Royal Arsenal

• 1. Introduction

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  The Royal Arsenal at Woolwich sits on the south bank of the Thames in south-east London, and for roughly three centuries it was one of the most consequential patches of ground in the British Empire. At its peak, during the First World War, it sprawled across more than 1,285 acres and employed close to 80,000 people. Yet for most of its life it was sealed behind a boundary wall and its operations kept well away from public scrutiny.

  How did a domestic rabbit warren attached to a Tudor mansion become the forge of an empire's firepower? What strange mixture of royal patronage, gunpowder politics, and mechanical genius transformed this riverside mudflat? And why, after centuries of secrecy, does the site now house thousands of apartments and a Crossrail station? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. Warren to Arsenal

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  Tower Place, the Tudor mansion at the origin of everything, was built in the 1540s for Martin Bowes, a wealthy goldsmith and later Lord Mayor of London. Its land included a domestic warren, the kind kept for rabbits, and it stood close to Gun Wharf, where the warship Henry Grace a Dieu had been constructed around 1515.

  In 1651 the owners of Tower Place allowed the Board of Ordnance to prove its guns on the warren. That same year the first proof butts were constructed. The arrangement suited both parties. Then came the shock that turned a temporary licence into permanent possession: in 1667, the Dutch raid on the Medway exposed London's river defences as dangerously thin. A gun battery, placed under the command of Prince Rupert - the King's cousin - was built in the grounds of Tower Place to prevent a similar disaster on the Thames.

  The following year Tower Place changed hands, and in 1671 the 31-acre estate was transferred to the Board of Ordnance in exchange for the adjacent Gun Wharf and a substantial cash payment. The board declared the site to be, in their own words, "a convenient place for building a storehouse for powder and other stores of war, and for room for the proof of guns." The first Storekeeper, Captain Francis Cheeseman, was appointed in 1670 by Warrant of the Master-General of the Ordnance. In 1681 King Charles II visited the site personally, watching Richard Leake, Master Gunner of England, fire experimental shot in the proof butts. Three years later the King returned to watch Leake demonstrate a newly developed mortar design. Royal interest was not merely ceremonial: in 1683 Charles formalised the Board of Ordnance's constitution and appointed two Proof Masters to certify that gun trials were conducted correctly.

  By 1688 an order directed that all guns and stores from Deptford be moved permanently to Woolwich. Manufacturing had not yet begun in earnest, but the site had become the nerve centre of the nation's ordnance supply, and its name had quietly shifted from Tower Place to simply the Warren.

• 3. Departments and Disciplines

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  Laboratory Square was built in 1696 to house the Royal Laboratory, an ammunition workshop relocated from a Great Barn at Greenwich Palace when construction of Greenwich Hospital displaced it. The barn itself was disassembled and rebuilt at the Warren. The square comprised a gateway at its north end, buildings along either side, and a clock tower at the south end. A Chief Firemaster oversaw manufacture by hand of gunpowder, shell cases, fuses, and paper gun cartridges. Early paintings show artisans at work among pyramid stacks of shells in the open courtyards. A pair of pavilions that once faced each other across the centre of that courtyard are now the oldest surviving buildings on the Arsenal site.

  A gun foundry followed in 1717, established after a devastating explosion at the private foundry the Board had previously used in Moorfields. The original Royal Brass Foundry building still stands. Its interior was designed for pure industrial function: a high interior ceiling to accommodate a vertical boring machine, and tall doors for removing newly cast cannons. The first Master Founder, Andrew Schalch, served for 54 years before retiring in 1769 at the age of 78. His successor Jan Verbruggen installed a horse-powered horizontal boring machine in 1770. Henry Maudslay worked at the foundry from 1783 and later credited the machine with inspiring his own improvements to the lathe. Remarkably, Verbruggen's machine remained in use until 1843, when a steam-powered equivalent replaced it.

  Gun carriages had been stored at the Warren from as early as 1682, but manufacturing of carriages was underway by the 1750s. The activity was formalised in 1803 as the Royal Carriage Department, the point at which the authorities recognised that carriage design was as central to ordnance provision as the guns themselves.

  The military dimension of the Warren was locked in on the 26th of May 1716, when a Royal Warrant directed that two companies of artillery of a hundred men each, plus a separate corps of twenty-six military engineers, be formed on a permanent basis. This was the founding moment of both the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers. By 1720 the Board had also sought to establish a military academy on site; it was not until 1741, however, that the Royal Military Academy was placed on a firm footing. The cadets' purpose-built barracks, dating from 1751, were entirely demolished in the 1980s for road widening.

• 4. Engineers and Inventors

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  Joseph Bramah installed his patented planing machine in the new Royal Carriage Factory in 1805, the first use of steam power within the Arsenal. The site quickly became a recognised centre of mechanical engineering, drawing in Samuel Bentham, Marc Isambard Brunel, and Henry Maudslay. Brunel was responsible for erecting the Arsenal's steam sawmills; Maudslay later extended the steam machinery further.

