One of the saddest sights on Greenwich’s Thames Path is Enderby House, left vandalised and wrecked, neglected by developers who don’t seem to have a clue what to do with it.
This is the site of the long-delayed cruise liner terminal, although much of the action on the site has been to build homes, presumably as quickly as possibly before the property bubble bursts.
Of course, this is also where the world’s first telegraph cables were made, with work still taking part in a small corner of the site. Without Enderby House, there may well have been no phones, and no internet. It’s a hugely-overlooked piece of local history.
The house has been in a mess for over three years – now a group of locals are taking action. Here’s Alan Burkitt-Gray…
“Just wanted to let you know that a bunch of locals have started to campaign for a strategy to protect and preserve Enderby House, the original offices of the company that created the communications revolution — between 1850 and the 1970s the factory there made most of the world’s undersea telegraph and telephone cables.
“The house is now surrounded by a building site, where Barratt is putting up houses and flats. Alcatel-Lucent, the direct successor to the other Telcon company that’s been there continuously since 1850, has shrunk to a corner of the site, though still does submarine-cable related work.
“There is no clear plan for Enderby House, a listed building, and the future of the cable-loading gear that sits on the riverside is also unclear. For more than a century cable made here in Greenwich was loaded directly onto the cable-laying ships on that jetty.”
The group has a website, www.enderby.org.uk, and want as many people as possible to attend a consultation meeting to be held at the Forum on Trafalgar Road on Wednesday 25 June at 6pm (the developers’ PR people seem to try for the most inconvenient times).
It’s also produced a leaflet explaining more about the history of Enderby House and why it should be preserved and celebrated.
The house could be a small museum showing the history of cable-laying. I remember the cable-layers, ‘Monarch’ and ‘Ocean Layer’, loading and setting out.
Good article. I will be at the Forum on the 25th. I walked passed Enderby House on the way home after visiting the Ballast Quay garden on Friday, a wonderful exhibition btw! It would not take much imagination to make the building relevant to the peninsula in the 21st century. Could it be a permanent home to celebrate the industrial heritage or global significance of the peninsula perhaps? There are examples across London how old buildings can be tastefully incorporated into new developments. New and old buildings do not need to be in competition. They can compliment each other.
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Is this where submarine cables were as my father worked there