SOAP
and SYRUP
FROM SOAMES TO SYRAL
by Peter Luck
The paper describes the history of the riverside site on Blackwall Lane now occupied by the developer, Cathedral - but previously the Syrol/Tate and Lyle/Amylum/Tunnel Glucose works
INTRODUCTION
This
paper is an adapted version of a talk given to GIHS in 2012 and is the latest
and probably still provisional product of a fascination derived from two views
of the east Greenwich glucose plant most recently operated by Syral who closed
it in 2009 and had demolished it by the end of 2010. They showed the view into
the crowded works from Blackwall Lane, drawing one in, and the formal interest
of the silos on the river front.
The
plant was located on the western shore of the Greenwich peninsula and had
operated under different company names and constitutions since 1934 when it
opened on a site previously occupied by the Greenwich Soap and Candle Works,
itself founded by Wilkie & Soames in the middle years of the nineteenth
century. Previous to that the land had been agricultural.
My
intention is to tell the story of this site. I have had to simplify in places
because I have more information than I can handle in the time, and in others
skate over long periods because I still have too little.
PART ONE: SOAMES
As
often, the beginning is elsewhere. The Wilkie and Soames soap works began operations
in Wheler Street, Spitalfields in 1808. I have found nothing more about them until
1821 when Mr Wilkie died. His name lived on in the company for another 109
years. In 1846 James and Louis Soames are recorded as holding the lease of 65
Wheler Street for a soap works, counting house, stabling etc, and James Soames owned or held leases on
three other scattered premises in Spitalfields. Two were sub-let to a tailor
and a greengrocer, one was noted as having stables, warehousing, sheds etc
adjoining, and no subtenant. By 1853
Arthur Soames has joined the family
partnership and Louis Soames is recorded as leaving it in that year.
Shortly after, the company moved to the Greenwich site. Probable reasons for
the move were the need for expansion and perhaps also the extremely unhealthy
conditions of Wheler Street. The one certain reason was the imminent
destruction of their premises as the north end of Commercial Street was cut
through Spitalfields.
The
last record (that I have seen) of Soames in Spitalfields is in Kelly’s Post Office
Directory for 1857 which is also the first year of their directory entry
mentioning Greenwich. They seem to have been there a little earlier.
Morden
College were the owners of the Greenwich land, which had been used largely by
butchers for fattening cattle and, at the perimeter, by basket-makers tending
osier beds. In the middle of the nineteenth century Morden began to sell leases
on riverside land for industrial development. The first significant move was
the sale of a lease of 95 years to Charles Holcombe in 1841, followed by
another to him in 1845, together forming the site of Morden Wharf and Hollick’s
Wharf. Holcombe and his executors sublet the land to various users and built an
access road now known as Morden Wharf Road and the pub, the Sea Witch at the
shore end of the road.
The
Soames, James 2nd and Arthur took a lease on land immediately to the
south in 1857 but it was back-dated to 1854 and there had been another drafted
in 1855. In any event, by the time the 1857 lease was finalised, the factory
was built and appears in the lease documents, together with a riverside enclave
within the site occupied by an engineering works. Whether there had been an
arrangement with previous leaseholders or the factory had been put up while
haggling over the lease isn’t clear. The land taken was quite a large area and
the factory occupied less than half of it. Much of it remained more-or-less
empty into the twentieth century.
Before
getting too involved in the history of the Soames in Greenwich (what little I
can find) it would be as well to comment briefly on soap production. It was a
smelly business. Soap is a salt of a fatty acid. It is produced by the
interaction of the fatty material with a strong alkali. The fatty material may
be of vegetable origin such as olive or palm oil, or animal fat including whale
oil. Whether the process is the ‘hot’ or the ‘cold’, heat is needed either to
boil fats and alkali together or to raise their temperature ‘just enough’ for
saponification. Various other ingredients can be added for scent or scouring
power. If the cold process is used , the soap must stand and mature before it
is useable.
