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.

Green Chain Walk D1.1: Thamesmead - New Eltham

 

The classic droog's eye view of Thamesmead South across Southmere Lake.

Our exploration of the Green Chain begins beside the Thames in the distinctive environment of Thamesmead, with its mix of waterside, green spaces and Brutalist architecture. From the ruins of medieval Lesnes Abbey, the surroundings change dramatically as the trail connects several expanses of ancient woodlands, heaths and meadows, including the magnificent Oxleas Woods. Old lanes take us onwards through the patchwork of meadow, formal parkland and sports fields at Avery Hill to end amid suburbia at New Eltham station. Along the way we’ll encounter and sometimes follow two of London’s lesser-known rivers, the Wogebourne and the Shuttle.

The terrain varies from flat former marshes to rugged and hilly woods. Thamesmead famously doesn’t have a station, so you’ll need to take a bus to the start, with frequent and fast connections from Abbey Wood station, which is also handy for breaking at the abbey ruins. The trail later passes Falconwood station and there are numerous bus stops too.

This walk combines several official Green Chain sections. After an unofficial link from Thamesmead Town Centre (which used to be described in official guidance), it follows all of section 1 from Thamesmead Riverside to Lesnes Abbey; part of 2 to Bostall Heath; nearly all of 3 to Oxleas Wood junction; a short part of 6 to Shepherdleas Wood junction; and part of 7 to New Eltham. For detailed directions for most of the route, refer to the Ramblers guides. I've included full directions in my own information sheet for stretches not covered in these, and the routes and places mentioned are on my Google map.

Thamesmead

Brutalist classic the A Bridge, connecting a severed community.

As mentioned on several previous walks, the banks of the tidal Thames were once much marshier: even parts of what’s now central London close to the river were threaded with small streams and wetlands. To encounter similar environments today, you need to venture some distance downstream, to Crayford Marshes (Loop 1) or Rainham Marshes (Loop 24), and even these are now largely drained. The area now known as Thamesmead where our walk begins has long been dried out and its watercourses domesticated.

But if you walk up to the heights of Lesnes Abbey and turn back to survey the flat expanse below, stretching towards the river, you may well be able to imagine it in a moister state. It wasn’t entirely inhospitable, though, with evidence of human habitation from the Bronze Age. And it’s possible that some rudimentary drainage and other management was already in place by the time the Romans arrived in 43 CE.

Nonetheless, this long stretch of riverside land between Woolwich and Erith remained undeveloped well into modern times. It was known as Plumstead Marshes in the west and Erith Marshes in the east as it was divided between both parishes.  Back then, this was all in the county of Kent, which I introduced in more detail on my suggested alternative route to Loop 1. Traditionally Kent was subdivided into lathes and then hundreds: both parishes were in the Lathe of Sutton-at-Hone and the hundred of Little and Lessness. The exact division between them was uncertain, but the authorities eventually settled on a more-or-less straight line which persists today, dividing the London Boroughs of Greenwich in the west and Bexley in the east.

Not that it mattered that much, because the marshes have long been managed as a whole, through a succession of three institutional interventions that have shaped their history in a way that’s unique in London. This began in 1178 when the abbey was established on the higher ground immediately to the south. I’ll cover this institution in detail later when we visit its remains: the important point for now is that it was never a wealthy foundation, so the monks looked on the marshes as an economic opportunity, draining them to create productive agricultural land.

The abbey’s vital role in maintaining the marshes was dramatically demonstrated when its dissolution in 1525 was followed in 1527 by two serious breaches in the river defences, inundating over 800 ha. By then, much of the land had been leased, and the abbey estate subsequently passed through various hands, much of it ending up with the Burrell family, with a Commission of Sewers appointed by the Crown taking responsibility for drainage in the 17^th century.

The next major development originated upriver in Woolwich. As explained on Ring 1 (and to be explored in more detail on Green Chain D2.1), a gun wharf established in 1667 to protect the Royal Naval Dockyard evolved and expanded over subsequent centuries into a major facility for artillery and explosives on Woolwich Warren, overseen by the Board of Ordnance. George III renamed this the Royal Arsenal in 1805. By then, the site had already begun to expand eastwards into the marshes, initially for rifle ranges, and this expansion continued through the 19^th century until the Arsenal controlled practically the whole marsh between Woolwich and Crossness.

New drainage systems were installed, land was infilled with spoil from the digging of the Royal Docks (Ring 15) and hundreds of buildings were constructed. These were linked by what became the densest and most complex private railway network in Britain, reaching its fullest extent during World War I with 237 km of track, more than the Midland Main Line between London and Sheffield. All that open space provided an ideal environment for the testing and storage of munitions, away from built-up areas and with enough room to divide stocks of explosives between various purpose-built magazines spaced well apart to reduce the risk of an accident in one sparking off explosions in its neighbours.

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. Then Woolwich council bought a chunk to build its Abbey Wood social housing estate near the station of the same name.

By the early 1960s it was clear that much of the rest of the Arsenal land would soon become available too and the question arose of what to do with such a large brownfield site so close to central London. This was an age of utopian town planning, so it’s no surprise that the London County Council (LCC), which had built numerous large suburban housing estates between the wars (including Downham on Ring 3 and Green Chain D4.1, Harold Hill on Loop 21 and Oxhey on Loop 14), proposed a visionary new development.

It was to cover 5.3 square km and accommodate 60,000 people displaced by ‘slum’ clearance in inner southeast London, a new town which would, once the LCC was replaced by the expanded Greater London Council (GLC) in 1965, be entirely within the metropolitan boundary. It was originally known as the Woolwich-Erith Riverside Project and was renamed Thamesmead in 1967 following a newspaper competition, though there were rumours the planners had the name in mind all along and waited until someone else suggested it.

The LCC acquired the land that’s now Thamesmead South, south of the Southern Outfall Sewer, just before it was abolished in 1965, and this became the earliest tranche to be redeveloped. The area to the north was acquired by the GLC, which was keen to take up the project, soon afterwards. Given its previous use, much work was needed to make the land safe, clearing it not only of remaining explosives but the contamination that resulted from their manufacture and storage.

Another concern was flooding, particularly as the Arsenal had been badly affected by the North Sea floods of January 1953. The estate was initially designed with all dwellings at first floor level or higher, connected by walkways with garages and roads beneath. This matched the then-popular approach, originating with Swiss architect Le Corbusier (1887-1965), of grade-separating motor vehicles and pedestrians, though the architect himself advocated putting the vehicles on the upper level. The Brutalist designs, with a heavy emphasis on concrete-faced tower blocks, were another echo of Le Corbusier, as filtered through contemporary Swedish architecture interpreted by postwar British municipal builders.

There was further Swedish influence in the incorporation of green space and water features, the latter conveniently coinciding with the need further to improve drainage. GLC architect Robert Rigg argued that water had a calming and civilising influence which would reduce crime and promote neighbourly relationships. The council attempted to learn from previous schemes that had left new residents feeling alienated and displaced, so prioritised housing for extended family members of existing tenants in the hope of improving community cohesion.

As with many such utopian projects, things didn’t turn out as planned, with numerous compromises for financial and political reasons made along the way. The first phase, around Southmere Lake, built between 1967 and 1972, was described by renowned architecture critic Nikolaus Pevsner as bearing 'little resemblance to the ideal community visualised by its begetters'. Shops and services were inadequate, exacerbated by stalling progress on the completion of the development. Many of the walkways were poorly conceived and failed to follow natural desire lines, so many residents simply walked across the green spaces instead, leaving the walkways underused and unwelcoming, with a reputation for crime and antisocial behaviour.

The estate was still some way from completion in 1985 when its controlling mind was removed through the abolition of the GLC under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government. Greenwich and Bexley boroughs lacked capacity to take the whole project on, so it was handed to a not-for-profit quango, Thamesmead Town Ltd (TTL), with many of the rented properties progressively sold to their tenants under the Conservatives’ right-to-buy scheme.

Following concerns about TTL’s performance, management passed in 2000 to a consortium comprising a housing association, a community charity and a private company, which began leasing some of the land for private housing development. In 2014 all three were taken over by one of Britain’s biggest housing associations, Peabody, which has launched a new programme of redevelopment and rebuilding, though this has been criticised for the loss of social homes in favour of more profitable private flats, with accusations of gentrification and needless destruction of existing infrastructure.

Almost sixty years after the first foundations were dug, Thamesmead remains a work in progress, with large areas of land still undeveloped. But though it’s still ugly in places, it’s not looking quite so grim as it once did, and the Brutalist architecture has at least slightly mellowed. Its green and blue spaces, though they might not quite have fulfilled their intended potential, are still among its most appealing features and the Green Chain makes good use of them. And though most of the Arsenal legacy has long since been effaced, and it’s very difficult to match the modern street pattern with what was there before, there are some intriguing remnants if you know where to look for them. Thamesmead might even be a better place to walk in than to live in.

A good source of information about the estate today is Peabody’s dedicated website Thamesmead Now, which includes details of community activities and facilities. There’s extensive background on the Royal Arsenal’s tenure of the marshes on the copiously detailed but somewhat chaotically presented Royal Arsenal History website.

Thamesmead Town and Riverside

Thamesmere, seen from the Thamesmere Leisure Centre.

One of the most signal failures of the Thamesmead project is the ongoing lack of a railway station. The nearest is Abbey Wood, a good distance from the original development: it’s now a busy interchange on the Elizabeth Line but until recently was a minor National Rail station with relatively infrequent services. When Thamesmead was designed, the prevailing view was that public transport even in cities like London was in terminal decline and soon everyone would drive themselves around in cars. Ringing and bisecting the site with fast main roads took priority. As a large, new development jammed up against the river some distance from existing centres, Thamesmead was already in danger of seeming isolated, and the poor public transport and encircling roads greatly reinforce the impression that it’s a place apart, cut off from the rest of London. As we’ll see, the roads even divide the estate from itself.

