Ref: 004/CT/MUP

WHITECLIFFE MAJOR URBAN PARK

Principal Artist, Christopher Tipping

HOLEY CITY & THE CHALK PEOPLE: aka an Alkerden Assemblage

Introduction

Many of the historic images which illustrate the development of cement industries in Swanscombe show what appear on first looking, to be an interlinked series of raised roadways, causeways, narrow land-bridges, footpaths and trainlines emerging & manufactured from the scarred chalk topography below & about them. It is otherworldly & unsettling. Sheer walls of chalk act as dams, or defensive walls - with cars, trams and buses running atop them. Maybe these are ancient earthworks or river flood defences? The remnants of a place hewn by giants.

All an illusion of course. The ‘raised up’ land bridges are not what they seem. These ‘raised’ roads and footpaths are in fact ground level details. It was the adjacent land, abutting the cliff edges, once orchards & allotment gardens with its buried chalk treasure that has been subsequently quarried, scooped & scraped out, often by hand. Deeply dug, hard won, emptied of content & abandoned to nature or backfilled.

A rough-hewn irregular giant latticework then, of sheer-drop quarry edges and narrow chalk ledges. Residential streets & huge industrial sites, close-linked by these landlocked narrow bridges, chalk causeways & footpaths. Evocative of a natural coastal chalk landscape, of sheer white cliffs, chalk stacks, caves, and arches. But this area is densely populated by industry, housing, transport, retail & recreational facilities, a footprint often built within and reclaimed from the exhausted, excavated landscape of dusty whiteness and perched precariously along the margins, chalk spines and cuttings created by it. 

A precarious chalk cliff, literally at the bottom of your garden. The end of your street and dead-end 100 feet drop. This was Swanscombe town centre not so long ago. The quarries moved outwards to the margins south of the town, bigger, deeper, powered more by machines than men. A huge & efficient industry, laboriously stripping off the top soils, sand and gravels and backfilling exhausted quarries - all to access the white gold. Winning chalk to build London and beyond.

In contrast, the domesticity & scale of workaday community life in Swanscombe is illustrated not only by large numbers of 19th & 20thC locally manufactured brick-built terraced houses to service the growing industry but in equally large numbers of grid-like, soft green carpets of vegetable and flowers, with the odd bit of livestock for good measure. Carefully tended & managed allotment gardens (founded out of a community Land Club) evidenced in aerial photographs, patterned with produce, reminiscent of patchwork quilts or bedspreads, which all eventually fell to the chalk-hungry excavators, along with their original seed banks, soil memory, social history & loving care. I wonder, where did that go?

This vital landscape of Swanscombe resonates with the sheer physicality & hard-won, man-made legacy of its former industry. Chalk quarrying, digging, excavating, cement making, moving, processing & exporting millions of tons of materials from the depths of the chalk Downs – itself the 200m thick legacy of a Cretaceous Ocean some 80 million years in the making. ‘Swanscombe Park Chalk Quarry provided more than 100 million tonnes of chalk to the Northfleet and Swanscombe cement plants up to its closure in April 2008’.

Just how quickly this local agrarian and natural landscape changed within a few short years is made evident in these black & white images. Hasted, writing in the 18thC, described Swanscombe as home to 10 rare species of herbs and plants found in Swanscombe Park, south of the village.

‘Swanscombe Woods were a wonderful place to walk through, lots of bluebells, wood anenomies, trees, blackberries etc. Through the ‘old’ woods along the Watling Street, and back through the ‘new’ woods (as we called it) made a very pleasant afternoon. As young Mum’s we were able to take our flasks and cakes to give our children a picnic. They could run about, collect flowers and blackberries…’ ‘The Woods were criss-crossed with footpaths, linking back through the fields to Swanscombe’.

This tumultuous impact was inflicted upon an agricultural landscape, including the local village and hamlet-based community with its centuries-old social heritage, an unbroken legacy of previously unchanging farmland and quintessential English chalk landscape. Brand-new, dynamic, technologically engaged, and advanced urban communities quickly developed and grew around the dust and debris of chalk quarries & cement & paper industries, riding on the back of a voracious industrial revolution and thirst for expansion by concrete, knowledge, and news, and were themselves eventually absorbed, quite literally within that new landscape, to become the people of the chalk.  

