Enderby's Wharf is a wharf and industrial site on the south bank of the Thames in Greenwich, London, associated with Telcon and other companies. It has a history of more than 150 years of production of submarine communication cables and associated equipment, and is one of the most important sites in the history of submarine communications.
The wharf lies on the Greenwich Peninsula, a little to the north of the historic centre of Greenwich. It is between the Thames and the Blackwall Tunnel approach road, across the river from Cubitt Town. It covers an area of some 16 acres (65,000 m2) and has a frontage of around 600 feet (180 m).
The wharf was first developed commercially by the whaling company of Samuel Enderby & Sons. The site was first acquired by Samuel Enderby II, with Morden College assisting in the acquisition of the naval ammunition wharf. It was Samuel Enderby III who initially developed the site along with brothers Charles and George, who acquired the site for a ropeworks.[ citation needed ] Enderbys also built Enderby House in the early 1830s, which stands today as a listed building among modern housing. [1]
In 1857 submarine cable manufacturers Glass, Elliot & Co and W.T.Henley took over the site; Henleys subsequently moved to North Woolwich. [2] As well as jointly making the short-lived first transatlantic telegraph cable, [1] Glass, Elliot supplied many early telegraph cables including Corsica–Sardinia, Lowestoft–Zandvoort, Malta–Alexandria and Sicily–Algeria. In the 1860s Glass, Elliot and the Gutta Percha Company were absorbed into the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company (Telcon), [4] which manufactured a second transatlantic telegraph cable at Enderby's Wharf. This was successfully laid by the SS Great Eastern. The company went on to manufacture many more transatlantic cables, and others to Australia, New Zealand, India, Hong Kong etc. [5]
In 1935 the site came into the ownership of the newly formed Submarine Cables Ltd. Some of the cross-channel, D-Day Pluto pipeline was made at the wharf in World War II. After ownership by BICC and AEI, in 1970 the company passed to STC. Manufacture of submarine cable at the site ended in 1975 (transferring to Southampton), and work concentrated on manufacture of optical repeaters and amplifiers. It subsequently passed to Northern Telecom and then to Alcatel of France in 1994. [6] In 2006 Alcatel merged with US company Lucent to create Alcatel-Lucent, and the following year their division based at Enderby Wharf was renamed Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks, which became Alcatel Submarine Networks [7] after Alcatel-Lucent was acquired by Nokia in 2016.
Around 2010, a large part of the site was sold to Barratt Developments for a housing estate, called Enderby Wharf. [8] Enderby House, the original office building, was within the Barratt site but stood disused for several years [9] [10] before being developed to become a bar and restaurant, [11] which opened in April 2021.
In 2010 a proposal was made to turn 3 acres (12,000 m2) of the river frontage of the site not in use by Alcatel into a terminal for huge cruise liners, and housing. [12] The proposal (known as 'Enderby Wharf') received planning approval from Greenwich Council in 2011, subject to approval by the Greater London Authority (GLA). [13] Mayor Boris Johnson gave his approval to a revised application for a larger terminal in August 2015. [14]
It was expected that up to 55 large cruise ships would dock there every year. Each would need to run its diesel engines continuously to power onboard facilities, generating large polluting emissions near residential areas and schools. While London has strict regulations on air quality and emissions, they do not apply to the Thames, which is in the jurisdiction of the Port of London Authority (PLA) rather than the GLA. At the London elections in 2016 the Conservative and Labour mayoral candidates joined their Green and Liberal Democrat rivals to support the residents' campaign against the terminal. [15] In 2018 Greenwich council changed its opinion, and called for Morgan Stanley, current owner of Enderby Wharf, to implement a less polluting solution for the cruise terminal. Residents of the area proposed it should be "zero emissions", supporting ships able to use onshore electrical power without the need to run their engines while docked. Some cruise ships already support the use of shore power, while others are being adapted to do so. [16]
In 2019, Morgan Stanley sold the site to Criterion Capital for further housing development. [17]
A submarine communications cable is a cable laid on the seabed between land-based stations to carry telecommunication signals across stretches of ocean and sea. The first submarine communications cables laid beginning in the 1850s carried telegraphy traffic, establishing the first instant telecommunications links between continents, such as the first transatlantic telegraph cable which became operational on 16 August 1858.
Transatlantic telegraph cables were undersea cables running under the Atlantic Ocean for telegraph communications. Telegraphy is now an obsolete form of communication, and the cables have long since been decommissioned, but telephone and data are still carried on other transatlantic telecommunications cables. The first cable was laid in the 1850s from Valentia Island off the west coast of Ireland to Bay of Bulls, Trinity Bay, Newfoundland. The first communications occurred on August 16th 1858, but the line speed was poor, and efforts to improve it caused the cable to fail after three weeks.
