"Deptford" a Deptford Travel Page by deptlads

Deptford is in the London Borough of Lewisham. It lies between the A2 Dover Road (the Roman Watling Street) to the South, and the River Thames to the North East; with the Ravensbourne River forming Deptford Creek (and the boundary with Greenwich) to the East, Rotherhithe and the Surrey Commercial Docks to the North, and the railway viaducts to the West.

Less than half a mile from Greenwich, Deptord is just in the Western Hemisphere (by about 1½ arc seconds, or 0.025 of a degree of longitude). Opposite the Isle of Dogs, Deptford's riverside is on Greenwich Reach (a "downward" limb of the River) and about 2 miles from Tower Bridge and the City of London.

Deptford has very strong associations with the river and the Navy, the railways and 19th century industrialisation, and 20th century urban development. Deptford has also had an important part to play in social and cultural development.

There are plenty of famous Deptford associates, including Samuel Pepys, Christopher Marlowe, Czar Peter the Great of Russia, Grinling Gibbons, Sir Francis Drake, Vic Reeves and Jools Holland. But Deptford also has its less well-known heros, such as John Evelyn, Rachel and Margeret McMillan and Sebastian de Ferranti.

Today, Deptford is a busy inner city district with some 70,000 residents of a very broad ethnic mix. The housing is mostly late 19th century terraces and 1960s amd 70s high density council estates, although there is some new housing thanks to Government initiatives such as Deptford City Challenge and the Deptford Creek regeneration project. There is a fair amount of industry, much of it based around distribution (warehousing, paper and timber import, scrap and recycling industries etc), which hark back to the importance of the River and the railways.

Deptford certainly has more than its fair share of social and economic problems (and has been on the receiving end of virtually every Government aid programme devised over the past 30 years), but it is not an unpleasant or unrewarding place to live, and the historical associations are an added bonus. I have lived in Deptford for over 15 years, and would certainly prefer to be here than in the bland suburbs a few miles to the south