Woolwich Dockyard (formally H.M. Dockyard, Woolwich, also known as The King's Yard, Woolwich) was an English naval dockyard along the river Thames at Woolwich—originally in north-west Kent, now in southeast London—where many ships were built from the early 16th century until the late 19th century. William Camden called it 'the Mother Dock of all England'. By virtue of the size and quantity of vessels built there, Woolwich Dockyard is described as having been 'among the most important shipyards of seventeenth-century Europe'. During the Age of Sail, the yard continued to be used for shipbuilding and repair work more or less consistently; in the 1830s a specialist factory within the dockyard oversaw the introduction of steam power for ships of the Royal Navy. At its largest extent it filled a 56-acre site north of Woolwich Church Street, between Warspite Road and New Ferry Approach; 19th-century naval vessels were fast outgrowing the yard, however, and it eventually closed in 1869 (though a large part of the site remained in military hands for a further century). The former dockyard area is now partly residential, partly industrial, with remnants of its historic past having been restored.
History
Origins
Woolwich Dockyard was founded by King Henry VIII in 1512 to build the new flagship of the Tudor navy, Henri Grâce à Dieu , the largest ship in the world when she was launched.Woolwich, Encyclopædia Britannica Online Library Edition, 2010 The ship was built in Old Woolwich, which is where the dockyard was initially established: past Bell Water Gate, east of the area later known as Woolwich Dockyard. The site consisted of one or more rudimentary dry docks, a long storehouse (for canvas, rigging and other materials) and a small assortment of other buildings. Like its counterpart Deptford Dockyard, Woolwich was probably chosen for its position – on the south bank of the tidal River Thames conveniently close to Henry's palace at Greenwich – and for its proximity to deep water.
Several other ships were built here after Henri Grâce à Dieu, but in the 1520s shipbuilding appears to have ceased (the site may have been prone to flooding, a problem that caused the closure of another Royal Dockyard further downstream in Erith at around this time). By 1540, however, the royal shipwrights had begun operating on higher ground further to the west at what was to become the permanent site of the Dockyard, where a pair of dry docks (already in situ and known as "Boughton's Docks") formed the centre of operations. The site was purchased by the Crown in 1546 and in the second half of the century several sizeable ships were built there. The yard was also used for heavy repair work.
Early history
The two dry docks were rebuilt in the early 17th century (the first of several rebuildings) and the western dock was expanded, enabling it to accommodate two ships, end to end. In the years that followed, the dockyard was expanded; its facilities included slipways for shipbuilding, timber yards, saw pits, cranes, forges, a mast house and several storehouses. There were also houses on site for the senior officers of the yard. A clock house was built in 1670 (containing a mould loft for drawing up full-scale ship designs) and in 1698 a palatial Great Storehouse was erected. Apart from the brick-built mast house and Great Storehouse, the buildings were almost entirely of timber construction.
The Gun Wharf
As at other Royal Dockyards, the Ordnance Office maintained a Gun Wharf at Woolwich for storage and provision of guns and ammunition for the ships based there. The Gun Wharf was sited east of Bell Water Gate (where there is now a car park next to the Waterfront Leisure Centre). It was here that Woolwich Dockyard had been founded in 1512 and the Great Harry was built in 1515; when the dockyard had moved to its new, permanent site in the 1540s, the old wharf, crane and storehouse had been given over to storage of heavy ordnance and other items. Gun carriage repair was also undertaken on site. Later, use of the Gun Wharf was shared with the nearby Royal Ropeyard, which maintained a storehouse there for hemp and other materials. The wharf and its buildings were improved and rebuilt at regular points through the 16th and 17th centuries; as late as 1664 a large new brick storehouse was provided "to lodge ships' carriages in".
The wharf was still subject to frequent flooding, however, and from the 1650s the Board of Ordnance began to make use of open land at Tower Place, to the east of the Gun Wharf, as a site for proving and storing cannons and other large guns. Known as 'The Warren', this was the beginning of what would later become the Woolwich Royal Arsenal. The Ordnance Office withdrew from Gun Wharf in 1671, but the Ropeyard continued to make use of the wharf and its associated storehouses into the 19th century.
The Ropeyard
In the 1570s the Crown established a naval Ropeyard in Woolwich, one of the largest in the world at the time. Too long to fit within the confines of the Dockyard, its parallel sheds lay along the line of present-day Beresford Street. As first built it consisted of a 600 ft 'cable house' along with a series of sheds accommodating different parts of the rope-making process. In 1695–1697 the ropeyard was largely rebuilt, under the supervision of Edmund Dummer; by the end of the century it included a double-ropewalk, 1061 ft long, a parallel single-ropewalk of similar length, a brick storehouse with a clock tower, houses for the yard's senior officers and various other buildings, all enclosed within a perimeter wall topped by watchtowers. Parts of the yard had to be rebuilt after a fire in 1759, and again after another fire in 1813. The ropeyard remained in service until 1832, by which time similar establishments in other Royal Dockyards had begun to come to the fore; the site having been sold in 1833, its buildings were demolished soon afterwards, in 1835.
