A few months back I was involved in an email exchange about the patch of wood blocks adjacent to Bunhill Row Cemetery, just off Artillery Row, specifically, and perhaps coincidentally (ironically?), in Chequer Street. Back in ye olde Victorian times this street ran alongside Star Works, the De La Rue postage stamp manufactory, though I don't know if this company was related to Danny.
This little road is a patchwork of setts and cobbles and looks to have been repaired, extended or updated with various kinds of blocks. It’s probably more likely, due to the pristine condition of this area, that these were laid more recently, perhaps using blocks that were found in the vicinity and some clever person had the idea to make a feature of them.Ah, but this isn't the only patch of wood paving in the metropolis – I have happened upon quite a few other places that show hints of this eco-friendly-but-hard-to-maintain wooden surface. I've found enough to start a specific collection on my desktop and here I am sharing some of them with you...
At 90-92 Pentonville Road N1, on the corner of Penton Street, there is
evidence of a whole paved private courtyard that is currently used for
car parking. Patches of wood can be seen peeking out from under the
receding Tarmac.
Research shows that this was once the display forecourt outside the
ground floor showroom of R. W. Wilkins & Son, marble, granite and
stone merchants, monumental masons, sculptors, table-top manufacturers,
shopfitters, and interior decorators in marble and tiles. This had
originally been constructed as three Georgian houses with deep front gardens,
mirroring those across the road, and was converted into one
premises in the 1860s by Henry Webb Wilkins, probably RWW's father. The
rectangular blocks appear to be the same shape and size as the ones at
Chequer Street.
Many good remnants of wood block can also be found nestling within the segments of some old manhole and utility covers. Fir instance, just east of here, near the border of Islington and Hackney (when this was Finsbury and Shoreditch, respectively) there are examples in Mora Street on the southern side of City Road:
In the middle of Grays Inn Road at the junction of Acton Street by the zebra crossings, there is a superb example, as shown below, top left, with the streetscape below it. And there are two more good examples in Islington High Street as shown below, middle and right – one set within the pavement near Pizza Express (middle pics), another in the road at the rear of the former electricity transformer station and tram depot (top right). A third one, by the southern door to that building, at the corner of Duncan Street, sort of facing The York pub, has been recently covered in Tarmac (bottom right).
Update: The Grays Inn Road pic shown above was taken in 2021. This cover plate was subsequently covered in Tarmac, but in April 2024 I noticed that the surface has worn away to reveal how the pieces of woodblock within the segments are now much smaller. Hmmm, how very strange. I wonder if someone tried to remove the wood blocks and then replaced them after they'd discovered that the chunks did not come out complete. See right.I'd really love to experience the sound of horses walking on a wood-blocked street. The super-informative Roads Were Not Built For Cars shows us that Bartholomew the cartographer, produced road surface maps of London where streets coloured yellow denoted wood, green indicated sheet asphalt, blue was setts, and pink for macadam (a pre-cursor to Tarmac). The rationale that wood blocks offered the benefit of a quieter environment explains their implementation in residental streets such as West Square and in the old hospital zone around City Road.
The same 'quiet' effect would also apply at this next location – the rear of City Hall, on Belvedere Road, built as the London County Council's head offices in 1911 and, hence, a really busy municipal street.
Here, long wooden oblongs, arranged in a grid format, have been uncovered for many years. Whenever I am in the Waterloo area I often go to check they are still visible. The random piece of flat metal is, I suppose, an attempt at protection.Update July 2021: due to the wet weather, the woodblocks in Artillery Row are framed in grass. I think it’s lovely.
There are two manhole covers in Thurland Road here
ReplyDeletehttps://goo.gl/maps/ZmRD37q7pnLX6B9C6
The round one can be seen in the middle of https://www.londonpicturearchive.org.uk/view-item?i=218161
but ironically the square one was back then almost totally hidden by tarmac - it's under the "copies or screen grabs" in the watermark. As you can see, the two cocks that the sewerman (one of my grandfather's colleagues in the Bermondsey Borough Council sewers department) was operating are still there in the middle of the road. Nothing else in the photo survives.
Here's another:
https://goo.gl/maps/GD9uoKdnb7ThG87C8
Geoff
Thanks Geoff...That's SE16. It looks like two round manholes that would have been wood filled at the end of the street in Dockley Road.
ReplyDeleteAnd re the Georges Rd, SE1, one... yes yes yes... I've got a pic of that somewhere. I knew I had others; I just hadn't re-named the files so they aren't coming up in a search.
Thanks again