The House by the Thames (31 page)

Some of the Munthe antique furniture was in use in the house, mostly in the first-floor front room, which was Dr Black's study. Dan Black recalls that the other rooms were ‘quite austere', with traces of the 1930s minimalistic white décor still in place, and rather antiquated gas or electric fires. No central heating as yet, a quite usual state of affairs in the '50s and '60s. The kitchen, in which they ate and which they used as ‘a general family room' since there was no other one to spare, was still in the ground-floor front with the corridor running alongside. It had an old-fashioned coal range as well as a gas cooker. The cellars were still ‘ruinous and full of junk', but the rat problem seems to have abated. The rats were known to be there, but were
‘sotto voce'
.

It may be that continuous human occupation was enough to discourage these creatures, but their decline may also have been a measure of Bankside's declining trade. For Dan Black's childhood there, roughly from the late '50s to about 1970, saw the last of Bankside as it had traditionally been. When he was small there was a crane in operation ‘about every twenty or thirty metres' and many barges tied up. River craft still hooted and cranes dipped, in the time-honoured way, to mark New Year's Day. There was two-way wheeled traffic along Bankside, as there had been for the last three hundred years. The new Power Station was fully functional and, beyond it, the Blue Circle Cement Company created a white silt which drifted in at windows, competing with the still-ubiquitous London soot. Immediately to the east of 49 the warehouse that had belonged to the paint manufacturer was now occupied by a company making wirebound hoses, and there was other light industry still along the river front towards Mary Overie's Dock. There, ‘it was like walking into the nineteenth century', with iron walkways overhead between warehouse loading doors, cobbles underfoot, and a smell of spices, bacon and fish. There were still warehouse men around in suits and caps, and foremen wore bowlers – locally made. But they were the last of their kind. Already, by the 1960s, many warehouses were empty.

Like the trade, the industry of Southwark was not what it had been. Most of the firms whose premises had been flattened by bombs had either gone out of business entirely or had moved out of London. When the war was over and the blitz-dust had settled, they never moved back. A works near a major road, where the new articulated lorries could get in and out, was more attractive. The Skin Market, directly behind 49 Bankside, was a case in point. In the late nineteenth century, apart from a jam factory, this had been full of small houses that supplied the army of labourers needed to manhandle goods on and off barges. By the 1930s, with greater mechanisation in use on the wharves, many of the houses had been supplanted by an extended factory, now making soap, perfume and patent medicines. But by the time Dan Black and his brothers were running down Cardinal Cap Alley to what had been the Skin Market, it was to play on a mound of bomb debris, sprinkled with the rosebay willowherb that was known as ‘fireweed', devastation which no one seemed in a hurry to rebuild.

There was in any case, in the planning ethos of those years, a persistent prejudice against industry, even light industry, in districts that were also residential. The fact that this logically led to a net loss of jobs for local people was not, somehow, as apparent to planners as it should have been. Or possibly, if it was apparent, for years it was vaguely thought to be a Good Thing. As the current archivist of Southwark put it to me with restraint, ‘Local authorities at that time were often remarkably anti-commercial in their attitudes.' More specifically, perhaps, too many of those who went into local government at that time had a bred-in-the-bone mistrust of small businesses, as incarnating the bogey of capitalism.

It was as if they also failed to realise, at the most basic level, what urban areas are and what sustains them – as if townscape were simply a stage-setting, to be manipulated and renovated at will. The two twin planning obsessions of the time, that industry should be ‘got out of cities' and that ‘huddles of mean streets' should be demolished to make way for ‘tree-lined boulevards', worked together to fatally accumulating effect. The Abercrombie Plan, with what now seems an almost Stalinist lack of regard for democratic independence and human preferences, had proposed as a target that Southwark's population should be fifty per cent lower than its pre-war figure. In the words of two local historians:
¹
‘To begin with, population reduction happened naturally – if being unable to return to a bombed out home can be called natural.' But through the '50s and the '60s it went down and down, far below any target, as on the one hand local jobs were discouraged or folded and on the other people were ‘decanted' out of the borough in ever more megalomaniac council building schemes undertaken in the name of progressive policy.