For many decades, hopes were pinned on a new London Underground line initially known as the Fleet Line. Planned in the late 1960s, this was to take over the Bakerloo Line branch from Stanmore then run in a new tunnel through the West End to Charing Cross, east through the City to Fenchurch Street then under the river to Surrey Docks where it would absorb parts of the East London Line (now the Windrush Line) to New Cross and Lewisham. The plans were changed in 1973, re-routing the planned line from Surrey Docks to the Isle of Dogs, North Greenwich, Silvertown, Woolwich and Thamesmead, which would be served by no less than three stations.

The first phase of what was now known as the Jubilee Line opened in 1979 as far as Charing Cross, where it stalled due to financial issues and an increasingly unsupportive political environment. The Thatcher government was hostile to public transport and to large-scale public undertakings, particularly those under the direction of left-leaning urban councils that would be operated by unionised labour. The Jubilee Line was finally extended in 1999, prompted by developments at Canary Wharf and the Millennium Dome (now the O₂) in North Greenwich, but its eastern extremity was deflected northwards to Stratford for better connectivity, and at least partly to avoid the expense of tunnelling through Thamesmead’s difficult marshy soil.

Other hopes were also dashed. The Thames Gateway Bridge between Beckton and Thamesmead, proposed in 2004, was to carry an extension of the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) as well as a road, but was cancelled in 2008 amid spiralling costs and environmental concerns. In 2014, when the extension of what’s now the London Overground Suffragette Line to Barking Riverside was agreed, Thamesmead residents lobbied for a continuation under the river, but Transport for London (TfL) rejected this as too expensive. Prospects currently seem a little more positive, as TfL is now planning an extension of the DLR under the river from Beckton to a new Thamesmead station, linking with guided busways to Woolwich and Abbey Wood. But the scheme is only partly funded and won’t be completed until ‘the early 2030s' at the earliest, at least 65 years after the first tenants moved in.

For the moment, then, most Green Chain walkers will head to Abbey Wood then catch the bus to the start of the walk described here. This has got a little easier recently, as the main entrance of the rebuilt Abbey Wood station leads directly out to the bus stops on Harrow Manorway. Since early 2024, bus options have included the SL3, part of the TfL’s new Superloop, a chain of interconnecting orbital express bus services, which takes you almost non-stop to Thamesmead Town Centre. This is on the Plumstead side of the estate, which became part of the Metropolitan Borough of Woolwich in 1900 and the London Borough of Greenwich in 1965 (known as the Royal Borough since 2012).

The bus pulls up in a side street by the Thamesmere Leisure Centre, which also houses the Claude Ramsey Library, named after a long-serving Greenwich councillor who died in 1997. This rather undistinguished brick building was opened in 1988 and almost closed in 2024 as the council was struggling to afford the replacement of an ageing and failing heating system for the swimming pool, but it’s been saved by a Sport England grant. When it’s open, you can still access the upper part of its waterside terrace through a passage on the left, providing a view of Thamesmere itself, of which more later. Sadly, the lower terrace is in a state of disrepair and closed for safety reasons.

Thamesmead Clock Tower and water channel.

But where’s the promised town centre? Something just about qualifying for that description is around the corner, and worth a look before you set off: early Green Chain leaflets directed you here as a prelude to the main walk. It’s a modest urban square surrounded by small shops, cafés and a pub, the Cutty Sark, not much for a town of 60,000 people. It’s also awkwardly placed on the edge of the development, though the planned Thamesmead Central would have been adjacent (the DLR station will likely be further south).

It’s another measure of the lack of planning foresight that even this was an afterthought, added in response to complaints of a lack of shops and services and opened in the early 1980s. There’s more to it than meets the eye, with bigger shops and a large supermarket round the back, more strategically placed for the car park, but this detracts from the smaller businesses on what should be a much more flourishing central square.

The square has three features of interest. One of the drainage canals runs along the far side, part of a network that stretches to 7.5 km. There’s an inviting waterside walkway, not part of the Green Chain, that will take you south towards Hawksmoor Park, but only a short distance north: the channel feeds Thamesmere Lake, which is currently out of bounds. On the other side of the canal are two early 19^th century cannons: these and several others which once belonged to the Arsenal were found on the site during redevelopment.

More prominent, though, is the clock tower, which is a mix of old and new. The brick tower is contemporaneous with its surroundings, but the cupola and clock that surmount it are much older than Thamesmead. They originally stood atop an 18^th century extension to the Tudor Great Storehouse at the Royal Naval Dockyard in Deptford. Their exact age is uncertain: they were likely added sometime after the building itself and are first mentioned in 1880.

The dockyard had long been in commercial use as Convoys Wharf when the building was demolished in 1981: the clock and cupola were almost scrapped but local campaigning saved them. For a few years they were kept on a corner of the site, under constant threat of destruction as an inconvenient nuisance. Then someone had the bright idea that they’d make a good centrepiece for Thamesmead, so just before its abolition the GLC had them transported by boat from Deptford and restored. They were installed here in 1986.

The best way to connect on foot with the main Green Chain is the Thames Path. The route towards the river takes you along Linton Mead, a drive and then footpath with a fenced area on the left. This encloses Thamesmere, one of the development’s four large lakes. It’s also known as the Pump Lake, as it’s connected to the Thames by a pumping station with four Archimedes screws which together empty 2.4 t of water collected from around the site into the river every second. Except for the leisure centre terrace, the lake and its surrounds have never been open to the public, though you can glimpse the pumping station from the path. Peabody is planning a major development, Thamesmead Waterfront, which will encompass the remaining areas of open land as well the town centre and the lake, so better access may follow in the next couple of decades.

Thamesmead Riverside: view across Barking Reach.

Over the river wall, a magnificent view of the river Thames at Barking Reach opens before you. The giant guillotine-like structure on the opposite bank is the flood barrier at the mouth of Barking Creek, the lower reach of the river Roding. Operative since 1983, it’s a vital part of the flood defences downstream of the Thames Barrier. The 38 m wide barrage is normally kept at the top of two 40 m towers to allow access for shipping. Downstream of this, to the right, you can see the recent development of Barking Riverside.

We’ve encountered the river Thames many times in London Underfoot, and since I eventually plan to cover the Thames Path, I’ll reserve a more detailed introduction until then. Suffice to say it’s the longest river entirely in England, rising near Kemble on the edge of the Cotswolds and flowing for 346 km via Oxford, Reading, Windsor and London to its official end between Gravesend and Tilbury where it’s considered to join the North Sea. It’s unarguably London’s most important natural feature, the reason why the city is here and still an essential part of its life.

It's possible to track the entire river on foot. The Thames Path National Trail, one of a small family of nationally supported walking trails waymarked with an acorn design, opened from the source to the Thames Barrier in 1998. Greenwich and Bexley councils opened the Thames Path Extension from the Barrier via Woolwich and Thamesmead to Crayford Marshes, not officially part of the National Trail and waymarked with its own Thames Barge logo, in 2002.

Then in 2022 the England Coast Path (since renamed the King Charles III England Coast Path) opened from Woolwich as far as the Isle of Grain in Kent as part of an ongoing project to create a National Trail along the entire coast of England. So the short section of riverside path we follow is now dotted with acorns too. The path itself predates the designations: it was created as a riverside promenade for Thamesmead in the late 1970s, but was originally isolated, closed off at both ends. It boasts three elevated viewing platforms atop the river wall, backing onto the housing of Greenhaven Drive, and at the last of these a fingerpost indicates we’ve finally reached the official start of section 1 of the Green Chain Walk.

Thamesmead North

Thamesmead: Crossways Lake.

The trail turns inland, through a series of green spaces in Thamesmead North, the second phase of the development, largely built in the mid-1970s. The first of these is the petite Thamesmead Riverside Park with its extended viewing platform, a chance to admire the river once more before we leave it. We’re still just in Greenwich here, but a few paces after our route joins the path along the left of the green strip, it crosses into Bexley in what was once Erith parish.

In Arsenal days, the area we’re passing through was known as Berber, as the rail system that traversed it used tracks recycled from the short-lived Suakin-Berber military railway in Sudan. This was begun in 1885 during the Mahdist War but abandoned after only three months when Britain suspended hostilities against Sudanese nationalists led by the Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmed. The truce was later broken and the war continued, but the rail project wasn’t resumed. The Filled Shell Stores, a row of five massive rail-connected warehouses, once stood to the west (right) where the housing of Nickleby Close now is, while on the other side Castilion School opened in 1985 on the site of various ancillary buildings.

Once through an underpass carrying Crossway, the loop-shaped main road around Thamesmead North, you follow the Greenwich-Bexley boundary for a short distance, not that there’s any evidence: all the public infrastructure is simply branded Thamesmead and/or Peabody. This stretch is also the original route of Harrow Manorway, once one of the few roads through the marshes, though the name has since been transferred to a modern successor which we’ll shortly encounter. The park here is Manorway Green, most of which lies west (right) of the path. Across the grass is a raised area with play equipment, the site of one of the cordite magazines or ‘tumps’, known as Tump 47 or Magazine 9.

The trail soon turns decisively into the London Borough of Bexley. Erith parish became an Urban District in 1894 and a Municipal Borough in 1938; in 1965 it was merged with Bexley municipal borough, Crayford urban district and the Sidcup part of Chislehurst and Sidcup urban district to create the current London borough. Before then, all these areas were in Kent, so you’d have been leaving London here. I’ve covered Erith itself in more detail on Loop 1 and we’ll revisit on Green Chain D3.

