Riverway - as was

These two pictures are of the area around The Pilot Pub.  

photo R.Carr

The upper of the two photographs is  from May 1980 and is looking from Blackwall Lane eastwards from a point which is probably around what is now Old School Close.

In the picture is a street name sign which says 'River Way'. The Pilot Pub now stands in a sort of courtyard which is, still, called 'Riverway'.  At the time the picture was taken this was a road which went from this junction with Blackwall Lane (now part of Millennium Way) above to the riverside where there was a long causeway into the river - which you could walk along out into the river. 

What we are looking at is the last gasp - if that's the right word  - of East Greenwich gas works - the Stage II Hydrocarbon Reforming Plant (lean gas - CV 310 -320 Btu) with Stage IV CRG catalytic rich gas - CV 650 Btu).  This closed around 1980.

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photo R.Carr

The German photographer Manfred Hamm at work, East Greenwich May 1980.

The photograph above is taken from outside the Pilot looking towards what is now West Parkside. The photographer is facing a railway bridge. Behind the railway line is the Hydrocarbon Reforming Plant - by then probably out of use.  The line is on an embankment and which came into the gas works from the Angerstein Branch Railway at a a junction in Horn Lane. The elevated building is a signal cabin.

Although this branch of the railway went into the gas works it is understood that it was not used very much.  Coal came into the works by boat at a huge jetty on the site of the QE Pier. The railway seems to have been used mainly for byproducts leaving the works.  Perhaps someone who worked there can tell us if this is so.  

The railway line remained while the Dome was being built in the 1990s but, rather than trains, it was used as a road for lorries going in and out of the site.