I
have found no record of the materials used by Soames (though a Soames brother,
Henry Aldwin, was a Russia merchant and may have imported Russian tallow) or
which process, but I do have some knowledge of the products. An advertisement
makes it clear that their soaps were generally of the heavy duty kind. Other
brand names were Apron, Big Wilkie, Spry, Wonderful Washer and British
Carbolic.
Besides
soap, the works did, as its name states, produce candles: Stearafine (‘They
give a better and steadier light than any other candle.’); Greenwich Sperm
(‘.....suitable for the best establishments in the kingdom.’) (and surely based
on whale oil); Pure Parafine; and also a device for holding candles steady as
they burn to the very end – the Greenwich Fix.
I
have little information on their clients. They exhibited candles at the 1867
Paris Universal Exhibition, which suggests ambition and were soap maker ‘by
appointment’ to the Poplar Union in 1906.
The detailed history of the site development
is an almost-closed book. There was a serious fire in 1861 and an illustration
is claimed to have been published in the Illustrated London News, but I failed to
find it. The Ordnance map of 1867 shows
the iron works still in place, various small sheds around the site, the stables
at the back (if riverside is front), a short jetty with a crane and an internal
tramway system. The 1894 edition shows a larger jetty and many more buildings whose
purposes appear to be identified on an undated plan in the Morden archives. This
shows departments for paraffin, soap boiling and candle-making, with supporting
laboratory, stables, maintenance departments, separate messes for men and
women, and housing for gate-keeper and foreman. The riverside ironworks has
been absorbed into the Soames site. At peak more than 140 men and boys were
employed there; later, women were employed in cutting and stamping toilet soap.
A licence granted to the Soames by Morden in 1915 approves their building an
engine house, gas fired, next to their saw mill, but on the Morden plan the saw
mill is among a group of buildings labelled as demolished. It is not clear when
this south part of the site was cleared.
Road
access remained from the NE corner of the land past the paraffin refinery. Probably
main deliveries were to the pier. These will have included the fats and also
timber for the saw mill. I am guessing that this would have been simply cut to
manageable lengths and burnt for ash as a source of the necessary alkali.
There
appears to have been no change to the site before the 1914 edition of the OS. This
shows the buildings in the southern part of the site still there. If this
suggests commercial stagnation, it might be the case. There was a slump in
demand around 1906 which Lever Brothers attempted to counter by inviting other
soap manufacturers into a combine, so saving on research and advertising costs.
Soames declined to join after strong negative publicity. (Levers successfully
sued the Daily Mail for libel.)
More
is known of the role of the Soames family in Greenwich society. Among peninsula
industrialists, the Soames were untypical in staying in Greenwich and putting
some of their considerable profit back into the area. The elder James Soames in 1849 moved into the Red House,
a large establishment on Westcombe Park Road, high on the hillside,
more-or-less next door to Vanbrugh Castle and with fine views north over the
peninsula. A few years on he moved to Blackheath. James Soames 2nd followed him in
1854, buying Maze Hill House, lower on the slopes and facing Greenwich Park. This
tends to support 1854 as a start date for the Works.
James Soames 2nd was a political
liberal, supporter of various political, religious and social causes in
Greenwich, a member of the Board of Guardians, chairman of the Greenwich
Society for the Relief of Distress, and assisting at St Alphege where his
brother was the vicar. In 1890 he funded a new church for Westcombe Park, St George,
and installed another Soames, Werner Henry Kolle Soames, as vicar. Other Soames joined the company,
lived in the area and married local girls. Walter Soames took over the running
of the factory and stayed until the take-over in 1920. He may have been the
Walter Field Soames who became Mayor of Greenwich in 1910 and 1911. (Walter
Kolle and Walter Field Soames – which was which?) WHK Soames worked hard to
build up his flock but the area was slow developing and he retired ill, the
church being completed only in 1926 by its third vicar.
