Bankside’s Past in the Present

The Millennium Bridge, officially known as the London Millennium Footbridge, is a steel suspension bridge for pedestrians crossing the River Thames linking Bankside to the City of London. It is located on the site of an historic landing called Mason’s Stairs. Construction on the new bridge began in 1998 and it initially opened in June 2000. However, Londoners nicknamed the bridge the “Wobbly Bridge” after pedestrians felt unexpected swaying motions. The bridge was closed later on the opening day and, after two days of limited access, it was closed for almost two years while modifications were made to eliminate the swaying motion. It reopened in 2002.

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The gardens around Tate Modern were designed by the leading Swiss landscape architect Dieter Kienast (1945-1998) and where completed in time for Tate Modern’s opening in 2000. His landscape designs have a simple lyrical quality. By reducing his designs to a few essential elements and principles, Kienast plays with opposing factors such as the natural and the artificial, order and chaos. In this re-worked image his silver birches and shimmering leaves cast a calming veil over the long forgotten industries of Bankside’s river wharves.

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The south side of Tate Modern recently underwent a major transformation with the opening of the Switch House and landscaped gardens. The work was completed in June 2016. The gardens continue the silver birch tradition established by Dieter Kienast’s river view gardens in 2000. This image depicts a row of Santander-sponsored bicycles in the foreground, the original switch building, and the pre-war silhouettes of the original Bankside Power Station chimneys with St Paul’s quietly but ever present in the far distance.

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During WW2, London’s energy supplies came under severe strain. Urgent steps were taken to increase the capital’s electricity supplies. Two contrasting options were proposed: one to replace the existing Bankside Power Station on the same site (the pragmatic option) or alternatively, to knock down Bankside Power Station, green-over the site and build a new power station down river in Deptford (The Abercrombie option). The political ‘battle’ raged until after the war ended, eventually seeing the pragmatists win the day with the intervention of Prime Minister Clement Atlee who insisted that the new power station should be oil and not coal-fired.

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After months of debate and competitive tendering, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (architect of the Battersea Power Station) was commissioned to design the new Bankside Power Station. The Scott family has its roots in Bankside but it was the eloquence and modernist vision of his single chimney design, with the building set parallel to the river, that the won the day. But there were many dissenters. However, the idea that air pollution from the 300 foot chimney would be reduced by new oil-fired technology was seen as less significant than the overbearing presence of the power station’s chimney itself on the urban landscape – especially the impact this would have on St Paul’s Cathedral directly opposite on the other side of the Thames. Quoted in the Daily Telegraph in May 1947, Lord Llewellyn claimed the new power station would be like putting an alligator in a lily pond. The new power station – Bankside B – opened in 1952 and continued supplying the capital until its closure in 1983 when it was deemed uneconomic as a result of the 1970s global oil crisis.

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Occupying the site that is now Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall was the world’s largest coal-fired power station. Built alongside Meredith Wharf, it opened to grand acclaim in 1891 and was known initially as the Pioneer Station. The discovery of electromagnetism and electrochemistry was made earlier in the 19th century by Southwark-born Michael Faraday. He and others (Thomas Edison) harnessed the power of electricity. With the emergence of CLELC’s new power station in 1893, its practical manufacture of electricity began thundering over Bankside, disrupting the lives of hundreds of local residents who, till then, had worked on the river and a myriad of manufacturing industries. The CLELC demanded and won the space to expand; whole neighbourhoods were quickly razed in the process…

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At the beginning of the 19th century every house on the river front was occupied by a tradesman or craftsman needing wharfage or storage space for their work. Among them were dyers, brick-makers, iron-founders, coal merchants, a soap manufacturer and a miller. But many of the Banksiders still made their living from the river and its needs: John Scott the lighterman, Shears the coppersmith, Hack the anchorsmith, Arnold the mast and oar maker, White and Field the barge makers, and Sutton the sailmaker…Shop talk of lug-sails, top-sails and main-sails and their different ‘castings’ or patterns: of ‘linings’ for strengthening such as ‘clew and head’, ‘tack and corner’ pieces, come from the corners of the workroom, while Master Sutton stands at his door, looking with an appraising eye at the tan-coloured sails of the barges in the neighbouring British Lion Wharf…by the beginning of the 20th century these picturesque trades had disappeared from Bankside, as did the numerous public houses…

From Old Bankside by Grace Golden (Williams & Northgate 1951) pp 174-175

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Two years after opening, the CLELC quickly expanded. From 1893 it became known as Bankside A Power Station (lasting until its decommissioning 66 years later in 1959). It had an engine room some 230 ft (70 m) long and 50 ft (15 m) wide, with two 200 kW, two 350 kW and two 400 kW alternators driven by Willans engines. The buildings comprised a boiler house, by then containing 22 boilers, 18 chimneys, generators and a switch house, built at right angles to Meredith Wharf. This enabled coal to be delivered (and ash removed) by barge, as well as the facility to draw water directly from the Thames.

