Talk:Mudchute Park and Farm

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Dumping ground for excavated material when the Millwall Docks were first built?

I understood that the Mudchute was used for the initial excavation of the Millwall Docks, not just later dredging of them, which would presumably be taken by barge out to be dumped at a deep spot in the estuary, as it still is today. The vast size of the Mudchute was because the area excavated to form the docks to the west was very marshy (as was the whole peninsula, though it does seem to have been used as grazing). The solution was to build an earth bund around a large enough area, then move the mud they were excavating along a conveyor and finally shoot it [as in shooting dice] down a chute into the "reservoir", where over many decades the water evaporated and the level fell (London clay shrinks considerably when desiccated) leaving the present flat surface well below the level of the bund (by about 2 m IIRC). However, although it was fenced off, for some decades there were drownings when trespassers fell through the crust into quicksand (?quick clay). [1]

I forget where I read all that -- it may have been an internal LDDC document about 40 years ago. However, this blog [2] by someone who was brought up in the area supports what our article says now, and it may well be that his research was better than that of whoever wrote the LDDC document, so I only flag it as something for people to watch out for, in case there is any available reference which backs up what I read. However, the blogger has more support from the Victoria County History of London which has a section on the Mudchute here [3] (starts 60% of the way down). The VCH is variable county by county, but the London section is very good and has also been updated to at least 1980. I have never before found anything wrong in it, but I think they must be wrong here: they claim that the area referred to as the Transporter Yard was never used for dumping mud. However, the height of the land is about 10 m above mean sea level (see borehole data below), and the 1895 map 20% down the blog post at the top of this para shows the same area as "Mud", and lower, while describing the Globe Rope Works, immediately south of the Mudchute, it speaks of the bund fluidising after heavy rain one year and pushing down some of their buildings while several of the old maps in the various references say, written across the whole area things like "seven feet lower than high water mark" (there is about 5 m tidal range at that point of the river, so that still leaves it perhaps 0.5 m above mean sea level).

But there is something else that backs up the version I heard -- modern borehole data appears to me (and although I have some experience of interpreting borehole data, I am not an expert) to show that about 8 m of sludge was dumped on top of the original ground level -- and bear in mind that is the amount left after the water evaporated. And if you look at fig 95, about 70% of the way down this section of the Victoria County History of London [4], you can see the bunded area of the Mudchute (labelled Transporter Yard due to its later use) and it appears to have about ¼ the area of Millwall Dock, suggesting it was the equivalent of dredging 2 m off the bottom of the whole dock. I could understand that it could have been used if there was a decision after opening that it needed to be 2 m deeper so larger ships could enter, but it seems far too much for just ad hoc dredging to remove silt washed in from the river during the relatively short periods the lock was open -- it is not as if it was open to the river 24/7. A dock locked from the river normally needs very little dredging.

And before anyone complains this is "Original Research", yes it is, but I am not suggesting including the results of the research in the article. I am using it to decide that, yes there is something fishy in what is in the article now, so it is worth looking for further documents which might show a different conclusion, so we can quote them. And that is well within the rules.

I haven't been back since, so was amazed to see on Google Maps that there are now trees dividing what used to be a vast flat grassed area, and that it is now surrounded by housing, where previously there were wide vistas of the Thames from on top of the earthen bund. The DLR was not yet open, but most of the viaduct was in place, from a previously closed railway. The bund surrounding it used to be very obvious, but is less easy to see now. You can see it from inside the Mudchute to the north of this photo [5] , and from the outside from a few points along East Ferry Road, though it tends to be masked by the trees. Looking SE in this photo, you can see an entrance path climbing diagonally up the bank, with very shallow steps, which were DDA compliant in the early 80s! [6].

There was one oddity there. I was supposed to survey and record various things, including drainage. I was shown a manhole more or less in the middle of the Mudchute and was told it seemed to be a very deep drain, around 15 m deep. At 15 m, it would have been just shallow enough to have run into one of Bazalgette's intercepting sewers running to Abbey Mills pumping station, but firstly, there is no reason for any drain on the Isle of Dogs to be that deep, and secondly, only an idiot would run a drain under a reservoir of mud when there was much more stable ground only ¼ mile away, so it would have to predate the docks, ie it would have to have been built before 1800 -- decades before Bazalgette, who built the intercepting sewers, was even born, and at a time when, even in central London, sewage was piped straight into the Thames. No one dug deep drains then. Unfortunately, I did not have a torch with me strong enough to illuminate the bottom of the shaft, nor anything long enough to confirm the depth, but fairly clearly it was not a drain but a well, perhaps to serve the allotments which used to be there a few generations back, although the head work looked quite new. I didn't have to record wells, and to enquire would have required a letter and payment for someone to search the British Geological Survey's comprehensive borehole survey (if you dig a borehole, you are supposed to send them a note of what you found at what depth, and they have very many thousands of records). But now, all that information is searchable for free, so zooming in on their map today, I found a borehole roughly where I remembered it, named TQ37NE536, and clicking through, I found it was one of a set of investigatory boreholes made by the GLC's in house building design team in 1972, which checks out as the year the PLA began to negotiate to sell it to the GLC. Presumably, they'd filled in all the rest, but lined this one to make a well should one be needed. Looking at the materials brought up, I could see that the ground level when they dug it was 9.24 m above mean sea level; the top 7.9 m looked like what would have been excavated out of the dock, so the original ground level would have been 1.3 m above mean sea level, which fits with descriptions of the peninsula before the docks were built -- marshy. A map of c1850, on this page [7] shows the whole area as "Marshes Below the level of the Thames at High Water". Below that was 3.7 m of impermeable clay, followed by 4.9 m of permeable material, mainly sand and gravel, and 1.8 m of not-very permeable sandy clay, at which point they stopped boring. So the permeable layer was 11.6 - 16.5 m below ground, so about 2.4 - 7.4 m below mean sea level. When they stopped pumping it out, the water level settled at 10.0 m below ground, so about 0.76 m below mean sea level. It is quite common to find shallow sandy beds in East London, which can provide a reasonable amount of poor quality water, adequate quality for watering crops or gardens provided it is not too brackish, but definitely not potable -- you need to bore much deeper to the chalk to get good year-round drinking water. As expected, they found similar levels in all the other boreholes, showing that, as indicated in old documents, the whole area had been marshy, and nothing had disturbed the geology beneath. [8] Before the docks were built, there were only two houses in the whole area: a big house, Chapel House Farm (on the site of a derelict chapel), on a slightly higher part which being the only part above water at high tide was the original "Isle of Dogs", before the name was applied to the whole area once sea walls were built. And there was a ferryman's house on the S of the "isle" near where the Greenwich Foot Tunnel under the Thames is now -- that was built in 1902 because the ferry was "expensive and sometimes unreliable". Enginear (talk) 07:41, 18 January 2023 (UTC)