Swanscombe, including the Eastern Quarry is a fascinating, fractured, characterful & strangely compelling place. It is full of contrasts & resonates with compelling stories, both factual and anecdotal, of social, agricultural, industrial, archaeological, and geological heritage extending far back into deep time – yet somehow, and brilliantly for us, much still evident and tactile on the surface, in the real & living place of today. However, this isn’t always easy to read or unpick. Much has been lost. Landscapes turned upside down. Geology reimagined. Industry come-and-gone. Man-made landscapes quietly, but impressively reclaimed by nature. Creative interpretation of heritage and context, resulting in embedded expressions and narrative within the landscape design can help to unlock the language of this truly Holey City in collaboration with the wider project team.

Farmers’ fields, crop patterns & old woodland, churned into trackways, excavated roads and steep sided quarries were linked by chalk tunnel ‘portals’ and dusty, behemoth factories fed by rail track, flat wagons, & locomotives with names such as ‘Dead Horse’, ‘Enterprise’, ‘Millbank’, No.4, No.5 & No.6, and latterly, long conveyors and huge pipelines. Orchards and meadow turned to rivers of clay and chalk slurry. The local language of work subtly altered. A new lexicon came into being. Winning Chalk, Chalk Getter, Wash Mills, Cement Tippler, Overburden, Slurry Backs, Settling Ponds, Chalk Spine, Cement Clinker, Rotary Kiln, Crushers and Decallowing amongst them.

Often excavated and following lines of history and practicality, along ancient field boundaries & along the tread of well-worn footpaths, quite literally in some areas of Swanscombe bringing sheer chalk cliffs to the bottom of the garden, the impact of the industry on the shape & topography of the land – old North Downs Forest, quintessentially English chalk landscape - and an associated agrarian lifestyle, has been immense, but the most visible shift in social culture has been the growth & absorption of the new community that travelled here to live and work at the start of the 20thC right into the heart of the growing industrial landscape & process itself. Small scale domestic homelife and mighty industry grew side by side.

Precipitous edges, ledges and chalk spine pathways were the norm for the people who lived here. The tram drivers pronounced it Holey City. (Ref: A Concise History of Swanscombe. C.R.Bull, BA, Dartford Local History Leaflet no.16). ALA Civic & social boundaries defined & displaced by huge & disfiguring quarries. Great Pit, Barnfield Pit, Milton Street Pit, Ingress Vale & Colyer’s Pit. Rickson’s Pit, Barracks Pit and Bakers Hole. Bevan’s pit, Galley Hill, Craylands Lane, Globe Pit and Stonecastle Pit. Once the chalk was exhausted, a new pit was opened, and - more often, new industrial buildings set up home in the old pit bottoms. Some were even used for recreational activities for the workforce. New overburden – sand and gravel – often tipped into old pits as made-ground, upending the accepted geological strata and orders of nature.

Ebbsfleet Garden City is rising within the vestiges of an all-encompassing and never forgotten industrial past.

Western Cross & the Eastern Quarry now provide the nurturing foundations & chalky embrace of new 21st C communities drawn to the area on a promise of a new city, a new start, a green life set in a green (& white) landscape. This landscape has come full circle. Nature-made to man-made industrial, returned to nature as brownfield & finally rediscovered & reclaimed, re-animated and re-settled. A new green urbanity.

Whitecliffe MUP lies at the very centre of this new land. Whitecliffe is comprised of three inter-connected new communities. Alkerden is sat right in the middle, at the heart of the wider Whitecliffe development. Castle Hill is to the west & Ashmere lies to the east – with all three zones still in various stages of development & delivery. Swanscombe rises to the North and beyond that, Swanscombe Peninsula, and the River Thames Estuary.

This is a linear park, running downhill on a roughly meandering north to south alignment, dissected by east to west transportation and pedestrian links, connecting all communities, new and old through open green space, public realm, and recreational sites, soft landscape & an invigorating topography.

An astounding chalk cliff headland abuts Whitecliffe Square and – within a landscape sculpted from upheaval and regeneration, a farmhouse & barn dated to the 17th Century, the most important and extant link to the agrarian heritage of the area - an anchor and interpretation point for the new park and old and new communities. The boundaries of Alkerden Manor had hardly altered for centuries, as evidenced by the Tithe Map of 1840 compared to the landscape still found there today.