The trail crosses a drainage canal, the Harrow Canal. There was once a natural delta of channels through the marshes formed by one of London’s near-forgotten rivers, sometimes known as the Plumstead River, though its older name is the Wogebourne. It rises in Oxleas Woods and runs roughly northeast for around 8 km through the eastern part of Plumstead. Its main confluence with the Thames was midway between the last viewing platform and Crossness Point, a little further downstream, and it was once used to mark the parish boundary. Tracing a clear course for its lower reaches is now impossible as it’s hopelessly entangled with Thamesmead’s drainage system. But the Wogebourne is never far away from the first stage of today’s walk, and we’ll tread very close to its source.

You soon cross another watercourse into Moat Gardens, an enclosed area which has more to it than immediately meets the eye. This was the site of Tump 52, or Magazine 13, built in 1897 to hold 100 t of cordite, the smokeless explosive propellant that since its invention in 1889 had replaced traditional gunpowder in everything from rifle cartridges to large artillery shells. Storage was a major safety challenge: at its peak at the end of World War I, the Arsenal held 40,000 t of explosives, enough to flatten much of southeast London. The tumps or bulk magazines were one solution: circular brick buildings with fragile roofs designed to deflect any blast upwards, surrounded by bunkers and walls to absorb lateral force and located at a safe distance from other installations.

Though the tump itself has been replaced by a sports court, the layout of the site is obvious: the waterway we crossed connects to the canal to form a continuous moat for extra protection. The Arsenal had 16 moated magazines like this, and another 28 topped with mounds. There’s still evidence of a few of them, including a near-complete one, Tump 53, in a nature reserve south of the town centre, though off our route.

The trail leaves Moat Gardens over the moat again and soon meets and follows another arm of the drainage network, the Crossways Canal, arguably the first stretch of today’s route alongside the Wogebourne. Then it’s once again under Crossway into Crossway Park, one of the three biggest parks in Thamesmead. As well as the large grassy sports fields opening to the right, the park has plenty of trees and some wilder areas, with more trees and other features added in recent improvements. A little further on, the water widens into Crossway Lake, created by a dam at the far end. Work to create a more natural environment here has been rewarded with birds including herons and reed warblers choosing it as a nesting site.

Across Eastern Avenue

Making the best of Eastern Avenue.

The Green Chain fingerpost at the top of the lake shows branching paths, a response to Thamesmead’s flawed design. In 1865, back in Arsenal days, the marshes were bisected by an embankment carrying the Southern Outfall Sewer, of which more shortly. The sewer would have been relatively easy to surmount, but in the early 1970s, as part of the preparation for Thamesmead North, the severance was reinforced by a parallel pedestrian-free dual carriageway, Eastern Way, with limited crossing points.

This blocks off the direct line south, so the Green Chain’s devisers resorted to providing two alternative routes using the nearest available crossings to the west and east. Both have their pros and cons: the eastern alternative is shorter, quieter and a little greener, the western 400 m longer and more urbanised, but from a historical perspective it offers the more authentic experience of hardcore Brutalism and a classic view of Southmere Lake. You can always walk both: I’ve suggested a way of doing this with minimal retracing of steps.

The eastern option turns away from the lake. Past the five-a-side court, Tump 99 once stood in the area behind the trees on the left. The surroundings become quite wooded, and on the right by a litter bin, a few paces on an unsurfaced path will take you to Crossway Community Orchard. It’s been here for a while but was revived in 2019 with new fruit tree plantings and a willow nursery and is now surrounded by a ‘dead hedge’ with living arches created from trained tree branches. Further on, a broad pedestrian underpass runs beneath Crossway, a thickly graffitied expanse of concrete that the Ramblers’ guidance describes as ‘a daunting location at night’.

On the other side, the Green Chain climbs a ramp to an embankment with a path running along its crest, and if you’ve walked Ring 14 between Bow and Beckton the surroundings here may seem familiar. You’re atop the Southern Outfall Sewer, the southerly sibling to the Northern Outfall Sewer. Both have been promoted since the 1980s as walking and cycling routes: while the northern one is called the Greenway, this one is the Ridgeway. The sewer was opened in 1865 as part of Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer system implemented in the aftermath of the Great Stink of 1858, as described in my entry for the Ring.

The Ridgeway at Thamesmead: London's other sewer walk.

The channel runs underground from Deptford, where it collects flows from Herne Hill, Balham and Putney, emerging as the present embankment near Plumstead station and running in a near-straight line for around 4.3 km to the Crossness Pumping Station on the Thames. Like the Abbey Mills Pumping Station on the northern sewer, this one is a landmark, a Grade I-listed building described by Pevsner as ‘a Victorian cathedral of ironwork’ and still complete with its four beam engines, thought to be the largest remaining examples of their kind in the world. Also incorporating a short length of restored narrow gauge steam railway, it’s intermittently open to the public (advance booking required) and well worth a look, but a little way off our route to the left. We’ll pass by more closely on the Thames Path.

The surface section of the Ridgeway is rather shorter than the Greenway, and rather narrower and more overgrown, doing a good impression of a country track. The Green Chain only uses it for a few metres before descending to the parallel road on the other side. This is the main drive to the pumping station and the route for public access, known appropriately as Bazelgette Way. You soon reach the northeast corner of Southmere Lake where both alternatives merge again. It’s here that we encounter our first Green Chain information panel: there will be many more of these on this and other walks.

The western alternative continues past the lake then follows Eastern Way, which soon rises to a viaduct decorated with a spectacular 2023 mural by street artist Lours, entitled Make the City Green Again. Opposite is another impressive mural featuring a dog, a stick, a squirrel and two robins in perfect balance, the work of Woskerski and added as part of the London Mural Festival in 2024.  There are several more pieces of street art in this area if you keep your eyes peeled: someone really should map them all. Across the grass to the right is a wildflower meadow created in 2021, a particular delight in spring and early summer.

In contrast, the steps ahead take you into one of the areas where the estate’s original aesthetic is best preserved. You cross to South Thamesmead on one of the few pedestrian links, the A Bridge, built in the late 1960s as an early example of concrete cable-stayed construction that may be the first of its type in the UK. It cuts across an elevated interchange where Eastern Way, running west-east, meets the north-south alignment of the modern incarnation of Harrow Manorway, which converges with the original line here. The view from the bridge, walled in by a roundabout and with Eastern Way roaring beneath, is an object lesson in poor design that prioritises cars at the expense of walkers.

As Harrow Manorway carries the boundary here, we briefly dodge back into Greenwich at the top of the steps and re-enter Bexley on the other side of the dual carriageway. The western alternative crosses the Ridgeway then descends to Bazelgette Way. The London College of Performing Arts occupies the space under the Harrow Manorway viaduct, and, if you detour a short distance right under the road, you’ll find the Link Pocket Park, just on the Bexley side of the original alignment of Manorway, a neat little space dotted with curious mosaics, popular with lunching college students in fine weather. The Green Chain as originally devised headed straight to the northwest corner of Southmere from here, but at the time of writing this was closed for redevelopment, so you’ll need to join the lakeside a little further east and follow it to the junction with the eastern alternative.

If you follow my suggested loop of both routes, you’ll see rather more of the Ridgeway, walk straight across the flower meadow and only retrace your steps by crossing and recrossing the A Bridge.

Thamesmead South

Binsey Walk, Thamesmead, early 2025, a little changed from Stanley Kubrick's day.

Southmere, dug in the mid-1960s as part of the first phase of the development, is the biggest of Thamesmead’s five lakes and easily the most iconic, with its fountain evoking Geneva’s Jet d’eau with either admirable audacity or breathtaking hubris depending on your point of view. Picture editors habitually illustrate pieces about the estate with stock photos of the four tower blocks on Hartslock Drive taken from across the lake. When I last visited, this view was still much as it was when originally created, but Peabody’s builders were hard at work all around, so while the blocks are slated to stay for the moment, their context may well change dramatically.

This area has provided a distinctive location for various films, beginning with Stanley Kubrick’s controversial 1972 adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange. The film depicts a near-future authoritarian Britain of unemployment, urban decay and disaffected youth, centring on Alex, a violent teenage gang leader with a curious penchant for the music of Beethoven who is forcibly subjected to aversion therapy. It’s hardly flattering to Thamesmead’s architects that Kubrick chose it as the perfect backdrop for his bleak vision, though another consideration was that it was still largely unoccupied and much easier to film in than the average busy urban location.

Alex lived with his long-suffering parents at ‘Municipal Flat Block 18A, Linear North’, filmed at the Tavy Bridge Centre on Wagtail Walk, near the lake’s southwest corner and a little off our walk. Before Thamesmead Town Centre, this was the closest the estate got to a focus. It was demolished in 2007 and has since been replaced by the private development around Cygnet Square that, though a little mellower on the eye, is considerably less distinctive and inspired.

Still recognisable, though, is the setting of the well-known scene at ‘Flatblock Marina’ where Alex pushes one of his fellow gang members (or ‘droogs’ in Nadsat, the largely Russian-derived futuristic slang invented by Burgess) into Southmere Lake. This was filmed on Binsey Walk on the west shore and used to be directly in line of sight for Green Chain walkers. At the time of writing, the building site is blocking off access: you can still reach it by detouring right from the Lakeside Centre past the outdoor gym, though the distinctive low-rise blocks which once lined it have been demolished.

