Deptford Station

Deptford is the oldest railway station in London. It is located in Deptford, London Borough of Lewisham, on the North Kent Line, about three miles from London Bridge station. The staggered platforms are on a high brick viaduct on which this line runs at this point, above High Street, Deptford.

Deptford Bridge, Deptford High Street looking North.

As it was then. St Pauls in the background

As it is today.

An Unknown Door In Albury Street

Another Drawing of Albury Street looking west by Geoffrey Fletcher 1975

First Door on the right No 29 Nan's House! At the end you can just make out the Electric Palace Theatre. When we were kids we use to get out of the dormer windows in the upper right side of the picture. Always in trouble we were. What this picture doesn't show is the lamp post which was outside the front door.

View of Evelyn Street 1890's

Building Layout Change from Union St to Albury Street

A

B

These two plan drawings show the different building/street layout from Union St. in the late 1890's to Albury St thereafter. In plan A the location of the Albany Institute can be seen at the East end next door the the Kings Head Public House situated on the corner of Church St. At the West end you can also see the Public House which was the King of Prussia pub once owned and run by John Gast. (See below) In plan B center bottom, you can see a building with a cross on it. Anyone who knows what this building was I would like to hear from you. I can remember the gap in this area as shown in plan A. Opposite the Albany Institute was a Hall. Can any one shed any light on this building?

John Gast (1772-1837) was a shipwright by trade who worked in the Deptford shipyards in south-east London (though he was also associated with neighbouring Rotherhithe, where he lived for a time at 14 Lucas Street), and an early trade unionist.Having unsuccessfully tried to found a labour organisation during the 1790s, he helped organise the 'Hearts of Oak Benefit Society' during a shipwrights' strike in 1802 and was advocating workers' rights in radical pamphlets such as Calumny Defeated, or A Complete Vindication of the Conduct of the Working Shipwrights, during the late Disputes with their Employers (1802). Having been involved with regional efforts to build trade unions (notably the Metropolitan Trades Committee), in 1822 Gast formed a 'Committee of the Useful Classes', sometimes described as an early national trades council, and in 1824 he was the first secretary of the 'Thames Shipwrights Provident Union'. Gast also promoted an inter-union organisation: 'The Philanthropic Hercules'. In 1825, the Combination Acts were repealed. Employers were furious and lobbied for the Acts’ restoration, prompting the emergence of workers' movements to resist such steps; Gast founded the first Trades Newspaper as part of this resistance. In 1836, Gast was a member of the London Working Men's Association, some of whose members drafted the core six points of the People's Charter (the principles at the heart of the Chartist movement).

He was also a dissenting preacher and ran the King of Prussia public house at 6 Union Street (now Albury Street), Deptford.