of a woodland: the western part likely dates from medieval times and was conserved as part of the 18^th century parkland, while the swathe nearest to us is more recent. On the right is an open grass hillside: it’s worth making a slight detour to some strategically placed benches at the top of the ridge to admire the view northeast across the Thames Valley towards Upminster and Essex, with the modern buildings of Crossness Pumping Station and the towers of Thamesmead clearly visible. The band of trees on the other side, beyond the benches, marked the boundary of what was once a large field.

Approaching the backs of houses on Shrewsbury Park Estate, the Green Chain turns left to follow the park perimeter, but there’s another opportunity for a rewarding detour if you continue ahead along the woodland edge. Look behind you from this path for another good view, then continue through a car park, the site of a barrage balloon installation during World War II, to another renowned viewpoint northwest towards Charlton, Hackney and Barnet. It’s just inside the park fence, overlooking the junction of Plum Lane and Brinklow Crescent.

If you have the time, around 200 m left down the lane, covered in tall grass and surrounded by railings at the junction with the other end of Brinklow Crescent, is one of the oldest remnants of human settlement in the area. The Shrewsbury Barrow is a pre-Celtic burial mound or tumulus dating from the Bronze Age around 1500-2000 BCE. Now a Scheduled Ancient Monument, it’s the only survivor of a group of six placed so they would have been visible silhouetted against the sky from the bottom of the hill: the others have long since disappeared beneath the houses.

Back on the trail, there’s a further view left across the field before you leave the park, with Shooters Hill Golf Club’s course visible through the fence to the left on the narrow footpath, and briefly follow the streets around the eastern edge of the conservation area. You pass Bushmoor Crescent on the right: Shrewsbury House, if you want to visit it, is just a short distance off the route here, behind magnificent wrought iron gates. Designed in Jacobean style with a nod to Robert Adam, it’s now Grade II listed, with a café and a pleasant garden, including a rockery thought to contain masonry from the house’s predecessor.

The current Shrewsbury House.

Behind it, fronting onto Mereworth Drive, is a curiously squat white one-storey building known as Green Garth, built as an HQ for air raid wardens when the main house was used for civil defence purposes, taking advantage of the elevation. Greenwich council subsequently leased Green Garth as a private home, but it’s been empty and derelict since 2016. The charity that runs the community centre has long tried to acquire it, but as of 2025 the cash-strapped council has decided to sell it off to private developers, amid much local controversy.

Eaglesfield Park, looking to the summit of Shooters Hill, the 10th highest spot in London.

Leaving the conservation area, its boundary marked by wooden gateposts, you pass the multiple courts of Shooters Hill Lawn Tennis Club, founded in 1927 as part of the golf club but independent since 1967. Opposite is Eaglesfield Park, which covers the 132 m summit of Shooters Hill. A tree just south of the play area, just a few steps off the trail, marks the summit itself, and from here you can see great swathes of Kent, as far as the Medway on a clear day. Originally a field likely named after the two eagles on the Lidgbird coat of arms, it was long a popular informal viewpoint and beauty spot. By the late 18^th century, some of the land was part of a pleasure garden attached to the Bull Inn on Shooters Hill, of which more below, including a pond created out of a claypit active earlier in the century.

In 1907, the field became the first portion of land in the area acquired by local authorities as public open space. Woolwich Metropolitan Borough Council and the LCC each paid half the cost, and the renowned Colonel J J Sexby (1847-1924), head of the LCC Parks Department, designed the new layout. The park was landscaped and hornbeams and oaks planted round the edges, with the pond refashioned as a decorative lily pond. The pond was restored in 2012 as a wildlife pond with the help of the Friends Group: it’s a little off our trail to the south, slightly downhill to the left of the summit as you approach.

Eaglesfield Park Wildlife Pond, a reminder of the previous pleasaure garden and claypit.

The 10^th highest point in London, Shooters Hill also gives its name to a stretch of Watling Street, the Roman road that runs straight across it towards Canterbury and the Channel ports. The name refers to the practice of archery on the hill during the Middle Ages, although it’s often assumed to derive from the road’s reputation as a haunt for highway robbers. I’ve gone into more detail at Woolwich Common on Capital Ring 1, and we’ve crossed Watling Street numerous times on other sections of trail, on London Countryway 1 near Gravesend, Countryway 16 at St Albans, London Loop 1 at Crayford, Loop 15 at Elstree, Ring 10 at Hendon and Green Chain D1.1 at Welling.

You approach this ancient highway along Cleanthus Road, with a major local landmark obvious ahead. The Shooters Hill Water Tower, built in 1910 at a cost of £3,256, is a looming octagonal pile of red brick 40 m tall, in a style that’s partly Gothic revival, topped by a spiky spire though pierced with Romanesque arched windows. It’s still in use today, storing water pumped from chalk wells in Orpington which then falls by gravity to an Eltham pumping station for distribution to local taps.

Shooters Hill Water Tower, with no wizards in residence.

Turning right along the main road, you pass a weathered block of Portland stone shaped into three steps. This is an 18^th century mounting block for climbing onto horses, now Grade II-listed. It was doubtless used by customers of the Bull, a little further along at the corner of Shrewsbury Lane, a coaching inn first opened in 1749, though replaced by the current handsome red brick building, also Grade II, in 1881.

