“There are new and unpredictable modes of dispossession to be understood alongside the centuries old carnage that moistens the earth beneath our feet.”

Gargi Bhattacharyya, Rethinking Racial Capitalism: Questions of Reproduction and Survival

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. It you have something to dispute or contribute please let us know.

This route begins in front of the new Tidemill Primary school and beside Deptford Lounge. The school is named after the Tidemill, named to remember the mill that once stood down the road and was the beginning of Deptford.

The name tidemill comes from a time before 14th century when a water mill was based here or near this site. At that time, Deptford was a small island surrounded by bog. People paddled to get here. It was called Meretun, the town in the marshes, marshes that extended all the way back to Clapham common. Rafts for fishing, which eventually put up sides, added keels and became the first ships.

The 15th and 16th centuries saw the struggle to reclaim or ‘inn’ the marshes from the river. Banks of earth or ‘walls’ were constructed along the riverside and the land behind was drained by ditches. Parcels of land were divided by cross-walls and ran perpendicularly to the river, advancing the river front over a period of time.

By the 16th century it was no longer known as Meretun but Vadum Profundum (Latin for deep ford) and the swamps had been sedimented by a major earthwork of embankment that extended from to Essex. The marsh was transformed by these deposits, turning marshy farmland into roads.

As these deposits or banks were built, so were the ships, and an industry of another was taking hold.

So impressive was the undertaking that, in the 17th century Peter the Great came to visit and imagine how the same process of swamp draining would be used to build up Petersburg. In Andrei Bely’s Petersburg a similar process is described ‘Petersburg was a swamp. This is a statement of fact. During the construction, parts of the swamp had to be drained (one reason for some of the canals), and piles driven in to support the weight of the buildings. The river Neva takes its name from the Finnish for swamp.

The Tidemill is also the name of a campaign and a democratically run, community wildlife garden set up to mitigate air pollution, which, in Deptford is one of the highest levels in Europe, and to contest plans for local development.

Early in the morning of 29 October 2018 150 bailiffs and police stormed the Tidemill. This ‘military-style invasion’ was ordered by Lewisham Council, paid for by Lewisham’s council tax payers. The council’s aim was to cut down the trees, and evict and demolish the block of 16 council flats next door, to make way for a new private housing development (now built) in one of the most densely built parts of London. As with many Council partnerships with developers the promised ‘affordable’ housing (the regular regime of justification for development), is minimal, with less that 80 homes offered at rents difficult for most to afford, of the 9,000 on the current Lewisham housing waiting list.

Our tour begins here for two reasons: the first to indicate the dynamic that exists in Deptford, like most areas in London, where most neighbourhoods are marked by the struggle against what David Harvey calls, ‘accumulation by dispossession’, the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of a few, the dispossession of the public of their wealth, land and taking resources, whether they be spatial, sensorial or social. The tidemill is both an important heritage site of beginnings for Deptford but also a reminder of the always tense dynamic between heritage, monumentality and struggles against the theft of community assets cannot be separated.

The second reason for beginning with the Tidemill is its process of sedimentation. Here the problem of the swamp, its softened ground, its melding of matter and scent and people, its murky unknowns and lurking liquidity and the response to it in division, compression, solidification and consolidation can be read alongside another kind of sedimentation, what Nahum Dimitri Chandler describes as a ‘paleonymic practice in thought’, a grounding in thinking that comes to presuppose ‘the status of European, Euro- American or white identity as coherent, as homogeneous, as a pure term, and on that basis as the norm, telos or orientation of identity, to be in history as such’. Such sedimented thought, in the centuries to follow. radiate a naturalised world order that, for some, comes, to be seen and felt as the unquestioned earth beneath our feet. Soil here is replaced by a ‘sedimented frame’, a history of ideas and desires that harnessing the groundwork to enforce a structure in which some exist in history and others (locked in nature) fall outside of it. This oscillation – between the movement and uncertainty of the swamp and the practice of sedimented control – one could say, radiates across the globe from the Deptford Dockyard.

It remains with us today underpinning the violent consolidations of ownership over the shaky movements of community democracy as seen in the Tidemill. Our project is to de-sediment them, making the ground shake.

Links and References