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There were numerous complaints against the power station throughout its operational life. One of the earliest was lodged by William Shelfer, the landlord of the Waterman’s Arms public house. This became a test case in English law until 2014 (Shelfer v City of London Electrical Lighting Co (1895). Meux Brewery owned the Waterman’s Arms, a popular public house situated at 61 Bankside. Till the opening of the power station, Waterman’s had been a popular recreational destination for lightermen and their families. However, shortly after the power station opened in 1893, the Waterman’s Arms began to suffer serious structural damage, being less than 30 yards along the wharf from the power station. William Shelfer and his family’s health began to suffer and trade quickly fell back.

In 1894-95 William Shelfer and Meux Brewery took court proceedings against the CLELC for an injunction to prevent further development at the power station. Initially this was upheld but a short time later it was overturned on appeal and Waterman’s Arms was awarded damages, though these were negligible. Soon trade ceased; the Waterman’s Arms closed and was turned into the power station’s office. In law the case was frequently cited for over the next 100 years when judgement was required to decide whether damages or injunctions is the best outcome (“four good working rules”).

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Preceding the growth in electricity production was Bankside’s gas lighting industry. This image depicts a family gathering under the shadow of the new power station outside the Pitts Head public House (on the site of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall).

Now silent falls the fleecy snow,
And streams with ice abound,
And scarce its rays the sun doth show,
Yet still there’s pleasures found.
The difference make! The streets all ablaze;
Courts, lanes and alleys are made bright with rays,
Which from gas continuously flow;
And gives daylight where’ere you go,
If light gives safety, safety causeth care,
Our labour then we feel assured must please,
To yield you safety to us is alike a charm’
We fly with joy, our labour guards from harm!

Extract from a Gas Lamplighter’s poem (1870)

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The land immediately to the west side of Tate Modern and its new Switch House was occupied by the burgeoning coal gas industry from the early 19th century. The Phoenix Gas Light and Coke Company was incorporated by Act of Parliament in 1824. The image depicts a gas lamp against the brickwork of Tate Modern’s Switch House, the site on which stood the company’s first gasometer and retort buildings. The Company served Southwark, Brixton, Deptford and Greenwich with coal gas for street lighting. Following a series of protracted struggles over competition to supply south London, the Phoenix Gas Light & Coke Company was eventually amalgamated with the South Metropolitan Gas Light and Coke Company in 1876.

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Prior to the establishment of the Phoenix Gas Light & Coke Company in 1824, the London Coal Gas business was established on Bankside. In the early 19th century the new phenomenon of gas-lit street lighting seized Londoners’ imaginations, beginning with experimental lighting in Pall Mall. The image is based on a quote by the chemist Sir Humphry Davy (1815) who remarked that the rapid expansion of gas production and storage on Bankside might well require the conversion of St Paul’s dome into a gasometer!

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The ability to pump water directly from the Thames under pressure (700 lb per psi) and distribute through 180 miles of cast iron pipes across London brought hydraulic energy into view as a vital competitor to the emerging electric power industry in London. The Falcon Wharf Pumping Station (1883 – 1977) stood on the site that is occupied today by Falcon Point flats. The London Hydraulic Power Company (LHPC) was set up by an Act of Parliament in 1884 and sponsored by railway engineer Sir James Allport. The hydraulic system’s pioneering technology was used to power workshop machinery, cranes, lifts, theatre (London Palladium and London Coliseum) and as a back-up to Tower Bridge. The system was also used to supply fire hydrants across London, mostly inside buildings.