The Farm, once surrounded by orchards and hop plantations was also growing currants, strawberries, and gooseberries. Many locals in recent history recalling picking fruit there. It is a powerful social memory jogger and foundation upon which to build. Community consultation a powerful reminder that heritage, however displaced or derelict still matters. My contextual and creative response is based on an appreciation and un-picking of Swanscombe and its environs as a single entity. All is linked, either through geography or social history. The ‘all’ is what makes the finer detail here and provides the foundations and scaffold on which to hang the narrative within Whitecliffe Major Urban Park.

Whitecliffe MUP is a hugely valuable & key asset in maintaining and propagating social and physical links between all local communities, old and new, north & south of Alkerden Lane. The Park landscape provides an anchor, a place rooted and imbued with meaning. The inter-connectedness of its setting, along a north/south axis creates a safe, pedestrian, and accessible green corridor rising from the reed-fringed ponds at the base of the chalk escarpment at the very south of the site, up through Whitecliffe Square, Chalk Spine, Alkerden Farm and onwards via Craylands Gorge to the Heritage Park and Swanscombe Skull Site National Nature Reserve beyond, with pedestrian links to Broomfield Park and Swanscombe Park.

Remarkably, all these now green spaces are linked through history more powerfully together than we might imagine. All the above green spaces were once chalk pits. Only two, Western Cross and Eastern Quarries have not been fully backfilled and covered in new housing or become green spaces. These two unique places have retained the powerful & raw-hewn features of their industrial past. This special place, now known as Whitecliffe provides homes for new communities ‘within’ the chalk workings themselves. Within, not atop, embraced by the heritage about it, rather than sat above the buried remains of it. These communities are literally the new people of the chalk, and this legacy must be embraced and held dear.

Clues and evidence of the industrial heritage of Western Cross and Eastern Quarries are, understandably hard to unpick. The closure of the quarries in 2008 & their subsequent phases of demolition, salvage, abandonment, and flooding, led on to a remarkable period of naturally rejuvenated brownfield habitats & varied eco-systems, some of which have been maintained.

The most compelling evidence rises in front of you from almost every aspect on the site. Chalk cliffs, machine scraped escarpments of fractured white rock. The dull roar of the A2 can be heard through the wooded hill top above the southern boundary of the site. Still raw cuttings and scrapings. Man-made, not natural. This is a brave and bold design decision embedded at the heart of the landscape plan.

The highest point on the now quarried out chalk down above the central southern edge of the site, at the heart of Swanscombe Woods was 200 feet above sea level. That is 70 metres. Some parts of the quarry excavated to 15 meters below sea level. A total of 85 meters above your head. These white walls of exposed chalk, laid down over 65million years ago, at once embrace and remind us of the hard-won physicality, endeavour & labour of earlier generations and the power of nature (& humanity) to regenerate, regrow and reinterpret spaces. It reminds me that the raw materials quarried here went on to build the foundations of London, and perhaps many cities and buildings across the world. More locally, homes for new workers were built of local clay, with brickfields springing up in nearby Northfleet. One of the earliest examples of a concrete frame house was built in Swanscombe. Swanscombe Cement Works were for some years the biggest in the world. Piled foundations, double-tee beams, floor slabs, panels & columns use cement to bind concrete aggregates. It is literally the glue that holds our cities together. Concrete is the most widely used building material in the world.

Standing on the proposed viewing platform atop the extant chalk spine rising above Whitecliffe Square, you will, on a clear day be able to see the towers of London to the west and the whole of the two quarry sites set out in front of you. The chalk cliff, at the heart of the Whitecliffe MUP stands as a brilliant legacy – a sculptural anchor, resonant both of deep geological time and recent industrial and social memory. It is a brave and powerful statement on an already extraordinary site. Powerful because it records how the land changed dramatically & significantly around it. This chalk ridge is a survivor of the original agrarian rolling chalk landscape. The top of the spine, leading back to Alkerden Farm has not been quarried. It was a sliver of land miraculously left untouched. Like the farm itself, the spine is a marker from another time, one still vivid in the memories of locals. Look down from here into Whitecliffe Square or over towards Alkerden and the London skyline beyond on the horizon. You are stood on the edge of a cliff, a man-made cliff edge, the inside face of the chalk quarry.

It is testament to almost two centuries of industrial growth and dramatic land-use, matched only by tectonic upheaval millions of years in the past which pushed up the chalk to form the rolling North Downs landscape we know today. This story is inherent in the physicality, disrupted topography and jarring contour lines of the site today. The evidence is written here in the landscape. This is where the interpretation happens. Our story is embedded in the landscape around you. You are walking on it.

End

©Christopher Tipping Studio

22nd January 2023