History of Albury Street Part 2.

Until 1882, Albury Street was called Union Street, a name which commemorated the Act of Union between England and Scotland. Union Street was already in existence in 1707 although only a few houses may have been built by then. The parcel of land on which the street was laid out is clearly shown on Evelyn's map of 1623 where it is marked as 'James Browns land'.

Its area is about 2 acres. Its boundaries no doubt were medieval, showing the original field pattern although no documentary evidence of this has been found. There is some possibility that the parcel of land may have belonged to the manor which the lord was then Sir Richard Browne. The manor was purchased by John Evelyn but James Brown's land does not seem to have been included in the Evelyn Estate. In 1623, it is shown lying between Church Lane (Church St?) to the East and Butt Lane, later Deptford High Street, to the West. Its southern boundary is shown marked by a hedge and its northern boundary by a few trees. There is a house in the center and two more at the eastern end. No record of the tenure of the adjacent land, nearly two acres of Bridgehouse land to the north leased to Will. Sale has been found for the seventeenth century.

Part of the parcel to the south was occupied by Thomas Lucas as early as 1692/3, and the remainder was in the possession of Elizabeth Clapp, but how and when they obtained their interest in the land, formerly the King's Land, has not been discovered. Further to the south lay Mr Paget's land and half an acre of Bridgehouse land leased to him. The tenure of this strip of Bridgehouse land has been traced from 1603 to 1737, being occupied by Eusebius Paget, his son Ephrain Paget, a clerk, and then by Peter Pett. The land is described in 1647 as pasture and there is no reason to doubt that all the land around here was pasture including James Brown's. By the time Thomas Lucas began his building separations, the lanes surrounding these parcels of land, Butt Lane to the west, Church Street to the east, Flagons Row to the north, and Crossfield Lane to the south were all lined with buildings, traditionally rural in type, some of brick and some of wood, built irregularly with no attempt at an overall plan. By deed of lease and release dated 5th and 6th January 1692/3, the land which was developed as Union |street, was assigned to William Allen of Deptford, Mariner, and others to Isaac Leader, also of Deptford, an anchorsmith. The land was described as containing an orchard and a messuage of tenement. The purchase price was not disclosed. Thomas Lucas obtained the land from Leader again by a deed of lease and release dated 23rd and 24th January 1704/5. Once more the purchase price was not disclosed. Lucas immediately mortgaged the land to Thomas Loving (or Leving ) of Deptford, blockmaker, for £350 by a deed dated 25th January 1704/5. This mortgaged was to run for 1000 years but could be redeemed after one year on  payment of £367.10s. In spite of various payments to Loving and his successor, Ralph Crew, the mortgaged was not fully paid off by the time of Lucas's death. So, by the beginning of 1705, Lucas was in possession of the land on which he was to develop Union Street, and had obtain the capital, on paper rather than in actual cash, to enable him to start building. Apart from his possession of land in Deptford, and that he was described as a bricklayer in the lease and release of 1704/5, and so must have learnt his trade by then, little is known of Thomas Lucas before he began work on what was to become Union Street. On the 22nd December 1703, he succeeded his associate Thomas Leving as foreman of the Deptford jury to the Kent Commission of Sewers. It would be interesting to speculate that Lucas obtained the post to facilitate laying a sewer for Union street, but no evidence of a sewer having been laid has been found. On the 3rd of December 1706, Lucas was rated for his tile kiln  which stood on land owned by Mrs Bridgete Ann Kingswill in Church Marsh Level. By 1706, the kiln was probably already producing tiles for new houses in Union Street. Although the earliest lease discovered of a plot in Union Street is dated 20th February 1707, it is unlikely that Lucas waited until then before starting building. He must of begun the first houses soon after negotiating the purchase of the ground and its mortgage in 1704/5. Some confirmation of this is given by a lease and release of the 18th and 19th October 1805. by which Lucas Freeman of Church Street, Deptford  and the descendant of Thomas Lucas's son-in -law Jon Freeman, assigned No. 8 on the north side (No. 13 now) to Robert Bowring its occupant at that time. Since all the original leases discovered were granted for 99 years it suggests that this house having reverted by October 1805 to Lucas's descendant, probably at the previous Michaelmas, was originally leased in 1706. The original lease has not been found but it could either have been an assignment for 99 years of a house already completed by Lucas, or it could have been a lease by which Lucas assigned a plot of land for 99 years on the express condition that a house be erected on the site within a year. Both types of lease for dates later than 1706 have been found.


Part 2 extract from A Quiney's paper on Albury Street 1979.

History of Albury Street. Part 1

Albury Street was laid out and developed between 1705 and 1717 or soon after, by a local bricklayer, Thomas Lucas. The method of development which he employed and the two homogeneous rows of terrace-houses which were built each side of the street are typical of speculative building as it developed in London after the Great Fire. It is of unusual interest that a local craftsman should build in a manner typical of the Metropolis in an outlying village, as early as this, and that so much still survives. In the middle ages, Deptford was one of several riverside villages lying below the City of London on the south bank of the Thames. Originally known as West Greenwich, its present name derives from the crossing by a deep ford of the river Ravensbourne nearly a mile from its outlet into the Thames. The village called Deepforde Straund or Deptford Strand grew up along side the Thames rather than by the Ravensbourne. 