Lever
Brothers’ interest in combines mutated into a desire to take over other manufacturers
and in 1919-20 they went on a campaign of acquisitions including big companies
such as Gossage, Gibbs, and Knights and a number of smaller ones including
Soames. By 1925 their policy with regard to certain smaller companies was to
allow them to close ‘on favourable terms’ if not wanted. Although the lease on
the site remained with Wilkie and Soames until at least 1937, the Thames Soap
and Candle Works closed in 1930.
INTERLUDE ONE
It
is quite striking that the 1937 LCC/OS differs hardly at all from the 1914 OS
in respect of the immediate surroundings of the site. Tunnel Avenue, the
approach road to the Blackwall Tunnel had entailed the demolition of some
housing which was replaced by the group of Idenden Cottages in 1896 and this still
stood. Housing, school and church on the opposite side of Tunnel Avenue were
unchanged apart from the appearance of new terraces on the old allotment areas.
To the north, the warehouses, works and yards on Morden Wharf Road were in form
the same though the cement works had passed its big shed on the riverside to a
packaging manufacturer. Beyond them, the extremely smelly Molassine Meal Works
was busy producing mollasses-based animal feeds. The Sea Witch catered for the
workers, as did the Mitre on the main road, and perhaps the Terry Dining Rooms.
PART TWO: TUNNEL REFINERIES BEGINNINGS
After
the closure of the Soames factory, the site and buildings stood vacant for a
few years gathering weeds and grime until taken over by the newly formed Tunnel
Refineries in 1934. This was a newly formed company but with a parentage going
back to 1873 and the founding of the company Callebaut Freres et Lejeune in
Aalst, Belgium. The Callebauts had been supplying hops and sugar to some of
Belgium’s 3000 or more brewers and founded their new company to manufacture
glucose syrup from starch and so bypass the heavy taxation on sugar. With
various changes of name and family members directing, the firm continued into
the twentieth century, eventually merging with the Blieck Freres to form
Glucoseries Reunies in 1926. Along the way, probably around 1880, they had
instituted the first company retirement scheme in Belgium.
In
the late 1920s this family firm formed a relationship with a London firm, A Hurst
& Co Ltd, to ship starch and glucose to England. By 1932 it was thought
better to import only the starch and convert it to glucose here. So a scheme
was devised by the Calllebauts with Henry Risner of Hurst’s to form a new
company which was duly named after its location. Risner became the first
Managing Director of Tunnel Refineries with Edward Ummen as Factory Director. Mr
Ummen seems to have been the conduit for this venture as the Callebaut family had
sat out the First World War in England as guests of friends of the Ummens.
The
Callebaut family remained dominant (or at least influential) until the year
2000.
Having
moved onto the site in 1934, apparently still as under-tenants of Wilkie and
Soames, Tunnel cleared and cleaned the site and was up and running in 1935,
producing its first batch of glucose syrup in August of that year. It is plain
from the 1937 LCC/OS map that the premises were used more or less as found. An
account by Albert Kershaw, one of the workers at that time, tells that ‘most of
the work was done with a minimum of equipment and expense’. The tram lines were
still in use for bringing coal ashore to the boilers but loading the trucks,
moving them and fuelling the boilers was all done by manpower. The jetty and
its not-very-adequate old crane was also used for off-loading starch imported
from Aalst, consignments arriving irregularly and having to be man-handled
ashore. A small work force meant production could cease for a few days while
every hand turned to moving a shipload of 2cwt sacks. Initially the glucose
produced was not particularly good but, as rare British produced glucose, it
was ‘accepted on the market’.