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On the site between Blackfriars railway station and Blackfriars Road Bridge once stood the world’s first steam driven flour mill. Designed by John Rennie and opened in 1788, this was the first time steam had been used to drive millstones and engines for grinding, fanning, sifting and dressing wheat. 20 pairs of millstones could grind 10 bushels of wheat per hour, 24 hours of the day. The Albion Flour Mill opened to wide critical acclaim, putting this technology and this part of London at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. However, the success of this innovation was viewed with hostility by traditional millers who feared their livelihoods would quickly disappear. The Albion Flour Mill burnt down three years later under mysterious circumstances. Arson or mechanical failure?

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The image depicts the original frontage of the Albion Flour Mill on the Thames, built in the style of an 18th century country house and opened in 1788. From its rooftop London’s first 360 degree panoramic paintings were created by Robert and Henry Barker. In the early 1790s panoramas became a great public attraction; a special diorama was constructed in Leicester Square to display this work. Through the windows of the Mill can be seen the (Albion) Crusader masthead of the Daily Express newspaper which occupied the same site between 1989 and 2015. The site is currently being redeveloped as a mixed-use 48 storey towerblock.

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On the night the Albion Flour Mill burnt down (March 3rd 1791), large numbers of millers were seen dancing for joy on Blackfriars Bridge. The Star newspaper reported that millers within 30 or 40 miles of London have been in a state of intoxication since Wednesday last. Though the Mill’s owner Samuel Wyat and designer John Rennie believed the fire started accidently, a popular song of the day goes:

And now the folks begin to chat,
How the owners did this and that,
But very few did sorrow show,
That the Albion Mills were burnt so low

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The Albion Four Mill was a technical innovation in its deployment of steam-powered machinery to grind and process corn. However, it was known at the time that corn and corn straw were highly combustible materials; the slightest friction could send a spark from the grinding mechanisms and start a fire. Mill owner Samuel Wyat and designer John Rennie always cited poor lubrication as the cause of the mill’s demise but arson – as a deliberate action against progress – was popularized in the public imagination. William Blake, who lived nearby and frequently crossed Blackfriars Bridge on his way to the City, endorsed this stance when he called the Albion that dark satanic mill. The blackened site lay abandoned for 19 years before its transformation by John Rennie into the Albion Iron Works.

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This image is inspired by André Derain’s painting from the same spot on the Thames shore looking towards St Paul’s (Blackfrairs Bridge 1906). In the foreground are two lifebelts, separated by an X. Immediately behind this view is the OXO Tower, one of London’s most original and iconic landmarks. Originally built as an electricity power station supplying the Royal Mail post office, the site was acquired in the 1920s by the Liebig Extractors of Meat Company, makers of the famous OXO beef stock cube product. The building was converted into a cold store and the front rebuilt in an Art Deco style by architect Albert Moore. In the new design Liebig wanted to include a tower featuring illuminated signs advertising the name of its OXO product. However, skyline advertising was banned on the south bank at that time so Liebig’s application was rejected. Then a light-bulb moment occurred for Liebig’s cunning advertisers: with some imaginative thinking the Tower was built in four sets of three vertically-aligned windows, each of which ‘coincidently’ happened to be in the shape of a circle, a cross, and another circle below.

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The original OXO beef extract product was invented by German chemist Baron Justus von Liebig in 1843. However the brand really captured the public imagination when OXO sponsored the London Olympic Games in 1908. Since then the ‘mighty cube’ has had several manifestations; during the First World War, for example, OXO cubes were part of soldiers’ ration kits. But it is best remembered as ‘the housewife’s choice’. Those old enough will not forget Katie’s 1958 ditto Oxo gives a meal man-appeal…

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Hat making in all its guises has been a tradition in Bankside since Tudor times. Thomas Bowler of Southwark Bridge Road was one such hat maker. In 1850, William Coke of Holkham Hall, Norfolk, asked his London hatter James Lock to create a new shape of hat. His top hat was not suitable for riding and was frequently damaged by rain and low-lying branches. Lock responded to Coke’s request and commissioned the task to Thomas Bowler. He created the shape of the famous bowler hat from a process he perfected that hardened and molded felt. The image is an homage to Reneé Magritte over the London map and with the north Norfolk sand dunes in the far distance.

