Thamesmead and Crossness Engine Trust Museum

Today we had a day out in a part of South-East London neither Dawn nor I had visited before.

This was the invite from Joyce.

"We have the chance of a whole-day tour of Thamesmead plus visit to Crossness Engine Trust Museum. We are planning this for Sunday 16 March.  he walking tour (by a qualified Visit London guide) will link in the 100 years of public mindedness, innovation and ambition as represented through Bazalgette’s sewers in the 1860s and Thamesmead’s ’Town of the 21st Century’ in the 1960s. 

Rough timings  

• 11am - arrive at Abbey Wood Station (via Elizabeth Line)  
• 1pm - lunch at Thamesmead Social 
• 2pm - travel to Crossness, including ride on their narrow-gauge railway 
• 2:30pm - introductory video and sewer system demonstration 
• 3:15pm - 4:45pm - tour of site 
• 5pm - depart  

It will be a long and full day but I am assured there will be seating at intervals at Crossness."    

This was our route, starting and finishing at Abbey Wood station.

Here are some of my photos.

We met outside Abbey Wood station, which, in deference to its name and the local environs features a lot of wood.

In the distance we could see the towers of Canary Wharf. We were some 11 miles east of Charing Cross here. How London has grown!

We started by visiting the lovely green space that is the park of Lesnes Abbey Woods.

We stopped in the Monks' Garden. 

Here is our guide for the day, Rob Harris, Visitor Development and Outreach Officer for the Crossness Engines Trust, telling us about Lesnes Abbey. Whereas some tour guides provide a rosy and glossy story about places they are telling you about, Rob, throughout the day, gave us insight into the places we visited with an unvarnished historical perspective which was both most refreshing and thought-provoking. Here he told us that the abbey was, let us say,  not the most spiritual of establishments.

While listening I could not help noticing  the blossom against the blue, blue sky.

Here are the abbey ruins.

Nearby is an ancient mulberry tree. Rob told us this is believed to be a descendant of the 10,000 mulberry trees planted in towns across England by King James I as part of a plan to establish an English silk industry. Unfortunately he planted black mulberry trees and silkworms only feed on the leaves of white mulberry trees, so that was a bit of a disaster. 

For a fair bit of our route we were following the Green Chain Walk, a walk of 50 miles linking green spaces around the south-east of London.

Now we were coming to the "new town" of Thamesmead.

Here Rob told us all about the origins of Thamesmead and the history of the New Towns movement that led to its development. Read more about Thamesmead here.

We walked through the development...

...including some of the high-level walkways,

Here we came to the border with Erith marshes and its wild horses. Erith and Plumstead Marshes, on which Thamesmead is now located, have a long history of travellers' horses being grazed. They are still to be seen right across Thamesmead and have even been known to roam into the lobbies of the tower blocks. 

We came to South Mere lake.

I liked this tiered amphitheatre.

We walked round the lake towards the Lakeside Centre where we would be having lunch.

Here we found this statue of Shelley's  Ozymandias... 

...round the back of which has the inscription quoting the poem :  "Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!" suggesting a parallel between the decay and sense of abandonment that some perceive in the Thamesmead estate, and the themes of the poem, particularly the idea that even the most powerful empires and structures eventually crumble into ruins

Meanwhile, we had our lunch, and very tasty it was too.

We assembled outside for our walk onwards to the second part of our tour.

At the entrance to the Crossness Engine Trust museum we were met by their narrow gauge railway train which took us on a short trip.

But this is what we were really here to see.

I spotted this on entering the museum.

They had an exhibition about the Great Stink, a major driver that led to the creation of the Victorian sewer network of which Crossness was an integral part. Read about the timeline of the system here.

Rob gave us a demonstration of how the system worked.

Throughout the visit, Rob had a great set of graphics to illustrate his narrative. 

I liked the display of "unusual toilets".

We were led to the workshop, full of machining tools, which reminded me of the shop floor at the British Gas Engineering Research Station in another new town, Killingworth, where I (and Dawn) worked in the 1980s.

We visited the exhibition of pumping engines, which all are in working order.

We stepped outside to visit the Thames Path. This is the view across the Thames. Just to the right of this is the Ford Dagenham plant.

On a drainpipe we could see an impression of the chief engineer Joseph Bazalgette.

Back inside we admired the toilet display.

This is a map of the sewage works created after the Princess Alice sinking disaster.

More recently, the sewage system has been enhanced with the Thames Tideway Tunnel which handles the overflow from the sewage system when its capacity is overwhelmed by excessive rainfall.

Then we donned out hard hats for te grand finale of the visit to see the beam engines that pumped the sewage.

The crests here are of the boroughs who's sewage is handled by the system.

One of the beams.

The extraordinary thing about all the magnificent  decorations is that, when the system was operating, only the workers here would ever see them.

Time to go, and we were let out at the gate onto the Thames Path.

After a brisk walk we were back at Abbey Wood station to begin our journey home in time for our 18:02 Elizabeth Line train.

Thank-you Joyce for organising and Rob for the wonderful and informative tour. You can find more details of our 7.6 mile  route here on MapMyWalk (or download a GPX file here) and more of my photos here on Flickr