The
internal layout at this time is not clear. Small but significant improvements
were made. These included constructing a pit and fitting a mechanism to enable
easier emptying of the heavy sacks of starch, installing a third boiler and
mechanical stokers and digging wells to supply water to vacuum pumps Much later, redundant, these
were filled in again. Maintenance was undertaken with very little machinery. It
all seems very hand-to-mouth. Perhaps it was, but clients came from all over
the country, including the South Shore Rock Co of Blackpool and Bassets
Licorice Co. They nearly all collected their own, few received deliveries, the
company vehicle fleet being very small. Even so by 1939 Tunnel Glucose was the third
largest British producer.
The
war set this back. Badly. Starch deliveries from Belgium ceased. Production
objectives were set by government. Starch supplies were requisitioned. Tunnel
had to take what it could get as raw material and this could be custard powder,
peas, sago, tapioca, potato starch. When this was running out, storage vats were built and liquid
starch was bought from competitors. From these disparate sources a glucose was
made. Mr Kershaw wrote, ‘Some horrible colours were produced, but still it was
glucose.’ For a while malt was made from potatoes and barley but this closed
down as supplies became unavailable.
A
part of the premises was turned over to the firm Thermalloys for the smelting
of Manganese from ore. This was a filthy process but it saw the premises in
use. Improvisation ruled here, too. Men needed to bathe before leaving at the
end of a shift, so barrels were acquired, sawn in half to give two tubs each,
and these were the company baths.
In
1941, the company sales HQ in Trinity Square was destroyed by bombing and the
glucose factory was shut down, its staff sent off to other local works such as
Delta Metals, Stones, Deptford Power Station. The small skeleton staff
remaining were turned by the ever-inventive Mr Ummen to producing tungsten
powder used in the hardening of steel. This work was under Ministry direction.
Various other work went on in various parts of the factory. The manganese
production increased and took over more space; an ersatz starch was produced
under the guidance of Mr Grobowski, a German Jewish refugee; the London Chain
Company spent two years making bicycle chains; an unused starch building was
turned over to general warehousing. Among the commodities stored were graphite,
raw black chocolate and cane.
In
1943 Glenvilles -appeared (possibly displaced from Deptford) and began
processing oils and fats but closed again at the end of the war. In 1944 a V1
flying bomb landed on the foreshore near to the Sea Witch. The pub was
destroyed along with the company laboratory and offices and most of the
riverside buildings of Morden Wharf. The
company was able to use lab facilities at the Molassine works, just north of
Morden Wharf and carried on with plenty of minor blast damage to attend to.
INTERLUDE TWO
The
war ended with the landscape changed considerably as the 1953OS shows: the
riverside was largely in ruins, the terrace of houses by the site entrance
demolished and areas of spare land with road access given to prefab housing. Idenden
Cottages were still standing. The ownership of land at the south of the site
now appears from the map to be ambiguous. Was it still Tunnel’s? If so, had
they sub-leased it to the Council. This is a question still to be answered.
What had not changed was the basic internal layout of the Tunnel site.
Molassine continued and the housing on the other side of Tunnel Avenue also
remained for the time being unchanged. Two years later, in 1955, the brick warehouse on the south side of
Morden Wharf Road was built, incorporating space for a barge repair yard (or,
at least, its equipment and materials storage) at the river end where the
riverside path cut through the building. Also around this time the warehouse on
the north side of Morden Wharf Road was rebuilt.
PART
THREE: TUNNEL REFINERIES REVIVAL AND DECLINE
With war over, the call for tungsten gone,
the Ministry contract for Glenville’s fats lost, and workers coming home, there
was an urgent need for the company to find something to do. The answer was to
go back to producing glucose from starch. Aalst once again supplied but further
supplies were needed and these were of doubtful quality, so the glucose too was
of doubtful quality. The company was now in a very awkward situation with
clients not accepting their quality and so leaving. Further to that the long
hard winter of 1946-7 saw much frost damage to pipework. Improvisation was
needed again to make good deteriorated and damaged equipment. One small
modernisation was the extension of the gatekeeper’s cottage to include a
bathroom.