Thamesmead has featured in many other films and TV productions. Beautiful Thing (1996), Hettie MacDonald’s film of Jonathan Harvey’s play, is almost a riposte to A Clockwork Orange, in which many of the same locations become the summery setting for an ultimately feelgood teenage gay romance set to the music of the Mamas & the Papas. More recently it’s heavily featured in The Misfits, a Channel 4 TV SF series about young offenders who acquire superpowers. But A Clockwork Orange will I suspect remain its signature screen role.

The western alternative passes a Brutalist building familiar to viewers of Misfits, the low-slung Lakeside Centre, with a waterside terrace that’s usually open to Green Chain walkers. It was built as a factory making materials for the first phase of construction but was always intended to be converted into a community centre and pub-restaurant. It’s since been through several incarnations and is currently run by charity the Bow Arts Trust, with a café, the Thamesmead Social, events and meeting spaces and 38 artists’ studios. Among the artists in residence is Gary Drostle, one of whose sculptures inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’ is installed on the terrace. Past this is a boathouse with a slipway much favoured by swans and geese, so watch where you’re treading.

Gary Drostle's 'Ozymandias': Look on my works, ye mighty.

Immediately after the two routes rejoin by the information board, you cross the channel where the Crossways Canal, or river Wogebourne if you prefer, emerges from the lake, and follow the east bank. The extensive green space of Southmere Park opens to the left: just past the bridge and up the slope on the left is the Southmere Tiny Forest, planted in 2022 with 600 young trees of 18 deciduous native species in a 200 square metre semicircular plot, with provision for a mini outdoor classroom and seating area. Beyond this, the park is attractively landscaped, crossed by undulating paths and dotted with trees and shrubs. The modern structures of the pumping station, including a wind turbine, loom in the distance beyond this, though the heritage can’t be seen from here. On the other side, numerous piers provide views of birds on the lake: 74 different species have been observed since 2014.

At the southwest corner of the lake, the path reaches a recently improved plaza, Southmere Square, then climbs a straight embankment to follow its crest, with a wooded hillside soon visible ahead. This isn’t just decorative and recreational but a safety feature, intended to provide an evacuation route in case of flooding. Subsequent improvements have turned it into a linear park, with play equipment and plantings. A footbridge links two sections of embankment across Yarnton Way, clearly showing the original conception of separating walkers and cars, except that there’s a small parade of shops at ground level to the left, some of the few included in the original plans.

The precautions are obvious in the low-rise blocks on the left once past the road. They have vacant ground floors and walkways at first floor level giving direct access to the embankment. At a little square, a short detour off the trail to the left will take you to another green community project, the Thamesmead Edible Garden, opened in 2021, which grows a selection of edible plants and fruit trees as well as flowers. It’s a charming space with plants labelled on reused roof tiles, playfully offsetting the surrounding flats. Beyond this, older semi-detached houses are visible in the streets over to the right, a sign we’re leaving Thamesmead for the older residential area of Abbey Wood. 

Thamesmead's Edible Garden: truly scrumptious.

Abbey Wood and Lesnes Abbey

Lesnes Abbey Viewpoint.

The embankment ends at a footbridge across the North Kent Line railway, built by the South Eastern Railway. The company began in 1846 by taking over the Thames and Medway Canal and using its tunnel near Higham to run trains between Gravesend and Strood. In 1849 it extended to London by building the present line from Gravesend, roughly parallel to the Thames, to Charlton then via Blackheath, Lewisham and New Cross to join the existing London & Greenwich Railway into London Bridge. The line included a station at Abbey Wood, but with a restricted service considered sufficient for what was then a tiny hamlet of only 100 inhabitants amid largely empty countryside.

Some development followed, with a few streets immediately southwest of the station forming something of a town centre by the end of the 19^th century, but the area remained poorly connected, and overshadowed by the nearby Arsenal lands, the frequent source of disturbing noise from artillery tests. George Duckworth, one of the researchers into social conditions in London for the reformer Charles Booth, commented in 1900 that ‘the trains are so infrequent and unpunctual that even Woolwich workers are shy of living at Abbey Wood’.

In 1900, in response to growing demand for homes particularly for Arsenal workers, the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society converted the farmland they’d acquired to the southwest into building land, laying the first bricks of what would become over 1,000 homes on the Bostall Estate. This encouraged the extension of electric trams from Woolwich in 1908, which stimulated private development. As already mentioned, Woolwich council began to turn former Arsenal land into homes with the Abbey Wood Estate, northwest of the station, completed in 1959. And then came Thamesmead.

Abbey Wood station is now a far cry from the rural halt visited by Duckworth. In 2017 it was extensively rebuilt as part of the Crossrail project, joining the Thameslink network in 2018 and becoming the terminus of the Elizabeth Line’s southeast branch in 2022. One curious feature is that the station straddles Bexley and Greenwich boroughs: the boundary runs through the concourse just behind the gateline.

But there’s an even earlier history to Abbey Wood which explains its name. In early medieval times, the area on what’s now the Bexley side of the boundary formed part of Lesnes or Lessness. This was a large area of rugged heathland to the north of Erith, the traditional meeting place of the Little and Lessness hundred of Kent. It was roughly centred on today's Belvedere Village where a remnant of the heath is now a recreation ground: I'll say a bit more on D3. The origin of the name is uncertain as it’s been through various spellings over the years: ‘ness’ is normally a riverside feature, a point or promontory, while the first element could refer to a burial mound or a shelter.

After the 1066 Norman Conquest, Lesnes became part of the extensive holdings of Bishop Odo, who we’ve met many times in London Underfoot, and was still in his possession in 1086 when visited by the Domesday surveyors. In 1178, Richard de Lucy (1089-1179) took a large tranche of land to the west to found the Augustinian Abbey of St Mary and St Thomas the Martyr, or Lesnes Abbey, on high ground overlooking the marshes and surrounded by extensive woodlands.

De Lucy’s family was from Lucé in Normandy, thus the name. He rose to the position of joint Chief Justiciar of England, effectively the first minister, under Henry II in 1154, becoming the sole holder of the office in 1168. Henry regularly clashed with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket (1119?-1170) on the English church’s relationship to Rome. Their disagreement came to a head in 1170 when Becket tried to block the king’s attempt to crown his eldest son, also called Henry, as his successor.

Four knights, acting on one of the king’s bad-tempered remarks, confronted Becket on his home turf of Canterbury Cathedral, an encounter which culminated in the challengers hacking the archbishop to death with their swords. Almost immediately, Becket was venerated as a martyr and was canonised in 1174. That same year, a contrite Henry humbled himself in public penance at Becket’s shrine in the cathedral.

De Lucy’s role in these events is unclear, but by some accounts he felt partially responsible for Becket’s death, resigning from his political role and founding the abbey as a form of penance. He retired to Lesnes in 1179 and died later that year. His descendants continued their association with the site: his great-granddaughter Rose (or Roesia) of Dover grew up here and requested that her heart was buried in the precincts when she died in 1261. By some accounts, the burial place was uncovered during excavations in 1939.

The abbey was a major local landowner but often struggled financially and never became a rich and powerful institution on the scale of some others in the London area, like Barking, Merton or Stratford (visited on Ring 14). It was this relative impoverishment that prompted the monks to drain and farm the marshes, to add further productive land to the estate, but keeping that land dry proved a constant burden. The community remained small and in 1525 became one of the earliest such institutions closed during the reign of Henry VIII. This preceded Henry’s break with Rome and the large-scale Dissolution of the Monasteries in the following decade: Pope Clement approved Cardinal Wolsey’s request to suppress religious houses with fewer than eight members.

Nearly all the monastery buildings were demolished almost immediately, and some of the masonry is said to have been recycled to build Hall Place in nearby Bexley, visited on Loop 1 (and Green Chain D2.2). The site subsequently passed through several private hands and was bequeathed to Christ’s Hospital school in 1633. The foundations were buried and the land used for farming. The only original building left standing was the abbot’s lodging, which was used as a farmhouse until it was demolished and replaced with a new building for that purpose in 1845.

The monastery was first excavated by the Woolwich and District Antiquarian Society in 1909 and 1910, and some of the finds from the time are now in Erith Library. The remaining structures were then backfilled so farming could continue. In 1930, Christ’s Hospital sold the estate, including the monastery site and surrounding woodland, to the London County Council, and it was opened as a public park in 1931. Further excavations followed, and in 1951 all the farm buildings were demolished, with the abbey remains exposed to view and partially restored. Management passed from the LCC to the GLC and, in 1986, to Bexley council.

Restored doorway from Lesnes Abbey cloisters.

Now a scheduled ancient monument, the abbey has long been a major feature of interest on the Green Chain but is looking even more splendid after a makeover with £4.2 million of National Lottery cash in 2016. It’s an intriguing combination of heritage attraction, nature area and well-used local park, and was one of only six sites in London achieving Local Favourite status in the Favourite Parks awards in 2022. The site has an informative dedicated website and an active Friends group.

A pedestrian viaduct with appropriate decorations takes the trail from the railway footbridge direct to the abbey across a patch of green and a road. Off to the right here is a dipping pool, and just past the first junction on the left is a picturesque black mulberry tree which is rather younger than the abbey. It was in the garden of the farmhouse converted from the former abbot’s lodgings. A plaque beside the tree claims it was planted in the early 17^th century as part of James I’s attempt to create a British silk industry, which famously failed as the king mistakenly imported the wrong species of mulberry. This history is questioned by Peter Coles on the Morus Londinium website, who argues the tree doesn’t look old enough and suggests instead it was planted as a fruit tree in the late 18^th or early 19^th century.

