Mary Mills – Southwark News

The fight to keep the historic river walk open from Deptford all way to the boundary with Bexley

Mary Mills — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 12:54:42 +0000

I see that the Royal Borough of Greenwich has a consultation out about what people feel about the Riverside Path. I’m not sure how ethical it is for me to put my fairly detailed research about the path into the public arena at this stage, but I can’t really see why not. Of course, the […]

The Old Kent Road kid who rose to great heights in gas

Mary Mills — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 10:19:10 +0000

A gas works does not seem to be the best place for a child to grow up in. But George Livesey always remembered his childhood in the Old Kent Road with affection and had happy memories of the gas works as his first playground. George Livesey was the d... This is premium content for subscribers […]

A history of Penn’s engineering works and the early vehicles made in Blackheath Road

Mary Mills — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 11:51:43 +0000

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve written articles about various steam road vehicles which passed through or originated in Greenwich and the surrounding area, writes historian Mary Mills… Some of these were for individual transport and others were for a number of people and both were based on the sort of horse-drawn vehicle which […]

Making Merry: Merryweather & Sons steam powered trams

Mary Mills — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 16:11:23 +0000

In the past five articles I’ve been talking about manufacturers and experimenters with mechanically driven road transport in Greenwich in the 19th century, writes historian Mary Mills. The majority of these vehicles were steam powered and most seem to have replicated private coaches and carriages with some experiments with making public service vehicles. Last week […]

Getting up Shooter’s Hill under their own steam (or gas)

Mary Mills — Mon, 09 Jan 2023 13:39:19 +0000

Nineteenth century Greenwich was home to any number of innovative engineers – with a reputation for skilled metal working. Most famous are the armaments made in the Royal Arsenal and the steam engines made at establishments like Penn’s on Blackheath Hill, but also there were many smaller firms. It was also an area where experiments […]

William Jones and his locomotives

Mary Mills — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 15:10:50 +0000

I was wondering what to write about this week so I picked up a pin and chose a firm at random from John Smith’s History of Charlton. What came up was A.C.E. Holdings who were in Westmoor Street and made various sorts of machinery. I couldn’t really get to grips with them apart from finding […]

Harveys’ vast ambition

Mary Mills — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 20:34:52 +0000

You must be thinking that I will never finish writing articles about Harveys. This will be article No.4 and I’ve never written up one of these local companies before which has run to 4 episodes. However, I thought I needed to do one more article to say what happened to them and their huge factory […]

Driving a distillation column across the country

Mary Mills — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 11:42:35 +0000

Well, I left you last week with an article which was Part 2 of my account of G.A. Harvey’s Greenwich Metal Works in Charlton. At the end I suggested – as a sort of homework – that you watch a short film on YouTube called ‘Dodging the Column’. Did any of you see it? I […]