Lost London: Walking the River Peck Part 3: Identity Crises
Near the junction of Silwood Street and Eugenia Road, where Bermondsey, Rotherhithe and Deptford meet, and similar convergence happens underground, where the River Peck meets the Earl’s Sluice. Despite its name deriving from its imposed use as a drainage channel, the Earl’s Sluice is another lost London river, rising in Denmark Hill and passing through Camberwell and Bermondsey, before joining with the Peck.
Technically, from this point onwards, the river is properly called the Earl’s Sluice, though it is still often referred to as the Peck. To further this mixed identity, this last stretch down to the Thames has also been known as the Black Ditch. It will probably just be referred to as “the river” here to avoid confusion! (And perhaps one day I shall get around to walking the upstream sections of the Earl’s Sluice.)
The Silwood Estate which the river flows under is a rather generic, early-21st Century south London estate, most of its streets looking frustratingly similar. Both and walker and the river must leave by crossing the East London Line, by footbridge and by large conduit respectively.
On the other side of the tracks, the area known as Surrey Quays (or Canada Water to some deceptive estate agents) has now been reached. The river cuts under and between many of the roads here, so a more meandering route has to be taken to keep on roughly the same course. Traces of the river can be seen first in the form of a stink pipe, and then more obviously with Thames Water’s Earl Pumping Station, which controls the outflow from the culverted waters.
Just beyond this lies the mouth of the river, in the form of the South Dock. This expanse of water was once part of the Surrey Commercial Docks, which started life in the medieval era, reaching their peak in the late 19th Century. Much like the docks on the northern side of the Thames, the Surrey Docks fell into decline after the Second World War, closing in 1969, and left derelict and without purpose. Many of them were filled in during the 1970s, though South Dock and its larger neighbour, Greenland Dock, both survived, and are now surrounded by flats, with their waters occupied by houseboats or used for leisure activities. They are decidedly more tranquil now than they would have been in their heyday.
The South Dock lock gates mark a clear point where the Earl’s Sluice meets the Thames – a snap change from the tributary to the main river. The clearer waters of the dock sit on one side, the silty brown waters of the Thames on the other.