The abbey ruins spread out behind the tree, the layout of the institution still obvious. Constructed in Kentish ragstone, flint and chalk, they include fragments of wall that reach 2.5 m in height, the remains of a door and lancet windows. On-site interpretation boards provide more detailed information, but the first buildings you pass close to the path are the former brewhouse and kitchen, with the refectory behind them. South of these is the cloister, entered via a surviving Gothic doorway, and south of this the abbey church, its east-facing cruciform shape and the two lines of bases for the pillars that once held up its vaulted ceiling clearly visible along its 70 m nave. The monks’ dormitory or dorter stretches out from the northeast of the complex towards the site of the abbot’s lodging. On the far side of the ruins is a viewing platform facing towards central London, equipped with mock-up Gothic window frames.

On the right is the newly built Lesnes Abbey Lodge with a small café, toilets and classroom. The best way to break the walk here is to leave right at the junction just before the lodge and take the main path to New Road, passing a log carving of a monk, one of several such carvings added in 2016: there are others on the main route. The area behind this is an arboretum of almost 100 trees, both native and exotic: there’s an interactive map on the Lesnes Abbey Woods website.

A Lesnes Abbey abbot monk as conceived by Tom Harvey.

Through an elaborate gate, one of several designed by Trish Hawes of Mei Loci as another of the recent improvements, and across the road, you follow a fenced path signed as the Pilgrims Path, leading to another area of the open space. Off to the left just before another gateway feature is a monument to radical designer William Morris (1834-96), installed in 2001 by Bexley Civic Society. Morris designed and lived in the Red House in Bexleyheath, some distance from here, but according to the stone passed this spot regularly on his way to and from Abbey Wood station. If this is also your destination, it's just a short step along Harrow Manor Way.

Ahead on the main route is the Monk’s Garden, a 2016 recreation on the site of a 1950s formal garden but including a selection of plants the monks may well have grown for use in the infirmary (this was a separate building east of the dorter and no longer visible). The plants include sage, which according to medieval herbals cleansed the body of ‘venom and pestilence’ and whitened teeth; betony, something of a cure-all; hyssop, for chest infections and bruising; and cumin, for skin and eye complaints. There are beehive sculptures acknowledging other monastic activities and a central feature that sprouts a model of a bishop’s crozier, a design which was in turn based on a shepherd’s crook. The spiral design of the crozier is echoed in the shape of its mounting.

Just inside the wood beyond the garden is a fingerpost marking the first of numerous junctions where the Green Chain Walk branches. We’ve been following Section 1, which ends here, so we pick up Section 2, which starts in Erith and joins from the left.

Lesnes Abbey Woods

Pine Pond, Lesnes Abbey Woods

Lesnes Abbey Woods is the first of a succession of substantial ancient woodlands which will dominate the rest of today’s walk. It’s a Local Nature Reserve covering 88 ha, mainly woodland, some of it likely continuously wooded since the ice retreated around 11,700 years ago, with areas of remnant heathland which we’ll discover in a future walk. The trees are mainly oak and birch with sweet chestnuts introduced in Roman times as a food source. Just as the abbey precincts were a working farm, this was a working woodland until the LCC converted it into a park.

Among its many attractions are its seasonal floral displays: visit in spring and you’ll be dazzled by daffodils and, later, native bluebells. Then there are the fossil beds, over to the left as you enter the woods, a 6.3 ha Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) rich with evidence of life in the late Palaeocene and early Eocene epochs, 50 to 60 million years ago. The remains of over 40 species of mammal have been found here, as well as reptiles, fish and one of the only two Palaeocene birds known in Britain. So copious are the fossils that there’s even a designated area where members of the public can dig informally, subject to certain restrictions.

Tom Harvey's Lady of the Woods

A little past the junction, keep your eyes peeled for the Lady of the Woods, arguably the most beautiful of six fine tree carvings on the site, set a little back from the path behind a fence. All the pieces were made in 2016 by Tom ‘Carver’ Harvey and are ‘direct’ carvings made without preliminary models using chainsaws and chisels. Further on in a clearing is a rather different tree-based sculpture, the Data Tree, created by Jonathan Wright for the Estuary Festival in 2021, commemorating the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt which partly mustered in the woods and at the abbey.

A dead oak stump is crowned with a rotating steel structure resembling a fingerpost, with six spokes, decorated with figurines and texts. The imagery was developed in consultation with the community and all of it has local references: look out for among others a monk, a rowing boat and seal representing river life, a pike from the abbey’s crest, a cog nodding to the pumping station, a shark’s tooth for the fossil beds, Rose of Dover’s heart and references to Kate Bush, who’ll we talk about later.

On the right just before New Road is the most recent addition to the site at the time of writing: The Clearing, opened in 2024 on a former council yard as a woodland craft centre and performance space. Designed by the delightfully named Wonky Architects, it’s made from recycled wood and shipping containers, with a large parachute that can be unfurled to create a sheltered outdoor area.

The woods continue on the other side of the road, where you pass three ponds. The first two, Fountain Ponds, are likely natural, and may be dry in summer. The larger Pine Pond, also known as Hurst Pond, is partially surrounded by railings and has a particularly peaceful and secluded atmosphere. It was dug as a decorative feature of the grounds of Hurst House which once stood on the south of the site, just along the next road, Hurst Lane. This was open to the public as a pleasure garden prior to the creation of the park. Another of Harvey’s tree sculptures is a short detour to the right just after the pond: it’s known as the Owl as that bird surmounts it, but there are numerous other representations of woodland species to spot, including an ingeniously placed bat.

The Green Chain once ran straight down Hurst Lane but has been diverted through the 1960s housing estate to the south to reach a safe crossing. The borough and former parish boundary runs north-south along Knee Hill here so in crossing the road we return from Bexley to Greenwich and the area known as Bostall in former Plumstead parish.

Bostall Heath

A particularly secluded corner of Bostall Woods. Spot the highwayman.

Bostall, the name meaning 'woody heath' or possibly ‘safe place’, was formerly one of the wastes of the manor of Plumstead, managed as a common. The monks of St Augustine’s in Canterbury were lords of the manor, on and off, between 960 and the Dissolution in 1539. It passed to the Boughton family and then to John Michel, who gifted it to the Trustees of Queen’s College Oxford when he died in 1736. Confusingly, some of the land to the northwest was also known as Boston Heath after Boston Farm which once stood there.

The college inclosed the heath in 1866, provoking the wrath of commoners and other locals. The inclosure was declared illegal by a court, but the owners nonetheless attempted to build housing on it, appointing a local solicitor and builder to implement the project. Riotous scenes followed, in which the local agents’ homes were trashed: the authorities drafted in 200 extra police and called out the fire brigade to hose down the mob. The college then lost a second court case, and in 1878, an act of parliament transferred 63 ha to the Metropolitan Board of Works, predecessor of the London Country Council, for public use for the sum of £5,500.

The area soon became a popular destination for day trippers as the inhabitants of an ever more crowded capital sought countryside retreats close by. J J Sexby, the first chief officer of the LCC Parks Department, who contributed to the design of numerous much-loved parks, described the heath and adjoining woodland in the late 1890s as 'the most attractive of the Kentish commons…every other common of the Metropolis, with the possible exception of Epping Forest, must yield to them the palm of beauty'.

Some big late Victorian houses were built around the heath, including Bostall House or Shobnells in the northern section with a substantial separate lodge, Bostall Lodge. This patch was part of the property acquired by the Coop and became known as the Coop Woods. It was gifted in 1988 to a local charity to build the Greenwich and Bexley Community Hospice, with the original house demolished in 1994. The lodge is now a private hospital in a modern building called Cygnet Bostall House.

In the late 19^th century, the woodland adjoining the heath to the south, now known as Bostall Woods but formerly Old Park Wood, became a private estate belonging to merchant Julian Goldsmith centred on a mansion called Old Park House. Goldsmith sold it to the LCC in 1892 and the joint site was opened to the public on Whit Monday 1893. The wastes formerly extended further to the south but most of this area was developed in the 1930s.

Today the 159 ha site is a patchwork of ancient woodland, secondary woodland growing on former heath and more domesticated mowed fields and sports facilities, with some remnants of heathland where gorse, broom and heather grow, this last a rarity in the borough. Following a grant in 2006, some areas of heathland have been restored. As at Lesnes Abbey, the ancient woodland is dominated by oak, while the newer woodland is mainly birch.  The LCC planted numerous Scots pines in the 1890s but few of these have survived. The site has its own Friends group.

Knee Hill: not all signing on the Green Chain Walk is this reassuring.

The short length of Green Chain Walk on the Greenwich side of Knee Hill must be one of the best-signed stretches of walking trail anywhere: numerous surplus wooden Green Chain wayposts have been repurposed as a fence separating the path from the traffic. You then follow part of the old drive to Bostall House before cutting through secondary woodland and a patch of remnant heath to Bostall Hill and the largest remaining open area. Opposite and to the left is Clam Field, a slightly later addition to the public space bought in 1894 as a recreation ground. But our way is right and across part of the heath proper, now an open green surrounded by trees.

The path heads for a Green Chain information board on the far side, clustering with a car park and cricket nets and with a bowling green opposite. Slightly off route to the right of the car park entrance along Longleigh Lane is a red brick cottage in a whimsical, almost fairytale Arts & Crafts style, built by the LCC in the 1890s as a keeper’s cottage, though it’s currently derelict and boarded up. Across the road, the Green Chain divides again at a fingerpost marking the end of Section 2 and the start of Sections 3 and 4. We follow the former downhill into the woods; the latter, explored on a future walk, heads off alongside the bowling green in the direction of Plumstead Common.

The sadly derelict keeper's cottage at Bostall Heath.

