Woolwich, Kent
Historical Description
Woolwich, a parliamentary borough, a garrison and union town, and a parish in Kent. It was within the parliamentary borough of Greenwich until the Redistribution of Seats Act of 1885, when it was made a separate borough, comprising the parishes of Woolwich, Eitham, and Plumstead, and is now, under the provisions of the Local Government Act of 1888, included within the county of London for municipal purposes. The town stands on the river Thames, with stations on the S.E.R., 8 miles E by S of London Bridge. It was anciently called Hulviz, Wiewic, Wollewic, and Wulewiche; belonged in the time of the Confessor to William the Fowler, at Domesday to Haimo the sheriff; and passed to Gilbert de Marisco, the Bohuns, the Pulteneys, the Gilbournes, the Bowaters, and others. It was only a poor fishing village till the time of Henry VIII., acquired then a royal dockyard, became speedily famous for the construction of great ships of war, rose to further importance in 1716 by the establishment at it of a royal arsenal, and became the place of the " mother-dock of England," and of the only arsenal in the kingdom, the similar establishments elsewhere being called gun-wharfs. It is a seat of county courts, publishes three weekly newspapers, is practically identical with the main body of Woolwich parish, or all of it on the S side of the Thames, and extends nearly 2 miles along the river, and about half a mile inland to the brow of Shooters Hill. It includes a spacious level plateau called Woolwich Common, used for exercising troops; comprises a principal street running parallel to the river, and lesser streets crossing this at right angles; has undergone great improvement, by reconstructions, by new erections, and by drainage into the southern metropolitan outfall sewer; and has a post office, three banks, several chief inns, a police station, a town-hall, public baths and lecture-hall, a theatre, a royal military academy, two endowed schools, several other public schools, a great military hospital, almshouses founded in 1562, a cottage hospital, and some general charities.
The Royal Dockyard extended about a mile. It was closed by the Government in 1869, and is now used as officers' quarters and store departments. The Royal Arsenal includes gun factories for building up, boring, and drilling pieces of ordnance; a carriage department for making gun-carriages, pontoon-trains, baggage waggons, and ambulances; a laboratory for making all kinds of ammunition; and a store department of vast extent, containing projectiles for all guns used in the united service, and a vast amount of entrenching tools, gun-carriages, ambulances, saddlery, and other articles for the service of the army and the navy. A large torpedo factory has been erected and fitted up for the production of this modern implement of naval warfare. The Royal Artillery Barracks stand on the top of the hill facing the common, present a frontage of nearly a quarter of a mile long, contain accommodation for nearly 4000 men and stabling for 1000 horses, and include a riding school, a scientific institution, a military hospital, a small observatory, a mortar and howitzer battery for flagstaff practice, a military repository, a garrison chapel, and a museum. The Royal Marine Barracks (now used as an infantry barracks and depot of Ordnance Store Corps) stand on the slope of a hill, in the ascent from the dockyard to the common, are spacious and well ventilated, and have accommodation for a battalion. The Naval and Marine Hospital stands on an eminence contiguous to the marine barracks, and consists of eight pavilions, connected by a corridor 447 feet long and 13 wide. The Herbert Military Hospital stands on Kidbrook Common. It was completed in 1866 at a cost of about £250,000, and consists of eight pavilions, one of them standing at right angles to the rest, and serving as the entrance and the architectural front, and contains 620 beds for general patients and 28 for prisoners. The Royal Military Academy was built in 1805, educates cadets for the artillery and the engineers, has on the average about 200 in attendance, had among its professors Simpson, Hutton, and Gregory, and numbered among its students the late Prince Imperial of France, to whose memory a marble stetue has been erected on the green. A monument was erected in 1882 to the memory of the officers and men of the Royal Artillery who fell in the Zulu and Afghan wars in 1879 and 1880. St Mary's Church was rebuilt in 1740, and enlarged and restored at a cost of £5000 in 1894. It stands on an eminence overhanging the river, the churchyard being laid out as a public garden. St John's was built in 1848. St Thomas' was built in 1850. Trinity Church is plain but spacious. St Michael and All Angels' Church was built in 1879, and is in the Early English style. The garrison church was built in 1863 at a cost of about £16,000, and is in a variety of the Lombardic style. There are a Roman Catholic and fifteen dissenting chapels. The Marine Society's ship Warspife, lying off Woolwich, is for training boys for the royal navy and merchant service, and contains about 300 boys. The ferry across the river to North Woolwich was opened in 1889 by Lord Rosebery, and was the first free ferry established on the Thames. The parish is governed by a local board of twenty-one members, and was specially excepted at the time of the passing of the London Vestries Act. Population of the parish, 40,848; of the parliamentary borough, 98,966.
Administration
The following is a list of the administrative units in which this place was either wholly or partly included.
Ancient County | Kent | |
Ecclesiastical parish | Woolwich St. Mary Magdalene | |
Hundred | Blackheath | |
Lathe | Sutton-at-Hone | |
Poor Law union | Greenwich |
Any dates in this table should be used as a guide only.
Directories & Gazetteers
We have transcribed the entry for Woolwich from the following:
- Samuel Lewis' A Topographical Dictionary of England, by Samuel Lewis, seventh edition, published 1858. (Woolwich (St. Mary Magdalene))
Maps
Online maps of Woolwich are available from a number of sites:
- Bing (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- Google Streetview.
- National Library of Scotland. (Old maps)
- OpenStreetMap.
- old-maps.co.uk (Old Ordnance Survey maps to buy).
- Streetmap.co.uk (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- A Vision of Britain through Time. (Old maps)
Newspapers and Periodicals
The British Newspaper Archive have fully searchable digitised copies of the following Kent newspapers online:
- Kent & Sussex Courier
- Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald
- Dover Express
- Kentish Gazette
- Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgate & Cheriton Herald
- Kentish Chronicle
- Maidstone Telegraph
Visitations Heraldic
The Visitation of Kent, 1619 is available on the Heraldry page, as is also The Visitation of Kent, 1663-68.