A second hand boiler was bought, additional
to those already in use and so power made more reliable, just in time for a new
venture, dextrose production for medicinal purposes. More new equipment was installed and 24hour production
begun. The demand was great.
Then Edward Ummen died. After a brief period
of senior staff filling in, Lucien Wigdor was appointed manager. His early
message to the work force was bleak. Despite the success of the dextrose, the
company was in a bad way and much effort was going to be needed to save it. The
effort was made; Wigdor’s addresses to the company became slowly more cheerful.
I have little information on the 1950s except
that in 1951 new offices were built at the riverside (these, with extensions
survived to the last) and in 1957 there were two major events. First the
company abandoned importing starch and equipped itself for milling its own from
maize. Secondly, the Belgians formed a liaison with the American Company, A E
Staley of Decatur, Illinois. I am not sure whether that was, at this stage,
just a working arrangement or a full amalgamation, but Glucoseries Reunies was
renamed Amylum and the Staley recipe for a high sugar content syrup, Sweetose,
was granted to Tunnel Glucose as a subsidiary of Amylum. By 1973 the Tunnel
directors were two each from UK, Belgium (both Callebauts) and the USA. At this
time, 1950s, too, the Glenvilles company was revived and began producing
custard powder.
At some point Lucien Wigdor rose from works
manager to Managing Director and it is his time in the top job that defines the
era best documented by the company magazines I have seen and the memories of
Tunnel workers I have talked to.
What
has been a fairly slow evolving story up to now, speeds up a lot and the shape
of the works changes constantly. The 1957 turn to milling their own maize meant
that silos had to be built to store it. These first silos were on land close to
the jetty. By the mid 60s suction
gear had been installed and American maize was offloaded either from coasters
which had picked up a cargo from big bulk carriers at Rotterdam, or from
lighters trans-shipping from smaller bulk carriers docking at Tilbury. The
coasters moored across the end of the L-shaped jetty and the lighters snugged
in at the side. A conveying system was installed carrying grain from the silo
to the steeps, themselves renewed. I am not sure whether the preference for
American grain reflected the influence of Staley or whether it simply was the
best. Photos taken from the house magazine show that first silo and the
delivery of a new vat in the mid 1960s.
In
1965 the site was briefly flooded. This was not due to particularly exceptional
river conditions, though the tide was very high. It seems that the site had
been un-troubled in 1928 and 1956 but this time building works for extending
the office / laboratory block caused a weakness in the river wall and it gave
way. All hands were necessarily turned to building sand bag walls, clearing up
and chivalry (a photo in the house journal shows
a woman being carried across the waters). The house cartoonist commented with a
drawing showing an unpopular supervisor being submerged.
A liaison with a Dutch company, Avebe, began
in 1967. They produced modified potato starch for textile and paper industries,
something Tunnel had only edged into and so Tunnel Avebe was born. They were
perhaps a little mysterious as one interviewee is convinced they were producing
junk food. What effect their presence had on the layout of the works I don’t
know, though developments in the late 1960s were particularly intense across the
whole site.
It should, though be pointed out that in the
late 60s the site entrance remained off Morden Wharf Road and between the works
and Tunnel Avenue there remained a small enclave which may have been, earlier,
the site of the manganese refinery and was now occupied by Williams, steel
stock-holders. In 1969 the curved building which came to dominate the road end
of the site was completed to designs by Dennis & Partners of Wimpole Street
for Glenville’s. The curve which seemed so excitingly modernist was a
straightforward response to the turning of lorries in at the entrance off
Morden Wharf Road.
The production process started at the top of
the building with tanks of starch and filtered under gravity down through the
stages of conversion. Temporary buildings were erected at the southern end of
the site, next to the river, for Glenville’s production of instant milk. During
the 1970s the Williams land and the site
of the newly demolished Idenden Cottages were acquired and the administration
and canteen block completed to designs by the Brunton Boobyer Partnership of
Greenwich, with the car park occupying the Idenden site.