One of London's oddest listed buildings: the mounting block on Shooters Hill.

The Green Chain crosses just before the Bull to Kenilworth Gardens opposite. A little further right here is the entrance to Memorial Hospital, opened in 1927 by public subscription as a working memorial to the fallen of World War I. It was built as a cottage hospital, later used as a military, general and geriatric hospital, and is now a day hospital for older people with an attached mental health unit. It still incorporates a memorial hall housing two books listing the war dead of Woolwich and Bexley.

Oxleas Wood

Green Chain stalwart the Oxleas Wood Café: no longer 'alpine' but still with a fabulous view.

I introduced Oxleas Woods in detail on Ring 1 so I’ll only summarise here. At over 133.5 ha, this is one of the most extensive and lushest wooded areas in London, much of it ancient natural woodland that likely partly dates from the end of the last glacial period. It’s designated as a Local Nature Reserve (LNR) with over half considered a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). It’s made up of various patches of wood with their own names, though the term Oxleas Woods is also applied to the whole complex, also represented by a Friends Group.

The woods were once part of the vast estate attached to the royal palace at Eltham, remaining wooded as poor soil and steep slopes deterred clearance for farming, though they were useful for rough grazing and sticks from coppiced trees. In 1679 the woods became privately managed as a commercial enterprise providing timber, including for shipbuilding in Deptford and Woolwich dockyards. The environment was also unattractive for housing development, but from the late 18^th century some big houses began appearing along the edges, particularly along Shooters Hill.

By the early 20^th century, the woods were more appreciated for their recreational value and councils began buying them as public land from 1924. They were already somewhat carved up by roads and railways when in the 1980s the environment was infamously threatened further by a proposal to drive a motorway through the woods, eventually cancelled in 1993 following vociferous opposition.

Immediately on leaving the main road along Kenilworth Gardens and Crown Woods Lane, you cross the old parish boundary between Plumstead, in Little and Lessness hundred, and Eltham, back in Blackheath hundred. The track here was the entrance drive to Nightingale Hall, one of the earliest big houses built within the woods in the 1780s. It was replaced in 1811 by a new house, Wood Lodge. The road name may refer to the woodland’s former status as part of the royal estate attached to Eltham Palace. About a third of the way along on the right is The Lodge, originally a lodge for a later desirable residence, Jackwood House, built in 1863. Both houses were demolished by the LCC in 1927, though Jackwood’s terraced gardens became part of the public park and are passed on Ring 1.

The lane takes you directly to the LCC’s replacement for Wood Lodge, the much-loved Oxleas Wood Café with its spectacular views across the open grass of Oxleas Meadow and over the Cray valley, with the North Downs rising in the distance. Originally known as the Alpine Café when it was opened in 1934, it’s likely the best surviving example of a 1930s LCC park facility in this style. It’s been an important junction and popular watering hole on the Green Chain network since its inception, though sadly no longer displays the original artwork for the first Green Chain map on its walls.

Section 4a terminates at the fingerpost beside the café, along with two other Green Chain sections. Section 5, and Ring 1, approach from the right (west), from Charlton and Woolwich Common, with the Ring having followed a more roundabout route from Woolwich. Section 3 leaves left (east) into Oxleas Wood itself and one of the patches designated as an SSSI, with Ring 1 also hitching a ride. This is our way too, one of those duplications that can’t be avoided in walking the entire Green Chain network.

At the bottom of the hill, by one of the ditches that collects the headwaters of the river Wogebourne, is another big fingerpost marking another Green Chain junction. Section 3 turns left (northeast) towards Welling, East Wickham and Thamesmead, while Section 6 starts by branching right (southwest) towards Falconwood, taking the Ring with it. If you’ve walked my route D1.1, you’ll have approached along Section 3 and continued along Section 6, so I’m afraid you’ll be treading the next 350 m three times if you follow all my suggestions. That's not too much of a hardship in such surroundings.

One of the main tracks through Oxleas Wood.

The path gives you a glimpse of the meadow right and passes a pond on the left to leave Oxleas Wood onto Welling Way by its junction with Rochester Way. I’ve explained the development of these roads, the legacy of successive bypasses of Watling Street, on D1.1. The Green Chain and Ring continue on a wiggly route to Falconwood through Shepherdleas Wood across the road, but as we’ve already walked that way, I suggest using the more direct path just inside the wood, parallel to Rochester Way, for 400 m to finish today’s walk at Falconwood station.

Falconwood

When the Bexleyheath Railway (see Welling on D1.1) opened in 1895, there was no point in providing a station here in what was then a deeply rural area. It remained so until the 1930s when New Ideal Homesteads, who will figure extensively on D2.2, built an estate on the cleared woodland of Westwood Farm, east of the borough boundary in the former parish of East Wickham. But the developers preferred the name of a field on the Eltham side, Falconwood Field (now also part of the public space, but off our route), so called their estate Falconwood Park.

The Southern Railway, by then the owner of the Bexleyheath line, opened Falconwood station to serve the estate in 1936, and its name was soon applied to the wider area. The station was originally on the Eltham side, but the boundary has since been tweaked to follow the railway and Rochester Way, so it’s now in Bexley. By finishing here, you’ll be entering that borough for the first time today: the rest of the walk has been entirely in Greenwich. And as most of our next walk is in Bexley, I’ll say more about it then.