Deptford

A historic Thames-side settlement, situated west of Greenwich. Its name is a corruption of ‘deep ford’. In The Spirit of London’s River, LM Bates says of Deptford waterfront “This was the ground from which, more than any other, grew the British Empire.” Henry VIII founded a naval dockyard here in 1513 and within a century Deptford had become one of the country’s leading ports and a major industrial suburb. Many of the greatest figures of sixteenth and seventeenth century English history had associations with Deptford. In 1577 Francis Drake sailed from Deptford via Plymouth for a three-year circumnavigation of the globe, claiming a portion of present-day California for Elizabeth I . On his return, Drake was knighted by the Queen after she had dined aboard the Golden Hind at Deptford. In 1593 the dramatist Christopher Marlowe was killed here, reputedly in a tavern brawl. Anthony Burgess’s A Dead Man in Deptford is one of the works to suggest a conspiratorial aspect to the affair. The diarist John Evelyn came to Deptford in 1652 to live at Sayes Court, a house belonging to his wife’s family, which he rented to Peter the Great of Russia in 1698 during his visit to learn the art of shipbuilding. Evelyn discovered woodcarver and sculptor Grinling Gibbons toiling in a lowly Deptford workshop and introduced him to Christopher Wren. Gibbons went on to become a master carver under five British sovereigns. Another illustrious diarist, Samuel Pepys, worked in Deptford as an admiralty official. From the closure of the dockyard in 1869 and of the cattle market that replaced it in 1913, through Second World War bombing and postwar industrial decline, Deptford has suffered a long and damaging period of deterioration but it is now the focus of extensive regenerative building, both commercial and residential, from Deptford Bridge in the south to the Pepys estate by the river. Deptford Creek is a planned site for further major riverside developments.