The woodland here is the former Old Park Wood, with the site of Old Park House through the trees to the left. It’s a particularly attractive section of the walk, where the woods seem thick and deep, the path skirting the edge of a steep ravine. Just before leaving the trees on the right is a tunnel known as Turpin’s Cave, as the notorious highway robber Dick Turpin (1705-1739) allegedly used it as a hideaway. The story goes that a female accomplice called Fanny worked in the White Horse pub on Wickham Street and signalled Turpin with a light when the coast was clear. The pub was later renamed, rather colourfully, Fanny on the Hill but demolished in 2014, its site incorporated into East Wickham Open Space. We’ll soon pass through the open space, but the pub site is off our route to the south.

Like many stories connected with Turpin, this one is likely spurious. The so-called cave, since filled in for safety reasons, was more likely the remains of a chalk digging dating from a century or so after the highwayman’s death. There were numerous such chalk pits around the wood, largely made by the Coop to source materials for the Bostall estate: one of these was a little north of the point where we leave the woods.

The steep descent takes us into the valley of the river Wogebourne, which has taken a meandering route from Thamesmead through the flatter ground to the west of the woodlands. As soon as you leave the woods onto Cemetery Road, in front of Woodside Cottage, you may be able to glimpse the flow of water at the foot of a steep, wooded slope on the other side of the track, running to the rear of house gardens.

From here, the walk follows the wall of Plumstead Cemetery, established by the Woolwich Burial Board in 1890 on former farmland attached to Old Park and now managed by Greenwich council. If you detour through the imposing main gates with their lodges, you’ll find a flamboyant hilltop chapel, a war memorial and a pink granite obelisk commemorating 11 Arsenal workers who died in two accidental explosions in 1903.  Aside from 187 Commonwealth War Graves and various local dignitaries, the most notable interment is Gunner Alfred Smith, who was part of a group sent to relieve General Gordon’s forces when they were besieged in Khartoum during the Mahdist war, as recounted in Woolwich on Ring 1. They were attacked by Mahdists on the way, and Smith died saving the life of an injured lieutenant, for which he was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

Plumstead Cemetery chapel with Woolwich Arsenal obelisk visible right.

Reaching Wickham Lane, the river runs under the road a little to the right, its presence acknowledged by the street names Bournewood Road and Brookwood Road. On the other side of Wickham Lane, opposite Brookwood and a little off the trail, is a stinkpole venting gases from the buried stream. Unsurprisingly, the boundary runs close by, and crossing Wickham Lane, we’re back in Bexley, in the former parish of East Wickham.

East Wickham

View back to the Wogebourne Valley from East Wickham Open Space.

The name ‘Wickham’ may derive from Latin vicus, a settlement, and there was certainly a Roman village nearby on Watling Street, which, as we’ll soon discover, runs a little to the south. The ‘East’ prefix was added later to distinguish the village from West Wickham near Bromley (and on Loop 3), though the two are some distance apart. It was once a separate manor within Plumstead, granted following the Norman conquest to the Burnell family, though it passed through several subsequent hands including the Howards, Dukes of Norfolk.

By the late 18^th century, it functioned as a separate parish and this was formalised in 1852, cleaving it permanently from Plumstead. It was allocated to Dartford Rural District in 1894 then Bexley Urban District in 1902, through which it ended up in the London Borough of Bexley. It remained relatively undeveloped until 1916 when the Royal Arsenal built prefabs for emergency war workers. and still has something of a rural feel in places today.

East Wickham’s most famous former resident is undoubtedly the innovative singer, songwriter, pianist and dancer Kate Bush (b1958), who grew up with her mildly eccentric and highly musical part-Irish family at East Wickham Farm. This was by then only a residence rather than a working farm, comprising a sprawling farmhouse, parts of which date back to the 16^th century, and various outbuildings overlooking extensive open land.

Bush wrote many of her early songs here, like ‘The Man with the Child in his Eyes’, and returned in 1983, installing a home studio that she used to create her most acclaimed album, Hounds of Love (1985), including one of her best-known songs, ‘Running Up That Hill’. The property is still in the family: Kate’s nephew Owen Bush, a self-styled ‘bladesmith’, has a forge there where he makes hand-crafted swords and knives. The location is a little south of our route and there’s not much to see from the street, but Bush would have been familiar with the paths we walk, and you can imagine how the odd, part-rural, part-suburban edgeland character of the place informed her idiosyncratic work.

The village centre is also off our route in the same direction: its most notable feature is the small part-13^th century Grade II*-listed Old St Michael’s Church, originally a chapel of Plumstead. This proved inadequate for the rapidly swelling population of the interwar period so in the 1930s a new St Michael’s Church was built close by. The old church is currently used by the Greek Orthodox community and has been renamed the Church of Christ the Saviour.

On the other side of Wickham Lane, you pass the Foresters Arms pub, opened by a brickmaker in 1860 and named for its proximity to the woodland. Rebuilt in 1900, it closed unexpectedly in April 2023 to facilitate the construction of flats in the former car park, though there’s a local campaign to save it.

You soon enter another major green space, though of a different character than the woods, with more rolling swards of open grass. East Wickham Open Space was once farmland attached to East Wickham Farm, which is amid the houses visible over to the left, outside the park, as you reach the top of the slope to find a Green Chain information board. The land escaped development but in the 1950s was used for landfill and to dump rubble from the Blitz. In the 1970s it was levelled and grassed over as a public park and wildlife area, also known as Fanny on the Hill Park after the pub with its Dick Turpin legend mentioned above.

There are still a few reminders of its past: patches of the former Hills Grove Wood to the right soon after you enter, a few traces of hedgerow and several tall oaks that once stood amid fields. It has a more varied texture than it did when the Green Chain first connected it, thanks to a collaboration between the council and Bexley Conservation Volunteers encouraging wild areas and tree growth.

Look behind you once you’ve climbed the first slope for a view over the Wogebourne valley and the woods rising above it. The bench near the Green Chain information board honours the work of the Conservation Volunteers, who among many other things are partially responsible for the park’s most intriguing feature, a damp east-west woodland strip with dew ponds, with the Green Chain running through it. This stretch includes the only boardwalk on the trail, installed in 2000.

East Wickham Open Space boardwalk.

The Wogebourne’s course is also through the park, roughly parallel to ours, over to the right on the northern margins. But aside from a ditch behind houses visible from the northeast corner, the river flows entirely in an underground culvert.

Poets Corner

Pygmy goats in Poets Corner, Welling.

Leaving the open space there’s some pavement pounding ahead of us, but not without interest. The houses didn’t appear here until some way into the 20^th century. Glenmore Road, on the west side of the park, was a country lane. Edison Road, running left-right at the first crossroads, was an old footpath that became the first proper street laid out in the 1910s in preparation for development, but building didn’t start in earnest until the early 1940s, during World War II, and was halted before plans were completed. The rest followed in the 1960s and the mix of houses from both eras is readily apparent.

The neighbourhood is known informally as Poets Corner for reasons that should become obvious from the street names. We’ve been following Dryden Road, named for John Dryden (1631-1700), England’s first Poet Laureate. The Wogebourne runs under Edison Road (not a poetry reference) just north (right) of the crossroads, its course marked on the left by a narrow grass strip between the houses and obliquely acknowledged in a street name, Combeside, almost opposite. Once again it carries the old parish and modern borough boundary. The Glenmore Arms, a faintly Brewer’s Tudor former Courage pub built in the 1930s to serve the planned development and inevitably closed and converted to flats in 2022, is just on the Greenwich side. Our route stays in Bexley for the moment.

Dryden Road now parallels the Wogebourne, which runs behind the 1960s houses on the right. This is a good stretch to note the contrasting architectural styles, with older 1940s houses on the left. You pass Milton Avenue (John Milton 1608-74, best known for his epic Paradise Lost) left and reach a bend where Dryden Road becomes Keats Road (John Keats 1795-1821, author of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and many others). At the corner on the right, beside a gate, is a paddock where pygmy goats often graze. From 2014 this was Keats Community Farm, an organic growing project, but they vacated during the Covid lockdowns and since 2022 the site has been operated as ADO River Valley, an independent outdoor school for children with mental health issues and learning disabilities.

The land here is part of a much wider 50 ha agricultural complex surprisingly close to central London, straddling the Wogebourne valley down to Watling Street at the foot of Shooters Hill. Woodlands Farm was created in the early 19^th century on a cleared woodland, Bushy Lees Wood, and bought in 1919 by the ever-active Royal Arsenal Coop. In 1937, the Coop converted it into a model pig farm with its own abattoir, supplying pork to the society’s shops. The abattoir closed in 1983, and though some farming continued, the Cooperative Wholesale Society (CWS), who had inherited the facility, drew up plans to develop parts of the site for housing. Following community protests, the CWS leased the land to a new charity, the Woodlands Farm Trust, who continue to operate the farm as well as providing educational and visitor facilities.

Green Chain walkers, sadly, are currently denied a close encounter with this unusual location. A path runs from the gate next to the goat pen direct to Bellegrove Road almost opposite the entrance to Oxleas Woods, following the Wogebourne which runs on the surface through the fields. It’s almost entirely in Bexley but doesn’t appear on the borough’s official ‘Definitive Map’ of public rights of way, perhaps because its last section is on the boundary with Greenwich which, as an Inner London borough, is not obliged to keep such a map. Nonetheless, it was used freely by locals for many years.

When the Green Chain Walk was created in the late 1970s, the CWS was happy for it to be signed through the farm and for several decades the path provided a convenient and attractive link in the trail. Then in 2007, the Woodlands Farm Trust suddenly and unexpectedly closed it off, in response, they said, to antisocial behaviour and irresponsible dog owners allowing dogs to worry livestock.