In 1970 a new Mill House was built but I am
not sure where. What did have some effect was
entry into the Common Market in 1973 and the (almost certainly)
consequent turn from American maize to French, which has been thought to be
relatively inferior. With a new mill house and an ever-increasing number of
products, the demand for maize was increasing so, at some time around now (and
I still can’t get a definitive date) the great off-shore silos were built and
with them new and extended suction gantries for faster off-loading. They could
shift 100tons per hour. They had a dramatic effect on the wider scenery of the
river frontage and the new gantries were not only effective but splendidly
framed views across the river.
The
next couple of years saw a further expansion of the maize grind and the
construction of a new plant for producing Isosweet, a high fructose glucose
syrup, which adds to the certainty that the silos were now in use.
At
this period the plant employed around 400 people and there were nearly always additional
contractors on site as there was always a new plant under construction or an old
being pulled down. Despite this, the core of the old soap works survived to the
end and the company retained, on the whole, a family character. There were a
few small strikes at the end of the 60s both in the plant and among the grain
gangs, probably due to rather clumsy management of redundancies, but these were
rare. The Callebauts had, after all, pioneered works pensions in Belgium and Mr
Wigdor had made good relations and mutual support an item of faith. The firm
paid well, too. To some extent it probably needed to, to compensate for hostile
working conditions; the heat in the plant could be ferocious, workers needing
salt drinks and it being rumoured that diabetics were so at risk from
atmospheric sugar that they could not be employed.
In
1982 dual processing of maize and wheat for starch was commenced. The plant was
the first of its kind in the UK. Common Market guarantees on cereal prices and
increased costs of American maize pushed the company towards wheat as a source.
Eventually despite the lesser purity of wheat-derived starch, maize was no
longer used and the silos fell out of use as wheat was brought in by lorry from
the company’s own mill in Suffolk.
I am not sure when the company acquired a lease on the Molassine site to the
north beyond Morden Wharf Road or began using the brick warehouses, which
others had built in the 1950s, for their own storage, but the waste water
treatment plant on the far northern edge of that site was put into
operation in 1988 and the production of
grain neutral alcohol began at the new plant in the centre of that site in
1992. This was, initially, a joint venture with a Scottish distiller but became
independent of them in 1994. This was the first all-new distillation plant in
London since the Beefeater in 1908. Alcohol was sold on to drinks manufacturers
including London’s last remaining gin distillers in Kennington. This brings the
development of the site to its maximum extent, the south part being extremely
crowded and the northern part more expansive. The history of land and leases
acquired and their eventual clarification into one big lease for the whole
operative site at its fullest extent is complex, only approaching a resolution
in 1995.
From
1957, the works has undergone several changes of ownership with effects on the
nature of the local company, as it became an ever smaller and less valued part
of an ever larger whole. In 1976 Tate & Lyle bought in, taking a one-third
share, leaving Amylum and Staley also with one-third shares. In 1988 Tate &
Lyle bought Staley, so gaining a two-thirds share in the company, but having
only 50% voting rights. Pierre Callebaut remained in charge of the Amylum
factories. This may account for the continued good opinion of the company held
by the people I have spoken to.
Latterly, a degree of corporate indifference may have crept into staff
relations but nothing to compare with T & L’s union busting activities in Illinois
which caused workers to protest, strike, and get locked out. The confrontation
lasted from 1992 to 1995 and the workers lost.
In
2000 T&L took over Amylum. They seem to have been little interested in
Tunnel or in the locality. Amylum had been keenly interested in the locality: in
1992 they were among the
founders of the Greenwich Waterfront Development Partnership (a partnership of
business and community interests for area regeneration) and undertook
improvements along their boundary to the river. These included two garden areas
and improvements to the Primrose Pier, opened as a public amenity.
In
2007 Syral, a subsidiary of a French conglomerate Tereos (itself with a history dating back to
1932) bought five T&L sites including both Tunnel and Aalst. In 2009 they
closed Tunnel citing logistical problems associated with an inner London
.location and an over-provision of starch and glucose production in the group.