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The biggest hat maker in Bankside was Cooper Tress & Co. Their head office is now the Mad Hatter Hotel on the corner of Stamford Street, a small but distinguished 19th century building surrounded by new development. Cooper Tress specialized in a wide range of hats for men and women – top hats, safari hats for expats and the colonies, ladies hats of all descriptions through to cloth caps and pith helmets. Close to his premises were two fur cutters in nearby Holland Street (H. Kent and the Sennett Brothers who supplied felts to hat makers). Rabbit skins were imported in large quantities from Australia and New Zealand as the raw material. Working in poor conditions in cramped warehouses, armies of girls and women first pulled course hair from the skins before passing them to the ‘carroters’ who brushed the fur with a solution of quicksilver (mercury) and nitric acid to give the pelts a silk-like finish. Mercury is known to be highly toxic but even at that time Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter (1865) gives a clue to the toxic effect the ‘carroting’ process had on the female workforce.

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Southwark, and Bankside in particular, was once famous for its glass industry. Glass is made by fusing sand and limestone with sodium carbonate added as an alkaline flux to lower the melting point. The image here shows the first Cone Glass House in Bankside (1688). It stood on the land occupied today by the mustard coloured Manhattan Lofts. The furnace was at the centre and the glass workers worked in the annular space within the cone in teams of men known as ‘chairs’. The team leader was known as the ‘gaffer’, the first use of this well-known word.

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Glassmaking around Falcon Stairs and in Hopton and Holland Streets was not universally popular. Long-standing laundry businesses, which served the needs of wealthy City folk over the river, did not take kindly to the soot and dust from the growing plethora of glasshouses on Bankside. A petition to the king in 1688 stated that one John Straw and others are erecting glasshouses in the middle of the parish to the utter ruin of many inhabitants whose livelihood depends on washing. At the same time, the river enabled the transportation of raw materials for glassmaking, in particular to meet the demand for the manufacture of bottles and drinking glasses which were crucial for the livelihood of the many inns and breweries in Bankside.

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The quality of glassmaking in Southwark improved markedly in the 1830s when Banksiders Pellatt and Green (‘Glassmakers to the King’) became famous around the world for their superb cut glass and cameo encrustation products. Astley Pellatt’s encrustations were medallions or other ornaments enclosed in glass: in his own words like the fly in amber they effectively resist for ages the destructive action of the atmosphere.

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Standing on the site occupied today by the Manhattan Lofts, on the rounded corner of Hopton and Holland Streets, was Epps’ Cocoa Powder Factory. This magnificent building once processed half of Britain’s cocoa imports at its peak between 1878 and 1898. Instant cocoa powder had its origins in homeopathy in the early Victorian era when James Epps and his brother John began making cocoa for patients for whom tea and coffee were restricted. In 1855 it began using the slogan “Grateful & Comforting” as the product became increasingly popular. Production began in north London but the product’s success led to the opening of a new steam-powered factory at Holland Street where it produced 5 million pounds of cocoa powder a year. Epps’ cocoa powder factory was acquired by Rowntree of York in 1926 but the site itself closed four years later in 1930. The building was severely damaged during the blitz in 1941 and eventually pulled down.

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In addition to its many manufacturing industries and bustling river trades, a strong non-conformist tradition thrived in Bankside to provide moral guidance, charity and education to local families. On a site in Zoar Street stood a chapel which was the earliest nonconformist school in London. Zoar Street is the site of one of three meeting houses in Bankside. “Zoar” means a place of sanctuary or refuge. In the year before he died in 1688, John Bunyan preached at the Zoar Chapel. The image reflects on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the travails of Christian as he journeys from the City of Destruction to his deliverance at the Gates of the Celestial City. In the foreground is one of Bankside’s most formidable couples – Mr. Henry Thrale and his wife Hester Thrale, onetime owners of the Anchor Brewery in Deadman’s Place (Park Street).

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In the late 18th century the Anchor brewery in Deadman’s Place (now Park Street) was the world’s largest brewery. Its owner, Mr. Henry Thrale, a well educated and respected MP for Southwark, became a close friend of Dr. Samuel Johnson. By turn Dr. Johnson became an intimate confident of Henry Thrale’s wife Hester. These familial associations frequently brought highly regarded company to the Anchor brewery for soirées where a heady intellectual mix of literary, artistic and theatre folk (Sir Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick, Edmund Burke and James Boswell among many) brought glamour and romance to Bankside. The image portrays Henry Thrale outside the burning gates of the Anchor brewery on the occasion of the anti-papist riots led by Lord George Gordon. Thrale had been accused (falsely) of supporting a Catholic Reform Bill during its reading in Parliament and thus presented a ready target for Gordon’s mobsters.