Despite numerous rounds of campaigning and negotiations initiated by the Ramblers and others, the Trust proved intransigent, and the path remains closed at the time of writing. It’s still mentioned in trail guides in the hope that the dispute will be resolved at some point, but until then you’ll need to take the signed, largely street-based diversion. Perhaps recalling the words of a few poets will make the going easier.

So the Green Chain now takes you along Keats Road past Wordsworth Road (William Wordsworth 1770-1850, the archetypal Romantic poet, most famous for his ‘Daffodils’) and Tennyson Close (Victorian Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson 1809-92, commemorator of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’), then down Chaucer Road (more below), passing Shelley Drive (Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822, another Romantic and author of the proto-psychedelic ‘Ozymandias’ that inspired a Thamesmead sculpture), and Burns Close (poet and songwriter Robert Burns 1759-96, the unofficial national bard of Scotland) to the junction with Wickham Street.

Opposite is the Green Man pub, another 1930s roadhouse, built by Beasley’s North Kent brewery in Plumstead, which was bought and closed by Courage in 1963. Unlike many similar buildings, it still functions as a pub, at least for now. There’s an alternative route from the pub car park on a fenced footpath around the edge of Hillview Cemetery, a surprisingly new feature opened by Bexley council in 1995 on what had previously remained a field. Bob Gilbert chooses this path for his unofficial Green London Way, and it does provide some relief from pavement trudging, but misses out a couple of interesting features just to the south.

Shoulder of Mutton Green, Welling.

The first of these is immediately ahead as you cross Wickham Street. The footway begins to diverge from the road on the other side of a grass strip that soon widens into a more substantial open area in a wedge shape that explains its name, Shoulder of Mutton Green. It’s been used as a public space since at least the early 18^th century, when it was surrounded by fields.

Like Bostall Woods, it was owned by Queens College Oxford who, tempted by its position beside a major road, attempted to inclose it for house building in the mid-19^th century. Angry locals tore down the fences, and the dispute culminated in the Metropolitan Board of Works buying the green in 1877 as a permanent public space. Largely a flat grassed area, it’s not one of London’s most attractive green spaces, but it’s nonetheless a welcome oasis amid suburbia, with a few flower beds, several handsome mature trees and extensive bulb plantings that burst into colour in early spring. Air raid shelters were dug beneath it during World War II.

The green hasn’t widened much when the Green Chain cuts across it, heading for a distinctive red brick church, St Mary the Virgin Welling. This site housed a temporary mission hall from 1934 to serve the growing population, replaced by the current structure in 1955. It was designed by Thomas Ford (1891-1971), chief architect of the Church of England’s Southwark diocese, who worked on numerous new and restored churches in south London in the 1950s and 1960s.

St Mary the Virgin, Welling: sgraffiti by Augustus Lunn.

The Italian Romanesque exterior reflects the neoclassical influence of John Soane (1753-1837), responsible among others for the Dulwich Picture Gallery (which we’ll pass on Green Chain D7), though the interior is more Greek in style, housing several notable artworks and stained glass. From the outside, the most striking feature is the Romanesque arch above the main door with its quasi-medieval sgraffito tempera mural depicting the mysteries of the Virgin Mary. This is the work of Augustus Lunn (1905-86), a noted revivalist of this ancient technique, which involves scratching into layers of plaster.

Rather than turning towards the church, you can continue along the left side of the green to break at Welling station: oddly, this isn’t an official Green Chain transport link, though it’s no longer than many other links on the trail.

Welling and Watling Street

Whichever option you follow, you’ll soon find yourself meeting a wide, straight and busy main road. It’s known here as Bellegrove Road, but it’s part of one of London’s most ancient highways, Watling Street. Built just before the year 50 by Roman engineers, partly along the line of a Celtic and possibly pre-Celtic trackway, it linked Wroxeter, St Albans and London with the Channel ports and then onward via ferry to Rome. Much of the road is now part of the modern highway network, including all the stretch from London to Dover, known generically as the Kent Road. We’ve encountered it several times in London Underfoot and I’ve considered its history in more detail on London Countryway 17b which crosses it south of Gravesend.

In medieval times, the road provided an important pilgrimage route from London to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury. It’s pleasing that one of the streets in Poets’ Corner should honour Geoffrey Chaucer (c1343-1400), the Middle English writer who is widely regarded as a founding father of English literature. Chaucer’s most famous work, The Canterbury Tales, is fiction but with an authentic setting, presented as stories told by pilgrims who gather in a Southwark inn before setting off along this very road.

Watling Street was turnpiked between the Old Kent Road at New Cross and Dartford by the New Cross Turnpike Trust in 1718. Turnpike trusts, as explained in several previous posts, were an early form of privatised highway management, where a group of trustees was given parliamentary authorisation to take over a stretch of road, invest in improving and maintaining it and recoup their investment and hopefully turn a profit by collecting tolls from users. Unsurprisingly given its strategic importance, the turnpike proved a great success and by the 1820s as many as 50 coaches daily passed this way between London and destinations like Rochester, Canterbury and Dover. In 1998, a new Wetherspoon pub in a former bank beside the road, a little to the east of where we join, acknowledged this history by taking the name New Cross Turnpike – rather confusingly, as it’s a good 11 km from New Cross.

In the early 1920s, with local authorities and central government now managing highways, the trunk road between London and Dover was provisionally designated A2 in the Ministry of Transport’s road numbering scheme. But sections of the old turnpike were already badly congested, so in 1923 work began on the first of many bypasses, Rochester Way, originally just a single carriageway road from the Sun in the Sands at Kidbrooke, a little east of where Watling Street crosses Blackheath, to Falconwood, where we’ll meet it shortly.

From Falconwood it continued as Welling Way to join the existing route 200 m east of where the Green Chain reaches the foot of Shoulder of Mutton Green. The bit of Watling Street here was always the A207, never the A2: that designation originally only applied east of the Welling Way junction. This only lasted until 1927 when Rochester Way was extended from Falconwood to Dartford, after which all of Watling Street between Sun in the Sands and Dartford was renumbered A207, still the designation today.

Eastwards, the road soon takes you to Welling, once a small hamlet at the centre of a separate manor within East Wickham parish. Its inhabitants mainly worked at the extensive Danson Park estate to the southeast, now partly a particularly delightful public park but some way off our route. There were very few houses aside from the occasional coaching inn, with lonely stretches in between that in coaching days were known haunts of highway robbers. Some of the inns – the Nags Head, the Rose and Crown – survive, at least as names on their original sites.

Development remained sporadic until 1895 when the Bexleyheath Railway opened as an infill of the South Eastern Railway’s North Kent Line, branching off at Blackheath and rejoining at Slade Green. This was largely thanks to the lobbying of Alfred Bean, the chair of Bexley Local Board, a railway engineer who had earned a considerable fortune abroad and who lived in Danson House at the time and saw the opportunity for housing development. Welling was one of the original stations. Today this stretch of Watling Street is heavily built-up, but nearly all the buildings are late Victorian at the oldest, and many are postwar. If you take a break here, look out for the Welling Gateway Mural depicting local history in the pedestrian passage under the railway bridge on the main road, created by Gary Drostle, whom we encountered at the Lakeside Centre in Thamesmead, in collaboration with local children in 2004, and a fine display of old photos in the station booking hall.

Walking the road westwards on the main route, the buildings are mainly residential. Shooters Hill rises in the distance, surmounted by a Gothic-style water tower built in 1910. At 129 m, this is the 10th highest point in London, but we won’t climb to it until D2.1. The trail passes the We Anchor in Hope pub, which has been here since at least the 1850s, although the current building looks like a late 19^th century rebuild in faintly mock-Tudor style. It was originally known simply as the Anchor, though has borne its current name, a biblical reference to Hebrews 6:19, since the 1890s. Just past it is a garage and just past this the Wogebourne is visible as an overgrown ditch, with the fenced-off exit of the path through Woodlands Farm immediately adjacent.

Overgrown Wogebourne and former Green Chain path on Bellegrove Road.

The stream still demarcates the boroughs, as you’ll see when you follow the Green Chain across Watling Street and into Oxleas Woods. At the woodland entrance close to a Green Chain information board, the round-topped plate half-buried in the ground is not just a trip hazard but a 1903 boundary marker for the former Metropolitan Borough of Woolwich. Close by is a London County Council bollard: between 1885 and 1965, this was also the boundary between Kent and London. The Green Chain once again enters Greenwich, and the former parish of Eltham, where it will remain for the rest of today’s walk.

Woolwich boundary marker threatening to trip unwary walkers in Oxleas Wood.

Though you can no longer walk freely through Woodlands Farm, parts are open to the public six days a week and it hosts various activities. The main entrance is a little further along the main road from where the Green Chain crosses: check the website for details.

Oxleas Wood

The main path junction in Oxleas Wood, with river Wogebourne ditch right.

I introduced Eltham, Shooters Hill and 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: today we’ll walk through Oxleas Wood itself, though the term Oxleas Woods is also applied to the whole complex.

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 in the 19^th century some big houses began appearing along the edges, particularly on Shooters Hill.

Around 1850, this eastern part of the woods was annexed to the Avery Hill estate, discussed below, but retained its tree cover. 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: our section was added in 1934. 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 both the woods and Woodlands Farm, eventually cancelled following vociferous opposition.

Just off the trail as you enter the woods is a footbridge and gate leading to an open space so obscure that it’s known locally as the ‘secret garden’, though its official name is Eastcote Gardens. Less than 0.4 ha in extent, it somehow avoided being built on and remains not so much a garden as a secluded grassy meadow, surrounded by house fences and liberally dotted with trees, including some fine willows. It’s now managed by Bexley council, as it’s back over the boundary ditch, part of the upper reaches of the Wogebourne, which rises from various springs in the woods.

