Borough in London, England
Bexley
In Bexley, a Victorian sewage pumping station gleams like a cathedral, and a First World War hospital reinvented the human face.
Key information
- County
- Greater London (historically Kent)
- Nation
- England
- Population
- about 246,000, 2021 Census
- Area
- about 23 square miles
- Known for
- Red House, Hall Place, Crossness Pumping Station, pioneering plastic surgery at Sidcup
- Famous people
- Kate Bush, William Morris, Harold Gillies, Hiram Maxim
- Football clubs
- Welling United, Erith & Belvedere, Erith Town
About Bexley
The sewage palace on the Thames
Start at the river, where Crossness Pumping Station looks more like a Victorian church than a piece of plumbing. Opened in 1865, it was part of Joseph Bazalgette's great scheme to stop London's sewage poisoning the Thames, and it lifted the capital's waste into the river on the ebb tide. The engine house is crammed with bright, ornate ironwork, and it holds four giant beam engines named Victoria, Prince Consort, Albert Edward and Alexandra. Volunteers have spent decades bringing them back to life. Few places make a drain look so glorious. The Thames shaped the north of the borough in other ways too. Erith grew up as a river town with a pier, wharves and heavy industry, while the marshes beyond stayed open and wild.
Why a socialist poet's dream home is in Bexleyheath
In 1860 William Morris moved into Red House in Bexleyheath, newly built for him by his friend, the architect Philip Webb. It was a deliberate break from fussy Victorian taste: red brick, steep roofs, an L-shaped plan and rooms designed to be decorated by friends. Morris, his wife Jane and their artistic circle painted, stitched and carved the interior themselves. The experience of furnishing it is often said to have led to his decorating firm, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. Red House is now run by the National Trust, and it remains one of the most influential homes in the Arts and Crafts story. Morris left in 1865, but the house stayed put, plain brick among the suburban streets.
Tudor topiary and a Georgian showpiece
Hall Place in Bexley village is a Tudor mansion built in 1537 by Sir John Champneys, a former Lord Mayor of London. It sits astride the River Cray, with a Jacobean wing added later and gardens that include the Queen's Beasts, topiary figures based on the heraldic animals of the 1953 coronation. Danson House, in Danson Park, is a different flavour altogether. Completed in the 1760s to a design by Sir Robert Taylor for John Boyd, it is a elegant Georgian villa with a painted interior that has been carefully restored. The lake outside is a favourite for boating and a good place to feed the ducks. Then there is Lesnes Abbey, a ruined 12th-century abbey founded in 1178. The woods beside it are a happy hunting ground for fossil hunters, who search for sharks' teeth from the Eocene.
The hospital that rebuilt faces
In 1917 Queen's Mary's Hospital opened in Sidcup to treat soldiers with terrible facial wounds from the Western Front. The surgeon Harold Gillies led the work, developing techniques in reconstructive surgery that helped found modern plastic surgery. Men who had expected to hide from the world were given new noses, jaws and cheeks. Patients wore a distinctive hospital uniform of blue, and became known as the Blue Boys. The artist Henry Tonks, who was also a surgeon, made detailed pastel portraits to record the results. Sidcup's long link with healing sits oddly beside its suburban calm, but it is one of the borough's proudest chapters.
Machine guns, Wuthering Heights and a Wings team
Crayford has a more martial past. Hiram Maxim, the American inventor of the machine gun, set up a gun-making business there in the late 1880s. The firm merged into Vickers, and Crayford went on to make weapons and aircraft. Bexleyheath has a gentler claim: Kate Bush was born there in 1958. Her debut single, Wuthering Heights, was a number one in 1978, making her the first woman to top the UK charts with a song she had written herself. On match days, the focus is Welling United, nicknamed the Wings, who play at Park View Road. Erith & Belvedere and Erith Town keep the non-league tradition going in the north of the borough. And in Sidcup, Rose Bruford College trains actors and theatre makers in the grounds of Lamorbey Park.