Crayford

Off to Crayford on Sunday to check out Daniel's GLIAS walk in June. (See Glias Newsletter at www.glias.org.uk/) Once Crayford was a busy industrial centre with textile printing and heavy industry at Vickers. Today all trace of Victorian industry had gone with much of the city centre covered in retail parks and industrial estates that are more warehouses than manufacturing. BUT there are traces of what the area once was. The most important feature was the River Cray which rises in Orpington and then joins the Darenth. It supported various industries such as textile printing and tanning. At one time in the long and distant past there was even an iron mill here - there still is an Iron Mill Lane.
We started at the bridge over over the river by Riverside which has now been landscaped. The Cray then wanders off northwards skirting the development of houses which were built for Vickers workers during World War 1. Check out the excellent Ideal Homes website for local history and great pictures. www.ideal-homes.org.uk/index1a.html



This is Green Walk which looks quiite similar today but with lots of cars cluttering the place up.

The Vickers site in the centre of town was lasted until the 1960s. The complex had been started by Hiram Maxim who manufactured his machine gun here. Later once Vickers was in charge, Crayford built the Vickers Vimy bomber, the plane in which Alcock and Brown crossed the Atlantic in 1919. Various anonymous industrial buildings remain at the back of the site close to the river but its difficult to know now what they were used for.

Perhaps the most obvious industrial building to remain is the clock tower built in 1902 to commemorate the coronation of Edward VII which also housed a sewage lift pump! The view below was taken in 1955 and shows both the tower and the works.