Bluebells in Oxleas Wood.

The main path tracks another Wogebourne ditch to a point where another stream joins among the trees. Here, a Green Chain fingerpost indicates another junction on the network. Section 3, which we’ve been walking, turns off here to finish at Oxleas Meadow beside a splendid park café, worth a 500 m uphill detour if you need refreshment. Capital Ring 1 from Woolwich and Charlton also threads this way, piggybacking on the Green Chain, and we’ll share the path with it for a while as we join Green Chain Section 6, which starts here. A little further along, you’ll glimpse the open green of Oxleas Meadow (Ring 1), but the path turns away from it, passing a pond on the left which is particularly attractive in spring, with a display of yellow iris. It’s likely fed by one of the Wogebourne springs: a channel of the river runs on the other side of the path.

Just past the pond, you emerge at the junction of Welling Way and Rochester Way, the two 1920s bypasses on the original A2. Rochester Way, the earlier road, approaches from the west (right): the A2 initially continued east (left) along Welling Way, until 1927 when the rest of Rochester Way was completed, forking southeast. This was superseded as a trunk route in the 1970s by yet another relief road, as we’ll shortly see.

Across the road is Shepherdleas Wood, also part of the Oxleas complex. The most direct way to our next objective, Falconwood station, is along the road, but I’ve preferred the slightly more circuitous route through the trees. The origin of the two names is obvious if you think about it: Oxleas was used for grazing cattle (oxen), Shepherdleas for grazing sheep. The respective woodlands are subtly different in character: Shepherdleas has more clay in the soil which encourages denser undergrowth. In the heart of the wood is another major Green Chain junction, where Section 6, and the Capital Ring, head off westwards towards Eltham. Today, though, we’ll keep ahead towards Falconwood on Section 7, which starts here.

Falconwood and Eltham Warren

Gravel Pit Lane, a hidden gem near Falconwood, with Eltham Warren right.

The trail rejoins Rochester Way almost opposite Falconwood station, and follows it across the Bexleyheath Line, the same railway that runs through Welling. When the line opened in 1895, there was no point in providing a station in what was then a deeply rural area. It remained so until the 1930s when New Ideal Homesteads Ltd, the country’s largest private housebuilder of the day and responsible for much of southeast London’s suburbia, 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, though our trail stays just inside Greenwich.

If the traffic noise here seems disproportionate to the visible vehicles, you’ll discover why as you turn down Riefeld Road. Running in a deep trench beneath is a busy dual carriageway, the Rochester Way Relief Road, the current incarnation of the A2. Opened in 1972, this follows the original alignment of Rochester Way from Sun in the Sands to Kidbrooke then takes a more southerly route parallel to the Bexleyheath Line to just east of here where it merges with the original route again, becoming East Rochester Way. Looking right from the bridge, you can see how it slices through the woods and parkland and imagine how much more damage the even wider 1980s scheme might have done.

Past the bridge on the left is Eltham Cemetery, a council facility opened in 1935 and now jointly operated by Bexley, Dartford and Greenwich councils. It’s worth a visit if you have time, particularly the eastern section where a crematorium was added in 1956, though this is a good 450 m detour from the main route. Amid extensive memorial gardens is a curiosity, a small circular Modernist chapel in the style of Liverpool’s iconic Metropolitan Roman Catholic Cathedral. Perhaps the most famous burial is Joe Crozier (1914-85), Brentford and Scotland goalkeeper; there are also 57 Commonwealth War Graves dating from World War II.

Eltham Cemetery Chapel of Remembrance, curiously inspired by Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral.

Finally quitting the well-heeled suburbia of Riefeld Road, the Green Chain finds a hidden delight: Gravel Pit Lane, a byway which is shown on maps from the early 19^th century but, judging by the age of some its trees, is much older than that. Today it runs as a fenced path between school playing fields on the left and Eltham Warren Golf Course on the right: the latter was founded in 1890 on what was then Warren Field, part of Eltham Park privately leased from the Crown. Surprisingly the lane is lit at night but is otherwise well-wooded and remarkably rural given we’re still in inner London. The eponymous gravel pit was towards the end on what’s now part of the golf course on the right; there were once sandpits on the other side.

Where the lane meets Bexley Road is a cattle trough that appears to be a private gift rather than one of the regular Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association facilities still dotting London. The inscription says it was presented by Spencer Maryon-Wilson in 1905: the Maryon-Wilsons were prominent local landowners and philanthropists, already encountered in London Underfoot at Maryon and Maryon-Wilson Parks on Ring 1 at Charlton.

The road between Eltham and Bexley was another improved by the New Cross Turnpike Trust. It formed part of the route linking London with Ashford and Folkestone, branching off Watling Street at New Cross, also providing an alternative link to Dartford.  In 1922, the section between New Cross and Lee was designated as one of the new trunk routes, the A20, but the designation was never extended to this section, as a southern bypass of Eltham was already under construction: we’ll cross it on Green Chain D1.2. On the other side of the road, a few paces off route to the left, is a Portland stone milestone installed by the Trust, indicating nine miles (14.5 km) to London Bridge and seven (11.3 km) to Dartford. Its official Grade II listing doesn’t give its age, but it was certainly placed prior to the 1870s when the Turnpike Trusts were wound up.

Bexley Road milestone: nine miles to London Bridge.

Avery Hill

Beside the young river Shuttle in Avery Hill Park.

On the other side of Bexley Road, the Green Chain enters another extensive and very varied area of green space. The overall site is known as Avery Hill Park and includes the formal gardens and parkland around the Victorian mansion of Avery Hill to the east, but it’s otherwise quite a patchwork, incorporating remnant countryside and playing fields. The section nearest the road, known as Pippenhall Meadows or Eltham Little Park, was once Pippenhall Farm, occupying a valley created by the infant river Shuttle, which rises from a spring here at the geological interface between the permeable Blackheath Beds and denser Woolwich Beds. It’s an astonishing relic of agricultural land with small meadows and ancient hedgerows. The Pippenhall allotments on the left were once part of the farm: managed by Eltham and Avery Hill Gardens Society, they include a seasonal garden shop.

Mesolithic tools from around 7000 BCE have been found here, though the first written records are from 1290 when Edward II obtained hay from tenant John de Henley to feed the deer at Eltham Palace. According to the Greenwich Industrial History website, the oldest dateable hedges are from 1370 and there’s a relic of ‘ridge and furrow’ in the southeast likely dating from before the Black Death in the mid-14^th century, though it’s badly overgrown.

A country estate began evolving to the east when Thomas Hale built a house in the early 19^th century. This was rebuilt in 1841 and expanded on a grand scale from 1882 by John Thomas North (1842-96), the ‘Nitrate King’, who had made his fortune in Chile dealing in nitrates, iron, coal, waterworks and railways. The London County Council bought the estate as a public park in 1902. Farming at Pippenhall continued into the early 20^th century when its last tenants, the Grace family, gave it up and its lands became part of the park.

The University of Greenwich now occupies the southeast part of the site, while the house, long a teacher training college, has recently become a school. I’ll say more about the history and the remaining heritage assets, including the spectacular Winter Garden, a massive conservatory built for North, on Green Chain D2.2.

The trail passes a now-redundant kissing gate, installed when the Green Chain was created in the late 1970s, and curves past hedgerows and through scrub. You soon reach a meadow where the Shuttle runs in a ditch at the bottom of the slope to the right, sometimes an empty channel in dry weather. The most likely source is two ponds hidden away just to the north: a detour along some rough paths will take you to them, but you might want to save this for walk D2.2. This will incorporate the entire Shuttle Riverway, which tracks the river, sometimes slightly approximately, from here through Blackfen and the old estates of Blendon and Bridgen to near its confluence with the river Cray near Hall Place in Bexley. It was planned as a branch of the Green Chain but implemented as a separate trail.

We’ve been following the Riverway’s station link since Falconwood, but the main trail shortly heads off east (left) at a major Green Chain junction. The house and Winter Garden, a café and toilets, the formal parkland, gardens, children’s playground and tree trail are all a short detour this way too. Another arm of the Green Chain itself joins from the right, a short branch of Section 6 providing a link to Eltham Park and Palace which we’ll also walk on D2.2.

For today, our way is ahead, alongside the sometimes-dry Shuttle, which divides two fields. The one on the right has recently been named Henley’s Field after its 13^th century tenant. It was sown in winter 2023-24 with meadow grass and wildflower seeds to create a flower meadow as a partnership between the Friends Group, the council and the charity Butterfly Conservation.  There are trodden paths along both field edges and the Green Chain chooses the left one, which is largely mown grass.

At the next junction, a new woodland is being created in the left-hand field ahead. But our trail leaves the park along an enclosed path, Sparrows Lane, a former farm drive, at first still tracking the Shuttle, now on our left. Opposite are the railings of Charlton Athletic Football Club’s Sparrows Lane Training Ground: we’ll pass close to the team’s main stadium, the Valley, in Charlton on walk D3. Where another fence appears on the left, the river swings away east: the buildings you can see, now part of the University of Greenwich, are on the site of Sparrows Lane Farm. Then the lane becomes a street, with the red gates to the right confirming the training ground’s ownership.

New Eltham

New Eltham station.

The last short stretch of today’s walk is along streets: first the rest of Sparrows Lane, then Avery Hill Road, with a stink pole right opposite the junction. You’re soon at the busy crossroads with Footscray Road where, just opposite, a driveway leads to New Eltham station. Formerly known as Pope Street, this was another area that remained rural until the late 19^th century when the railway stimulated development, though it didn’t become the intensively built-up suburb it is today until the 1930s. As there are a few more interesting features at the start of the next walk, I’ll save a more detailed history until then.