Chapter 1: Central Riverside Area
CHAPTER 1 Central Riverside Area The riverside between the former naval dockyard and the the 1830s with Beresford Street, where there has been a Arsenal stretching back to the High Street is where settle- peculiar mix of buildings. Notable among these are three ment began more than 2,000 years ago, on firm and fer- that have gone – Holy Trinity Church, the Empire Theatre tile Thanet-sand beds along the edge of the Thames and and the Autostacker. between expanses of marshland. Here was the Iron Age fort or oppidum. On a spur of higher ground immediately to the south-west perched the medieval parish church. Its Early industry and institutions successor of the 1730s is slightly further inland – a retreat from erosion, yet still prominent. Below, where the early town stood, antiquity is absent and even remnants of the The military-industrial sites that preceded and stood area’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century faces are scarce. between the naval dockyard and the Arsenal have received Old Woolwich has been blasted. This is partly because little attention, though lands here were in state use from industry has been a major presence, and at a large scale, the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. On the riverside, since at least the sixteenth century. A single wharf, just east immediately east of Bell Water Gate, was Gun Wharf of Bell Water Gate and lately a car park, saw the origins of and, to its south-east along the line that is now Beresford both the naval dockyard and the Arsenal in the sixteenth Street, was the Woolwich Ropeyard.
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