The local authorities of both Bermondsey and Southwark, and also of the LCC, bear a heavy responsibility for the cavalier way in which they treated the venerable districts under their charge, but the collapse of water-borne trade along the river was not mainly their fault. The root of the matter was the decline, and then the closure, of London's extensive dock system.

The docks had seemed, superficially, to recover well from the blasting they had had in the Second World War. In an illustrated book called
London Perceived
, published in 1962, V. S. Pritchett, who had known Thames-side life intimately as a young man, could still write about the docks and wharves all along the Thames in the pride-of-our-great-City way that had been traditional for the last hundred years: ‘We have passed miles of cranes, forty-six miles of them to be exact, if we reckon both banks of the river. They are thickest in the Pool, like an infestation of grass-hoppers sticking an articulated limb, with an insect's unknowable intention, into the sky … to drop a bale into a lighter, dead straight and suddenly, like a spit … At London Bridge they suddenly thin out. By Blackfriars, they have vanished. Trading London ends, ruling London begins.'

The last stretch described is, of course, Bankside, with the cranes stopping logically at the new Power Station that did not need them. But there must have been some warning voices by then, for Pritchett wrote on the same page, ‘Some say that in fifty years half the area will revert to what it once was: a pleasure ground.' But ‘fifty years' in prospect is a misty vista. There is little sign that he realised he was describing a riverscape that was, even then, barely intact, and on the point of passing into history. Down on the river's estuary at Tilbury a port was being built for huge new container ships which did not need unloading in the traditional way. This had its effect on the docks, this in turn affected the Pool of London, and this affected the function of the riverside above London Bridge.

Whether the coming of containerisation was the single, overwhelming reason that London's docks were put out of business is a huge subject in its own right. Some would say that the failure to construct better road and rail links to dockland in the post-war period played a part. Others would also point to the dockers' own intransigent refusal to adapt their working practices. All one can say is that it happened, and that no one, laying visionary plans in 1945, seems to have foreseen it, any more than they foresaw the arrival of the jet plane, or cheap mass travel, or the growth in car ownership, or indeed many of the other social changes of the 1950s and '60s.

The first dock to close, in 1967, was the East India Dock. Built for sailing ships in 1806, it had no space to accommodate the container trade. St Katharine's Dock, by the Tower, and the London Dock at Wapping, which had both been losing money hand over fist, followed two years later. The others went the same way in the 1970s. About half of the trade went to Tilbury, but the rest went to other coastal ports in the United Kingdom or indeed to Rotterdam in Holland. London's long history as a leading world port came to an ignominious end.

Along with the docks and the Pool, the lighterage and river-wharf trade, which depended on these sources of work, declined sharply also. In the 1930s there had been some 9000 lighters on the Thames at London, often moored many deep in the centre of the river waiting for tugs and the tide. ‘They are ubiquitous,' wrote a journalist in
The Evening News
²
in the approved telling-readers-in-Kensington-about-working-London style of the times: ‘They are as plentiful as lorries in the streets of dockland; indeed, they are the lorries of the river, which is the biggest street of all.' By 1963, already, the number of lighters had been halved to 4600 and was going down all the time.
³
In 1974 an
Evening Standard
journalist interviewed a group of lightermen at length and quoted one of them as saying: ‘Only six years ago the few wharves at Bankside that remained from the original thirty-two were moving 150,000 tons of cargo a year. And now this great God-given east–west highway has been allowed to die.' The journalist described the empty warehouses rising ‘sheer and bleakly deserted from the river … only the names remain emblazoned proudly, like that of Ozymandias.'
⁴

By 1983, when the last dock, at Millwall, had been closed and the Isle of Dogs was beginning to be turned into a district of glass office towers, there were under a thousand lightermen left. By then, the identity crisis being suffered in riverside boroughs had well and truly come home even to the most bone-headed local authority. Already, six years before, the Borough of Southwark had had to admit that it had more than a million square feet of warehouse and manufacturing space standing empty. And, to add to the problem, a programme of office-building had been undertaken, there as in several other boroughs, which bore no relation to actual demand.

