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MUD, MUD, GLORIOUS MUD | |
| by Bob Jenkins | ||
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One hundred and fifty years ago, almost all the land that is now street after street of housing was a morass of mud, even in areas that were beyond the high water mark, although occasional high tides would put even those areas completely under water. The area would have looked a bit like the image below, although of course there would have been no motorway in the background!
In fairness, the mud back then would probably have been a little cleaner. The area of foreshore shown above is right opposite the site of the former Pounds Scrapyard and oil and diesel leakage from tanks, lorries, submarines, etcetera, waiting to be dismantled seeped into the water and from there into the mud. As kids, we didn't venture very far out onto that mud, which was a cross between glue and a thirsty monster, eager to suck you down to your knees.
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The map on the left shows Portsmouth Harbour around 1830 - the deep water channels are drawn in, but not definined by a change of colour, or texture. Just to the right of Horsea Island (written as Horse I. here) is the foreshore shown in our moden photograph above and the word Subbington doesn't refer to the village near Gosport, but to Stubbington Farm, which spread from here down into North End and across towards Hilsea, where Green Farm was situated. At low tide, a lot of the area that wasn't "deep channel" was actually exposed and it took an experienced navigator to prevent ships running aground. Even so, the deeper channels would soon prove to be not deep enough ... |
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The first steam dredgers were introduced in 1797, using Boulton and Watt engines and mostly employed to keep estuaries and smaller harbours clear of sediment. Bigger and more powerful dredgers would appear in due course, especially when the need for them became urgent. The appearance of HMS Warrior in 1861 (launched the previous year) made every wooden hulled ship-of-the-line obsolete overnight and a new naval arms race began . Unfortunately, however, iron hulled ships drew a deeper draught and needed deeper and wider channels in harbours everywhere; Portsmouth was no exception. There had been a programme of dredging before this, although with the technology available before 1797 that must have been a soul-destroying job, but eventually dredgers began to evolve into the sort of vessel shown here, on the right, which employed what was known as a "bucket ladder" to bring up a continuous flow of mud and sand. |
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Dredging continued throughout the nineteenth century, into the twentieth and still goes on in the twenty first century - if the Royal Navy's two new aircraft carriers ever do get built, even the present day deep channels will need enlarging. The map to the left was made around 1932 and we can see how the original deep channels were widened considerably. It's also clear that both Whale Island and Horsea Island were enlarged, using the dredged up mud. The shoreline on the right, including Tipner, don't appear to have been extended, at least not laterally, but over a period of many years the level of this land was raised by several feet, to hold back tides and create, usable areas |
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These houses at the northern end of Gladys Avenue were built in 1897 and were a part of what was originally known as Gladys Terrace, one of many developments that sprung up along the road - and indeed, around the rest of the Stamshaw and North End area - between the late 1890s and the First World War. Gladys Avenue itself was originally called Muddy Lane, just to emphasise exactly how bad conditions had been around the area previously, but was eventually renamed after the daughter of local businessman A W White - yes, the same A W White who built the furniture repository on the corner of Stubbington Avenue, at North End, where InterCash Bureau de Change Ltd has its administrative offices. |
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