If you know where to look London still has evidence that once it was a great maritime port.

Anne-Marie Nankivell author of The Londonphile writes in this Guest Post, not of the iconic cranes standing unused outside the expensive flats in Docklands, but of a building that has survived against all the odds even though it has a list when all its neighbours were demolished.

[I]t stands in supreme isolation, alone along this little stretch of the river, like a mouth with but a single tooth. How many travellers along the Thames must have wondered about this funny, narrow little building in Rotherhithe? In fact, the Leaning Tower of Rotherhithe – as it is apparently known locally – was one of several buildings in the area owned by Braithwaite & Dean, a barge company. They were a lighterage firm – lighters being flat-bottomed barges – and their lightermen moved goods between ships and quays (not to be confused with watermen, who carried passengers). This building was their office – and already tilting back in those days – where lightermen would pull up in their boats to collect their wages.

Once this whole stretch of the riverside was covered with buildings, they mostly related to shipping, with a few public houses thrown in for good measure. You can see a Museum of London photograph of the area (commissioned by the Port of London Authority as part of their ten-mile panoramic documentation of the river) from 1937 here. The buildings to the west of our leaning tower were purchased in 1939 by Bermondsey Council, who planned to demolish them to build a garden. The Blitz then finished off any work that they had begun to this end.

To the east of the building stood what has been described as ‘a once absurdly picturesque row of largely wooden tenements…seedy in the extreme but vibrantly populated in the 1950s by a bohemian set of artists and writers’. Lord Snowdon lived along this row in a former coal store and is said to have met with Princess Margaret here, as well as hosting celebrities such as Marlene Dietrich and Noel Coward (who entertained him on the piano in his studio flat). In around 1960 he lent his room to John Betjeman (as you do) when his house burnt down.

Betjeman described his time here as ‘the most restful few months I had ever spent in London’, during which he enjoyed the ‘tremendous view’, including that of ‘the wharves and Georgian brick buildings of Wapping’ across the way. He moved the bed to the river-side of the room, going ‘to sleep to the solacing sounds of water’. At low tide he would listen to the sound of the waves rippling over the pebbles below, and described how at high tide ‘after a tug had passed the water made a plopping sound right against my bedroom wall as thought I were in a ship’s hold’. Until the Thames Barrier was built this whole area was of course subject to the risk of flooding; Braithwaite & Dean’s offices were flooded in 1953.

 The remains of Edward III’s manor house nearby

Despite a campaign by both Betjeman and Snowdon, the rather romantic-sounding row of buildings to the east was also pulled down by the local council after being condemned as a health hazard during the 1960s. It’s not known exactly why this particular structure was allowed to remain. It is not of any particular architectural value, though perhaps it was its brickwork that saved it, as many of the other buildings were wooden so arguably less sound structures. The King’s Stairs Gardens were then created here, and contain the remains of what is thought to be King Edward III’s manor house, circa 1353, uncovered by a Museum of London dig in the 1980s. Braithwaite & Dean stayed on in the leaning tower until the early 1990s, and it is now a (very) private residence.

The house is located at the very end of Fulford Street (you can’t miss it!), roughly equidistant between Bermondsey tube station and Rotherhithe Overground station. The photograph taken from across the river was shot (with a zoom lens) from Wapping’s Waterside Gardens.

Note from CabbieBlog: To get some perspective of how the riverside looked in its heyday this picture taken in 1937 shows Braithwaite & Dean with properties on either side used by lighterage and barge-building firms. Their appearance with steep-pitched mansard roofs with pantiles above would indicate 17th century construction. A hithe in Old English was a landing-place on a river, while Rother was the old term for oxen. So this was the river port for landing cattle.

This wonderful example of our maritime past is available to rent. Now converted into luxury accommodation it boasts of a one bedroom private penthouse, sleeping six with stunning views of Tower Bridge directly on the river [see above]. Located one mile from Tower Bridge along the Jubilee Thames path and an easy commute from Gatwick and to the city. Your may contact Helena here to make a booking.

Londoners delight in urban myths: Where is Lord Lucan; Did they buy the right ‘London’ Bridge; How much do cabbies earn.

But one myth is so neat it might actually have a ring of truth – The Pink Russian Tank called Stompie.

On a scrubby triangle of land a stone’s throw from the Bricklayer’s Arms quietly acquiring a patina of graffiti stands a Russian T34 tank.

[R]eputedly the tank was once used to defend Leonid Brezhnev’s social utopia against all odds in the Czechoslovakian Prague Spring students uprising in 1968. Once the vehicle’s useful life squashing protestors was over, in 1995 it was transported to London to feature in a modern day adaption of Richard III.
After Ian McKellen had cried “My Kingdom for a horse” (or in this case “kingdom for a tank”) the T34 tank ended languishing in a scrap dealers yard.

In 1995 for the princely sum of £7,000 the T34 was then brought by colourful character and developer Russell Gray who had lost his battle with Southwark Council to build some flats, not on Bosworth Field but a parcel of wasteland at the junction of Pages Walk and Mandela Way.

Gray bought the tank for his 7-year-old son (who wants Action Man when you can play with a real killing machine) and then successfully obtained planning permission to site a ‘tank’ upon the disputed land.

Folklore has it that Southwark Council assumed ‘tank’ was a vessel that would contain liquid of the septic variety. Gray sited the T34 tank with the barrel aimed resolutely at his nemesis, Southwark Council Offices, and named it Stompie. This was in memory of Stompie Moekatsi an ANC activist killed by Winnie Mandela’s bodyguards in 1988 after they suspected him of being an apartheid government informer, an inspired choice given its location at the end of Mandela Way.

In 2002 Gray was persuaded by artist Aleksandra Mir to have Stompie painted pink, maybe his son, now 14-years-old had grown tired of his toy. The choice of colour was reminiscent of an earlier event.

In Prague a Soviet war memorial in the shape of a tank [pictured right] commemorating the liberation of Poland from the Nazis symbolised for the local populace the tanks that were used to quash the student uprising – and Stompie’s finest hour.

Czech sculptor David Cerny painted the Prague monument pink. The Soviets who regarded this as an affront to their masculinity repainted it three days later to green. Ten days passed before political activists repainted it pink. Another green coat was applied by the authorities and that was soon repainted pink. Eventually the government realised they were fighting a losing battle and to save face replaced the tank with a fountain.

Since his pink period Stompie has been painted in a variety of colours including those of a Chicago cab, but now he languishes in a kaleidoscope of graffiti.

Apartheid iconography, cold war museum piece, symbol of a planning dispute, urban joke, movie extra, birthday present, Stompie lies in a forgotten field that is forever Prague. Now if you believe Chris Lawson it is one of London’s 10 quirky places.