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On the night of Wednesday June 7th 1780 the cries of “No Popery”, “Down with the Papists”, “Lord George” echoed around Bank End, close to the Anchor Brewery. Gordon led his anti-Papist mob across London for six days of rioting, looting and burning before King George II ordered soldiers “to fire and be damned”. The target for Gordon’s Southwark mob was Henry Thrale’s Anchor Brewery. As Southwark’s MP, he was targeted because he had taken an unprejudiced view of the rights of Roman Catholics and therefore presumed by the mob to be a Papist. Thrale himself was not in London at the time but had left the brewery in the capable hands of its manager John Perkins. With admirable presence of mind, Perkins lent the mob horses from the brewery and led them to a neighbouring public house where he entertained them fifty pounds worth of meat and ale. Meanwhile troops had been summoned and the rioters were driven back, thus saving the Anchor Brewery from certain ransacking.

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Barclay Perkins Brewery, formerly the Anchor Brewery, was witness to an extraordinary diplomatic incident in September 1850. The brewery had by then garnered an international reputation and received high-ranking visitors from near and far. The incident here focused on visit by the Austrian General Haynau. He had a reputation for extreme cruelty, particularly against women. News of his forthcoming visit to the brewery led to a mass demonstration (and disturbance) led by draymen who, upon witnessing the General’s signature in the brewery’s visitor’s book, attacked him with sticks, brooms and whips with cries of “Down with the Austrian Woman Flogger”. After some frantic and protracted struggles, Haynau escaped to a nearby public house before the police arrived and escorted him to safety across the river. Newspapers had a field day, either deriding or celebrating the actions of the ‘mob’. One, The Daily News said:

We rejoice that he (Haynau) escaped without serious injury, but we also sincerely rejoice that such a manifestation of British feeling, so honest, so popular and so spontaneous, as well as energetic, goes forth to the world of Europe to mark in what estimation the deeds of Austria in Hungary are regarded by the intelligent of our industrial classes.

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The incident and consequences surrounding the visit by General Haynau, the Austrian ‘woman flogger’, to Barclay Perkins brewery in September 1850, sparked a furious diplomatic row. The Austrian Ambassador in London demanded an explanation. Prime Minister Lord Palmerston, without waiting for Queen Victoria’s approval, replied that he was in fact sympathetic to the draymen’s actions who had public opinion and the popular press on their side. The Prince Consort (Albert) was furious and the Queen’s disapproval caused a letter of apology to be sent to the Austrian Court. The incident remained a subject of resentment between the two countries. However, 14 years later, Garibaldi visited the brewery with this message:

Let this to tryants a lesson be,
Not to crush fair liberty,
Or like Haynau they’ll have to flee,
And not get off so well as he.

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Few historic houses remain today along Bankside but one such survivor is 49 Bankside, situated between Cardinal Cap Alley and the Globe Theatre. The house has a varied and extraordinary history (see Gillian Tindall’s The House by the Thames 2006). During the 1930s, 49 Bankside was the residence of Robert E Stevenson and his wife Anna Lee. Stevenson was a script-writer and soon-to-be director attached to Gaumont British film studios. By that time the cinema had become a mass industry; Southwark alone had over a dozen ‘picture houses’ by the 1930s (including one at Elephant and Castle which for a time was the largest in Europe). In the dining room of 49 Bankside, overlooking the Thames across to St Paul’s Cathedral, Stevenson and Lee held many glamorous dinner parties where guests included, for example, Jack Buchanan, John Mills, Merle Oberon, Sybil Thorndike and Jessie Matthews (later to become the lynchpin of the BBC’s Mrs Dale’s Diary).

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Robert E Stevenson, resident at 49 Bankside in the 1930s, took his film directing skills to Hollywood after the war where his wife Anna Lee also began a successful career as a film actor. In 1964 Robert directed Walt Disney’s most successful film to date Mary Poppins. Set in Edwardian London, this is the tale of a magical nanny who brought love and joy to 17 Cherry Tree Lane, the home of the Banks’ family. A re-make of Mary Poppins is due for release in late autumn 2018 (with a cameo appearance of Julie Andrews, the original Mary Poppins).

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