This site is part of the project River Logistics, Plantation Imaginaries, Common Winds: The Dockyard Dispositive .
It is drawn from notes for itinerant script for sites related to the Deptford Dockyard and how we might think about it at this important moment of contestation. In it we study the Dockyard from its current conjuncture, drawing in histories that explain the importance to communities of the present. The route is drawn from archival research, conversations with local activists, historians and memory keepers. It is a work in progress. If you have something to dispute or contribute please let us know.
Our next stop is the Dog and Bell, a pub built in 1794. It sits on the edge of what was once the Deptford Dockyard. The dockyard was developed for the Royal Navy by Henry VIII in 1513, and was one of the most significant royal dockyards of the Tudor period. It remained a principal naval yard for three hundred years but also housed commercial shipbuilding operations. From the pub’s front patio, we stare at a wall, construction hoarding that is there to protect Convoy’s Wharf a complex of luxury flats, currently at the early stages of construction, by the global company Hutchisons Whampoa. Hutchisons Whampoa began acquiring wealth in port management. With Ports in China, Bahamas, Vera Cruz Mexico among others, it is now drawing profits from the development of ports and dockyards in addition to energy, infrastructure, and telecommunications sectors. It owns 7 subsidiaries, earns 280 billion a year and is registered in Hong Kong and the Cayman Islands. In a strange stroke of irony, maps of their global ownership are reminiscent of the trade routes of the British Empire.
Sitting across from this wall for many years, a group of community activists including the campaign group Voice for Deptford, met here to consider how to fight the development, which will change the face of the neighbourhood. Voice for Deptford have been an important voice in galvanising the community to object and generate alternative plans to the development.
Before this development, the Convoys Wharf site had been vacant since 1998 when Rupert Murdoch’s News International stopped using it to store its newsprint. It the largest single space for development in Lewisham and was recently reported by the Evening Standard as one of the largest regeneration schemes in London.
Rupert Murdoch applied for outline planning permission in 2002 to erect 3,500 residential units on the site and received outline permission from Lewisham council in May 2005. He engaged Richard Rogers Partners to produce a master plan for the site. A few months later Rupert Murdoch sold the site, with planning permission attached, to Convoys Properties Ltd, a subsidiary of the Hong Kong property giant Hutchison Whampoa.
Subsequently several well-known architects tried, and failed, to get fresh planning permission to build on the site. They failed because, amongst other things, their plans did not recognise the great importance of the site’s historic wharves or meet the need for good infrastructure for local people (Section 106 money). Lots of different groups raised strong objections including local people, groups like Deptford Is…, Lewisham, the GLA and English Heritage. Eventually Farrell’s, another leading international architecture firm, was asked to design it. Farrell’s based their plan on the original Richard Rogers work. Their master plan for the site was submitted in April 2013, almost fifteen years since Convoys Wharf first fell vacant. Farrell’s plan, like all plans for the site, was for a high-density development including three tall residential towers, one at 48 storeys and two at 38 storeys, some of the highest buildings south east of the river. Included was a hotel, restaurants, shops, bars, a primary school, improved transport links, right to use the Thames Path and restoration of the old dry docks in the Grade II listed Olympia building.
Objections to the scheme continued. Deptford community groups, Lewisham’s Strategic Planning committee, Members of Parliament and others still thought the plans unsuitable. The developers were also criticised for not consulting local people adequately. Further adjustments were made to the plan to take some of these complaints into account.
By October 2013, the developer considered Lewisham was taking too long to make up its mind about the plans and took the opportunity to write directly to then Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, to ask him to use his powers to intervene as the Planning Authority. The then Mayor had a ‘track record’ of intervening in favour of private companies on planning. Consequently, in March 2014, a public meeting was held and, in the teeth of continuing opposition, Johnson approved the Farrell outline planning scheme. All further consultation, he said, was to be done at the detailed planning stage.
This approved outline plan remains substantially the same today (apart from changes made on Plot 17 to accommodate the Sayes Court Garden project and making space for the Build The Lenox project – which has now been rejected). The scheme has 3 extremely tall buildings – one at 48 storeys, and two of 38 storeys – 85% private luxury apartments, and 15% affordable homes. All the land is privately owned. The ‘affordable’ element will be owned and built by a Housing Association.
From 2014 until the summer of 2017 local people heard little of Convoys Wharf. Then in July of that year Convoys Properties Ltd and Farrell’s the architects announced local consultations. They are obliged by law to consult with the community. These consultations were held in the Methodist Church, Creek Road and concerned the first plot they said they wished to build (Phase 1, Plot 08). These are the detailed plans (RMAs) which now sit with Lewisham Council. In addition, in August of 2018, the summer holidays, Convoys Properties Limited suddenly put in an extra detailed application for another plot (RMA Phase 1, Plot 22). This was unannounced and unexpected. Neither they, nor the architects, had consulted on it, something they are obliged to do with us by law. This application concerns the river jetty. It does away with the original plans for a river park by the Thames and replaces it with a possible three story marketing suite so that the company can sell its luxury flats to visitors to the site.
Among the objections raised by local groups, is the fact that:
* In the 20 football fields of land to be developed here is to be NO social rented housing available anywhere on Convoys Wharf. The the Outline Planning Agreement states that at least 15% of the homes should be affordable. This is not a fixed percentage and the position of the affordable housing on the site has not been allocated.
*There are no review or meaningful consultation mechanisms.
*There are no spaces for young people – currently in the design there a garden planned for ‘under fives’ and older children are meant to play ‘off site’
*There are to be no cultural groups invited be use the site barring one, Sayes Court, which, it is imagined, will engage in green activities. The other group who had been given space in the original design, the Lenox Project, has now been rejected by the developer.
* New designs include buildings where parks were originally promise, again, with no community consultation
In addition to these issues there has been little to no regard for heritage, especially the inheritances of colonisation and enslavement associated with the dockyard, which remain unearthed. Deptford People’s Heritage Museum was founded with this in mind - to challenge the development as an act of dispossession, of changing a neighbourhood composed of African, African Caribbean and other working class people whose ancestors bore the pain and violence of empire instigated by the dockyard, and who, also, in this and dockyards across empire fought, sang, whispered and plotted their rebellion.
At a moment in which the toppling of monuments called for a de-sedimentation, an undoing of these histories, an understanding of the spectral relations between them and the city, Convoy’s Wharf and other developers in Lewisham adopt a celebratory tone, using nautical and colonial motifs - ships and evening cocktails, the face of Sir Francis Drake - to draw the attention of would be private home owners. They bank on the iconography of the history of the site as a historic dockyard while they bury its remains in the foundations of luxury accommodation.
Whilst the unveiling of plans for a monument to enslavement take place on the other side of the Thames, community activists wonder, however, if this, Convoy’s Whard is the real monument to the histories of enslavement, one that enshrines rather than repairs the practices of dispossession instigated at the dockyard.
Construction prices have slowed down development on the Convoy’s Wharf site, presenting a different conjuncture. Could this be a moment to exercise the dockyard’s history of ‘common winds’, to de-sediment new foundations before they take hold?