The settlement by the ford and then the bridge which led to Greenwich, which was later called the Upper Town, was much smaller than that by the Thames until the nineteenth century when it expanded to become the centre of the suburb.

Looking towards Deptford Strand 1620 to 1630



Royal Dockyard 1513

In the reign of Henry VIII, a royal shipyard was founded at Deptford to provide for the developing navy, and for over three hundred years it brought growth and prosperity to the “Navy Building Town”. A map of the village in 1923 shows the docks and the Kings Shipyard and another belonging to the East India Company with a mass of houses close to the river surrounded by fields.

Christopher Marlowe

Here, Christopher Marlowe was killed in a fight at a tavern and here that Gindling Gibbons was discovered. During the seventeenth century John Evelyn, the diarist took a lease of Sayes Court, the manor house of West Greenwich alias Deptford Strand. His diaries recount much of Deptford life and the sojourn there of its most illustrious visitor, Peter the Great of Russia, in his own house. Evelyn records that at the end of the century “by increase of Building may be seene that the Towne is in eighty years become neere as big as Bristoll”. The most notable buildings to be erected there in these eighty years, Trinity Almshouses, were built in 1664-5 in Church Street, considerably away from the Thames.

Grindling Gibbons

John Evelyn

Throughout the eighteenth century, starting with Albury Street, or rather Union Street as it was formerly called, this increase of building continued as houses were built farther and farther south away from the river. As a result Deptford became eligible for one of the fifty new churches planned by the Act of Parliament of 1711, St Paul’s, built to the design of Thomas Archer between 1713 and about 1724. It was Thomas Lucas who obtained the contract as a bricklayer for the church and as such was responsible for building the core of the building before it was faced in stone.

St Paul's Church, Deptford

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Deptford, New Cross, Lewisham, and Greenwich had become one continuous built up area, but although the riverside had an unbroken series of docks, wharves and houses right to London, there were still open fields stretching to the west as far as Bermondsey. It was across these fields that London’s first railway was built between Spa Road and Deptford in 1836, ultimately to connect Greenwich with London Bridge. With the closure of the Royal Dockyard on the 30th March 1869, and its reuse as the Metropolitan Foreign Cattle Market, Deptford’s former individuality and prosperity were doomed. Enveloped at last by the expanding metropolis, it became the poor industrialised suburb which it has remained ever since.  



Foreign Cattle Market, Deptford



Part 1 extract from A Quiney's paper on Albury Street 1979. 

The History of Albury Street, Deptford.

During my research of Deptford and in particular Albury Street I discovered a document in the Lewisham Local History archives. This document was the most in-depth paper of Albury Street I have ever come across. It’s a fascinating piece of painstaking research of the area carried out in meticulous detail. I was so intrigued by the information contained therein I decided to contact the author and seek his permission to reproduce it in its entirety.

Anthony Prosper Quiney is an architectural historian, writer and photographer who has lived in Blackheath for many years. Dr. Quiney is Professor Emeritus of Architectural History at the University of Greenwich, and a fellow (and former president) of the Society of Antiquaries of London. He has written many books and articles in his chosen subjects some of which are listed here.

Article in the Archaeological Journal, Vol. 136 (1979).

John Loughborough Pearson, 1979. ISBN 0300022530.

House and Home: History of the Small English House, 1986. ISBN 0563211334.

The English Country Town, 1987. ISBN 0500014051.

Period Houses, a guide to authentic architectural features, 1989. ISBN 0540011738.

Kent Houses: English Domestic Architecture, 1993. ISBN 1851491538.

Wall to Wall, An exploration of building materials and domestic architecture, 1994. ISBN 1860000134.

The Traditional Buildings of England, 1995. ISBN 0500276617

Panoramas of English Villages, with Nick Meers. 2000. ISBN 9781857999464.

England's Architectural Heritage, 2002. ISBN 1903807239.

Town Houses of Medieval Britain, 2004. ISBN 0300093853.

A Year in the Life of Greenwich Park, 2009. ISBN 071122871X.

I would like to thank Professor Anthony Quiney for allowing me to serialise his paper on Albury Street over the coming weeks. Part 1 will be posted soon..

Deptford Fairground/Boxing Booth.

As a child I can remember the fairground just up past the station. I know it had been there for years with thousands of people visiting the fair over the years. My grandfather, Jimmy White, was a regular at the boxing booth fighting at straw weight, a little heard of fighting weight nowadays. My uncles told me he was a devastating  little boxer who went on to become Southern Area Champion whilst serving in the army. One year he had ,so I'm told, 113 fights! The Mosleyites knew of him leading up to the war years and use to pitch many a fighter against him only to have seven barrels knock out them. This was verified not only by family members but also in another way. I and my brothers were attending a family funeral at Lewisham Way and after the service went to the pub on the junction of South St and Lewisham Way. I cant recall the name. There was an old gentleman sitting in there with his collie dog and he enquired who's funeral we had attended. We told him it was family. He asked if we were the White family from Albury Street, Deptford . We said yes and he to recounted the same boxing stories about our grandfather.

Joe Bowker