Second golden age
The fortunes of the yard had waned toward the end of the seventeenth century; in 1688 its work was valued at £9,669, in contrast to nearby Deptford (£15,760), not to mention the (by now much larger) Royal Dockyards at Portsmouth (£35,045), and Chatham (£44,940).Saint & Guillery, The Survey of London vol. 48: Woolwich, Yale, 2012. In the first half of the eighteenth century, however, it gained a renewed momentum: the site doubled in size, as did the workforce, and even in the first decade of the 1700s there were more ships launched from Woolwich than from any other English yard. Many buildings were built (or rebuilt) at this time, now mostly in brick. On newly acquired and reclaimed land to the east, three new slips were built and a new mast pond was created, along with adjacent mast houses and boat sheds; a sizeable rigging house was also built here. Alongside the Great Storehouse an equally large building, housing both a sail loft and a mould loft, was constructed in 1740. Meanwhile, land acquired to the west enabled a new terrace of officers' houses to be built in the early 1750s.
The yard was further expanded westwards in the 1780s, again almost doubling in size. Much of the area of the expanded dockyard was preserved as open ground for storage of timber, with rows of wooden seasoning sheds; as the Navy's ships were growing in size and number, more raw materials were needed across the Royal Dockyards. Two new mast ponds were constructed, replacing a pond at the eastern end of the site which dated from 1720 but was now considered too small (the new ponds and mast houses could accommodate mast lengths of up to ); the old pond, together with its associated buildings, was now given over to the construction and storage of ship's boats. Centrally positioned in the expanded yard, a new clock house was built, containing offices for the various departments of the dockyard, and with it a new main gateway (replacing the old entrance which had been located further to the east).
Later, Shipbuilding continued in earnest during the Napoleonic Wars; but, as ships grew still bigger, the Thames continued to silt up. In 1800 Samuel Bentham, the Inspector-General of Naval Works (who had himself served as an apprentice shipwright at Woolwich in the 1770s) proposed replacing Woolwich, Deptford, Chatham and Sheerness dockyards with a single new facility on the Isle of Grain; but this, (along with other radical proposals) was not pursued. In 1802 a steam-driven bucket dredger was brought into service at Woolwich (prior to this, convicts had been used to dredge the quayside by hand) but still the silting persisted; nevertheless, the yard continued to be developed: in 1814 a large smithery or metal-working factory was added to produce anchors and other iron items. In the 1820s two new covered slips were added (No.1 and No.2 Slips) large enough to accommodate the latest ship designs. The following decade a substantial part of the river wall was rebuilt in brick and the two dry docks were reconstructed in granite in the 1830s–1840s. Alongside the docks a steam-powered saw-mill was provided, a new workshop with steam hammers and a hydraulic chain and cable testing facility.
The Steam Factory and last years of the Dockyard
From 1831, Woolwich found a new lease of life as a specialist yard for marine steam engineering (a relatively new technology which was being developed commercially at nearby Millwall). New buildings were constructed on the site for steam manufacturing and maintenance, including a boiler shop for manufacturing boilers, foundries for brass, copper and iron work, and an erecting shop for assembling the steam engines; by 1843 all were integrated into a single factory complex, with a single large chimney drawing on all the various forges and furnaces by way of underground flues.English Heritage Survey of the Naval Dockyards Integral to the creation of the steam factory was the conversion of two mast ponds (which lay to the north of what is now Ruston Road) into steam basins, where ships could moor alongside the factory while their engines and boilers were fitted. One of these basins was provided with its own dry dock (No. 1 Dock) which, like the basins, was filled in and built over in the 20th century. The factory was part of the dockyard, but had a high degree of independence: it was accessed by its own gate (known as the West Gate or Steam Factory Gate) and overseen by its own official, the Chief Engineer.
Woolwich retained its primacy as the Navy's steam engineering yard through the 1840s, but following the establishment of large-scale steam yards at Portsmouth (1848) and Devonport (1853) it became increasingly redundant, especially as its basins were no longer large enough for the size of ships now being built. Older ships still came to Woolwich for engine repairs and maintenance, but by the end of the Crimean War the steam factory's days were numbered. Surprisingly though, the dockyard had managed to remain active in shipbuilding and its facilities continued to be upgraded and expanded through the 1850s and early 1860s; during that time a new rolling mill and an armour plate shop were built as well as a sizeable new sail loft and rigging store. Ultimately, though, the yard could not keep pace with the emerging needs of the new ironclad warships, and by 1865 it was clear that both Woolwich and Deptford Dockyards were destined for closure.
Administration of the dockyard