  William Congreve - son of the Comptroller of the Royal Laboratory - designed the Congreve Rocket there, and from 1805 it was manufactured in purpose-built premises on the eastern edge of the site. Rocket manufacture became a sustained activity rather than a single experiment.

  The gunmaking side of the Arsenal was reshaped by William George Armstrong, who in 1859 made his patented designs for rifled ordnance available to the government. He was rewarded with a knighthood and appointed part-time Superintendent of the Royal Gun Factory at Woolwich. He resigned in 1863, however, after a rival - Sir Joseph Whitworth - demonstrated a more powerful rifled gun.

  Chemistry brought its own transformative figure. Frederick Abel, later Sir Frederick Abel, was appointed the first War Department Chemist as part of preparations for the Crimean War in 1854-1856. He was mainly responsible for bringing guncotton into safe use and won a patent dispute with Alfred Nobel over the rights to cordite, which Abel had jointly developed with Professor James Dewar. A new Chemical Laboratory, numbered Building 20, was built to his specifications. Abel retired from the Royal Arsenal in 1888.

  Scottish engineering pioneer James Nasmyth toured the site in the early 1840s and described it as a "museum of technical antiquity." He was subsequently engaged to help modernise it. Within a decade, and with Britain on the edge of war, the Arsenal had 2,773 specialised machines at work, powered by 68 stationary steam engines.

• 5. The Football Club Nobody Expected

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  In 1868 twenty Arsenal workers formed a food-buying association operating from a house in Plumstead, naming it the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society. Over the following 115 years it grew to half a million members across London and beyond, offering services ranging from funerals to housing to libraries to insurance.

  In 1886 another group of Arsenal workers formed a football club named Dial Square, after the workshops at the heart of the complex. Their first game, played on the 11th of December, was a 6-0 victory over Eastern Wanderers on the Isle of Dogs. Two weeks later the club was renamed Royal Arsenal, also known at the time as the Woolwich Reds.

  The club entered the professional football league as Woolwich Arsenal in 1893. In 1913 it moved to north London and eventually became Arsenal F.C., one of the most followed football clubs in the world. The Royal Arsenal also produced a second team, Royal Ordnance Factories F.C., though that one lasted only until 1896.

• 6. Peak and Blitz

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  At its wartime height during the First World War, the Arsenal covered approximately 1,300 acres. To house the workforce, the government built an estate of 1,298 homes at Eltham in 1915, later known as the Progress Estate. Between 1815 and 1835 the workforce had collapsed from 5,000 to 500 people during the post-Napoleonic lull; the scale of the First World War reversal was difficult to comprehend.

  On the 7th of September 1940 the Arsenal was struck during the Blitz. The fuze factory was destroyed, and the filling factory and a light gun factory were badly damaged. In September 1940, before that first raid, some 32,500 people were at work on site. Afterwards the number fell to 19,000. By February 1943 it had recovered to 23,000, but by August 1945 it had fallen again to 15,000. Across 25 raids by bombs, V-1 flying bombs, and V-2 rockets, 103 people were killed and 770 injured.

  The Central Offices were also damaged, and by 1942 both the Design Department and the Research Department had been evacuated to Fort Halstead in Kent. They remained there after the war, eventually merging to become the Armament Research and Development Establishment. In the quiet years after 1945 the Arsenal pivoted to peacetime production, building railway wagons between 1945 and 1949 and manufacturing knitting frames for the silk stockings industry until 1952.

• 7. Closure and Transformation

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  The Woolwich Royal Ordnance Factories closed in 1967. A large part of the eastern end of the site was sold to the Greater London Council, much of it used to build the new town of Thamesmead. The Ministry of Defence moved out entirely in 1994, ending nearly three centuries of military occupation.

  The western part of the site, now transformed by Berkeley Homes, contains one of the largest concentrations of Grade I and Grade II listed buildings converted for residential use in the country, with more than 3,000 residents. The first phase of the residential development, named The Armouries, comprised 455 new-build apartments in a six-storey building. One of the earliest developments, Royal Artillery Quays, was completed by Barratt Homes in 2003.

  In October 2018 planning permission was granted for the first phase of a multi-million pound restoration of historic buildings near the new Woolwich Crossrail station, creating a complex of theatres, dance studios, and places to eat covering 15,000 square metres. A public vote in July 2019 settled on the name Woolwich Works for the district.

  The Woolwich Crossrail station itself, part-funded by Berkeley Homes, opened in 2022. Where proof butts once tested cannon at 500 yards and a boundary wall 20 feet high sealed the site from the public, a Thames Clippers stop now serves apartment residents, and the Dial Arch public house - named after the workshops that gave Arsenal F.C. its original name - opened in June 2010.