The Port of London is that part of the River Thames in England lying between Teddington Lock and the defined boundary with the North Sea and including any associated docks. Once the largest port in the world, it was the United Kingdom's largest port as of 2020. Usage is largely governed by the Port of London Authority ("PLA"), a public trust established in 1908; while mainly responsible for coordination and enforcement of activities it also has some minor operations of its own.
The Greenwich Peninsula is an area of Greenwich in South East London, England. It is bounded on three sides by a loop of the Thames, between the Isle of Dogs to the west and Silvertown to the east. To the south is the rest of Greenwich, to the south-east is Charlton.
The Atlantic Telegraph Company was a company formed on 6 November 1856 to undertake and exploit a commercial telegraph cable across the Atlantic ocean, the first such telecommunications link.
Sir John Pender KCMG GCMG FSA FRSE was a Scottish submarine communications cable pioneer and politician.
Willoughby Smith was an English electrical engineer who discovered the photoconductivity of the element selenium. This discovery led to the invention of photoelectric cells, including those used in the earliest television systems.
Alcatel–Lucent S.A. was a multinational telecommunications equipment company, headquartered in Boulogne-Billancourt, France. It was formed in 2006 by the merger of France-based Alcatel and U.S.-based Lucent, the latter being a successor of AT&T's Western Electric and Bell Labs.
William Thomas Henley (1814–1882) was a pioneer in the manufacture of telegraph cables. He was working as a porter in Cheapside in 1830, leaving after disputes with his employer, and working at the St Katherine Docks for six years. During those years he was determined to learn a trade and used money from an aunt to purchase a lathe, vice and lumber with which he made a work bench. With those tools he taught himself to turn wood and brass and began to experiment, including with electricity.
British Insulated Callender's Cables (BICC) was a 20th-century British cable manufacturer and construction company, now renamed after its former subsidiary Balfour Beatty. It was formed from the merger of two long established cable firms, Callender's Cable & Construction Company and British Insulated Cables.
Charlton Riverside, previously known as New Charlton, is the area along the south bank of the river Thames at Charlton, London, which forms part of the Royal Borough of Greenwich. It was formerly a primarily industrial zone, known for the glass and rope making industries, but is now an area of regeneration.
The West Africa Cable System (WACS) is a submarine communications cable linking South Africa with the United Kingdom along the west coast of Africa that was constructed by Alcatel-Lucent. The cable consists of four fibre pairs and is 14,530 km in length, linking from Yzerfontein in the Western Cape of South Africa to London in the United Kingdom. It has 14 landing points, 12 along the western coast of Africa and 2 in Europe completed on land by a cable termination station in London. The total cost for the cable system is $650 million. WACS was originally known as the Africa West Coast Cable (AWCC) and was planned to branch to South America but this was dropped and the system eventually became the West African Cable System.
HMS Iris was a 26-gun sixth-rate frigate launched on 14 July 1840 from Devonport Dockyard. She spent some time with the West Africa Squadron suppressing the slave trade and later with the East Indies Station was involved in operations in Borneo. Iris was the first flagship of the Australia Station between 1859 and 1861 during which time she participated in the First Taranaki War. In 1864 she was extensively modified to allow her to ferry transatlantic telegraph cable to the cable-laying ship Great Eastern. She was decommissioned and sold off in 1869.
Telcon may refer to:
HMS Amethyst was a gaff rigged three mast sailing boat. She was a Spartan-class 26-gun sixth rate launched in 1844 and sold in 1869 for use as a cable vessel.
Glass, Elliot & Co was a business formed by the partnership of the mining engineer George Elliot with Richard Atwood Glass in 1854. When William Kuper and Co. went bankrupt in 1894 they were manufacturing wire rope in premises on the Surrey Canal. Their manager, George Elliot, relocated the firm to Morden Wharf gaining a sub lease from Charles Holcombe. By 1854 Elliott had paid off both creditors and family investors in the Kuper company and established his new business with Richard Glass.
The India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works Company was a London-based company based in Silvertown, East London. It was founded by Stephen William Silver in March 1864 as Silver's Indiarubber Works and Telegraph Cable Company Ltd. However in July that year the name was changed to the India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works Company.
The Submarine Telegraph Company was a British company which laid and operated submarine telegraph cables.
The Gutta Percha Company was an English company formed in 1845 to make a variety of products from the recently introduced natural rubber gutta-percha. Unlike other natural rubbers, this material was thermoplastic allowing it to be easily moulded. Nothing else like it was available to manufacturing until well into the twentieth century when synthetic plastics were developed.