The
layout of the factory at the close is given by an Amylum plan from five years
earlier. Not everything is
identified, only the major processing plants. From the walk round the site just
before closure some other buildings could be identified particularly the
admin/canteen building, laboratory and maintenance buildings and the
warehouses. Buildings surviving from the soap works are heavily outlined. The
oldest of them was redundant, unlit within, filled with props and with detritus
scattered on the floor. It seemed advisable not to enter. For the rest the site
appeared clean if a little run down in places. We were told that the effluent
treatment plant had been malfunctioning for some time.
POSTLUDE
Now
the site is cleared; only the administration block and the brick warehouses on
Morden Wharf Road still stand together with one of the tanks of the effluent
treatment plant. The rest is flattened and compacted ground. The riverside
scene is now much quieter, the drama has gone and further de-industrialisation
is very likely under the Core Strategy being devised by Greenwich Council
planners. The developer Cathedral Group has now taken a lease on the site and
the recently published master-plan for the area suggests the, to my mind
somewhat improbable, location of an open air event arena on the northern part
of it. Wait and watch.
PHOTOS
There
are relevant historic photos to be found in the Greenwich Heritage Centre and I
have a number of my own taken in recent years and falling into three groups:
-
six dating from
2007 to 2009;
-
eleven of those
taken on 24th September 2009 when, together with a small group of
industrial historians and a photographer, I visited the site just before
demolition commenced;
-
and nine images
of the later stages in the disappearance of the works taken from April to
September 2010.
A
small selection from these is also with the Heritage Centre.
1.
2007/01/BW/35/19 January 2007 Syral shore from IoD: Grain silos &
starch plant
2. 2008/20/BW/35/32 Sept
2008 Syral skyline from near
dome
3. 2007/16/BW/35/28 August
2007 Alcohol and effluent
plants
4. 2009/11/BW/35/28 July
2009 Grain gear and Maritime
Greenwich
5. 2008/20/BW/35/19 Sept
2008 Site entrance from Tunnel
Avenue
6. 2008/20/BW/35/22 Sept
2008 View into main site road
7. 2009/21/BW/35/4 Sept
2009 Main site road, starch
dryer, grain silos
8. 2009/21/BW/35/17 Sept
2009 View back from starch
dryer to Syrup refinery no1
9. 2009/21/BW/35/10 Sept
2009 Old steep tank bases
(1960s)
10.
2009/24/BW/35/4 Sept 2009
South wall of ex-soap works building
11.
2009/20/BW/XP/12 Sept 2009
The ‘back road’
12.
2009/21/BW/35/31 Sept 2009
Open batch syrup tank
13 2009/20/BW/XP/13 Sept
2009 Tanks and grain silos
14.
2009/22/BW/35/15 Sept 2009
Alcohol distillation plant
15.
2009/22/BW/35/17 Sept 2009
Distillation plant detail
16.
2009/23/BW/XP/4 Sept 2009
Emptied enzyme tanks
17. 2009/20/BW/XP/17 Sept
2009 Clean-up vehicle seen from
above
syrup
refinery no 1
18.
2010/01/BW/XP/1 April 2010
Demolitions at entrance
19.
2010/05/BW/35/27 July 2010
Sheerlegs lifting a tank
20.
2010/05/BW/35/33 July 2010
Inspecting a tank
21.
2010/09/BW/35/14 July 2010
Demolition equipment at entrance
22.
2010/11/BW/35/10 August 2010
Silos from entrance
23.
2010/12/BW/XP/11 August 2010
Silos from river path
24.
2010/12/BW/XP/9 August 2010
Silos from foreshore
25.
2010/14/BW/35/7 August 2010
Silos from IoD
26.
2010/17/BW/35/26 Sept 2010
Flattening the site; Maritime Greenwich