The closure of businesses on or near Bankside was piecemeal, and not always directly or obviously related to the ending of water-borne trade, but it was inexorably part of the same general change. Post-war LCC plans had promoted these closures, but when the Greater London Council took over in the mid-'60s some attempts were made to revive the riverfront, with talk of ‘rebuilding the past'. In practice, this led to a narrow, local focus on light industry, often of a rather transient and uncertain kind, with old, large works being pulled down and replaced by smaller, flimsier constructions. Jobs were ‘created' in the 1970s and early '80s, none of which existed by the following decade. Because of this belated preoccupation with shoring up a way of life that had been allowed to collapse, ironically, planning permission was refused at this time to convert industrial buildings into offices, that is, into businesses of another kind. Handsome, solid Victorian manufactories and warehouses were thus destroyed without another use being sought for them, sometimes even in the teeth of well-informed and influential opposition. Neither the local MP nor John Betjeman was able to save the finest building at Mary Overie's Dock.

The centuries-old hat trade collapsed because people stopped wearing hats, but it would have been driven out of Southwark anyway by post-war restrictions on noxious industries, as was the equally ancient tanning trade. Many printing firms moved elsewhere, reputedly because printers were now a well-paid lot who tended to want to live in green suburbs. A worse loss to Southwark's economy, and one that might well have been avoided, was that of the flourishing hop trade which had, for hundreds of years, linked Southwark with a rural heartland. After the war the traders found the local authority was making it too difficult for them to rebuild their warehouses, and so they relocated to a vast new structure in Kent. Fortunately the splendid Hop Exchange in Southwark Street just managed to escape demolition and now houses offices and a restaurant. The great Anchor Brewery, with its dray-horses and its yeasty smell, that had been such a feature of Bankside since the early eighteenth century, shut down in stages after Barclay Perkins merged with Courage in the 1950s. It became merely a bottling plant in the next decade, with some of its buildings let off for other uses. Someone who was a trainee engineer then at the Power Station recalls that there was ‘an egg-breaking plant' there (which smelt just as much as the brewery had) and was staffed entirely by women. No doubt that too shut when the great food-distribution wharves folded below London Bridge, as did the Sainsbury food-processing works above Blackfriars Bridge. In the 1980s the whole large brewery area was cleared, for what was supposed to be new ‘workshops' but which became a housing estate and offices. Fortunately, by that time, the Anchor pub, which had been scheduled to be demolished as ‘slum clearance' after the war, was prized as a relic and was allowed to remain.

Nearer to 49 Bankside, the City Lead Works by Southwark Bridge, with its tall chimney, had been derelict for years when it was finally demolished in 1981. Blue Circle Cement went too. The London Hydraulic Power works, next to the Power Station, shut in 1977. Blocks of unremarkable flats were built on the site and were named ‘Falcon Point'. As to the Power Station itself, for all its impressive presence and its much-advertised modernity, it turned out to be a white elephant of major proportions. It had to be built in stages so that the old one could be gradually phased out, and was not complete till well into the 1950s. Finally modifications were made in 1963, by which time Gilbert Scott's ‘brick cathedral' approach already seemed out of date. Ten years later the oil crisis drove up the international costs of petroleum, and an oil-fired power station became uneconomic: from then on it was doomed. In 1981 the plant was shut down. The Electricity Generating Board proposed selling the site for redevelopment, but no firm plans were made.

For twelve more years it stood empty, its machinery rusting inside the great turbine hall, visible through the huge but dirty mullioned windows. Rain found ways to infiltrate and left puddles on the floor, birds got in too and colonised the interior, depositing their droppings and flying about as if in an enormous, dim aviary. It looked as if the place were only awaiting its end, just as the equally huge and unwanted hulk of the Albion Flour Mills had stood near by for eighteen years before finally being demolished, almost two centuries before.