Dig manages to miss Elysium

From the 1650′s onward, the famous gardens at Sayes Court, especially during the summer, received a constant stream of visitors, from the Evelyn family friends to the court elite and royalty. Our own modest tour in my two most recent posts had to omit much detail, and did not include Evelyn’s private garden, or the house itself. There is also still much to tell, as well as some unsolved mysteries, about how the garden evolved over the decades, especially in the 1680′s when Evelyn radically altered the oval garden. How do we know about this? Thanks mostly to John Evelyn’s own writings and plans, but also to the steady trickle of interest and archival research into Sayes Court and Evelyn’s role in the development of science and society in the seventeenth century.  This trickle seems to have grown into something of a torrent since the turn of the millennium. In 2001, for example, there was a well-attended two-day conference at the British Library, “John Evelyn and his milieu”, which gathered together researchers from all over the world. Unbeknownst to me, there was definitely something in the air when I first started wondering about that old mulberry in the park!

John Evelyn by Godfrey Kneller, 1687

Ironically, at the same time as I started to learn about the historical importance of the house and gardens at Sayes Court, proposals had been drawn up to build a horrendous huddle of high rise (up to 40 storeys), high density (3,500 “residential units”)  tower blocks on the site of Convoys Wharf, which now covers Evelyn’s “Elysium” and the adjoining docks of the former King’s Yard. This so-called “development” scheme is blatantly designed to maximise profit for the present owners, Hong-Kong based company Hutchison-Whampoa. If it gets the go-ahead it will be a new low water-mark in social and historical exclusion. The docks have been linked for centuries to the general prosperity of Deptford.  It’s no secret that the area has declined since their closure.  How many local people could afford to buy an apartment  at Convoys Wharf with a starting price of nearly £300,000?  Not only does this proposal threaten to sever the site’s social links with the local community, it also looks set to destroy or bury for ever what remains of its history. Over the past three months, trenches have been excavated all over the site, as a “developer-led” archaeological investigation has been carried out.

Since the dig began in the first week in January, precious little information has been available to the public – still completely barred from the site for so-called “safety reasons”. Finally, just a few days before the end of the dig is due on 9th April, a perfunctory statement has just gone up on the developers’ website.

It seems from this statement that very little remains have been found of either Sayes Court house and gardens, or of the earlier phases of the dockyard. This is at first surprising, considering that earlier evaluations of the site found a lot more evidence.

Overlay of part of the trench plan on the modern landscape

Overlay of part of the trench plan on Evelyn's plan of 1653

However, when you take a closer look at where they’ve sited their trenches, (click on the images to view larger versions) it becomes clear that they’ve actually been digging in the wrong places. Overlaying the plan of their trenches (marked in yellow and numbered in black)  onto Evelyn’s meticulously accurate 1653 map (see earlier posts), and cross-checking them with the modern ground-plan of the warehouses, we see, for example, why their trench no. 29 failed to find the house. It was way off the mark, in completely the wrong area. Less a case, as they claim, of the house having vanished “due to the impact of later development” – than to the trench being situated in an open yard, empty of anything except a row of old elm trees in the seventeenth century, and next-door only to the stables and pig-sty.

Detail of the trench plain overlaid on 1653 plan, showing how the only trench in the vicinity of the house misses it completely

All this smacks of a deliberate misappropriation of the past. Who does this history really belong to -  a cabal of private interests, or the people of Deptford?

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The complete 2010 trench plan overlaid on Google Earth.

The complete excavation trench plan overlaid on the modern landscape can be downloaded from http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/ubbthreads.php?ubb=download&Number=893374&filename=Convoys Wharf trench plan 2010.kmz It will take a moment or two to download, then double click on it to open it in Google Earth (which must already be installed). This will open up the trench plan overlaid onto the modern map of the area.

Select (by clicking once on it) “Convoys Wharf trench plan 2010″ from the menu on the left. By dragging the arrow on the slider below (the one that says “the slider sets the transparency of the overlay”) you can view the trench plan or the modern landscape, and all degrees of transparency in between.

If you don’t have Google Earth, you can download it free at earth.google.co.uk

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