Prisons and Abandoned Factories: Photos of a Journey from Belmarsh to Plumstead

Prisons and Abandoned Factories: A Journey from Belmarsh to Plumstead, a set on Flickr.

On July 11, 2012, as part of my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike (or see here), I cycled east from Greenwich, intending to travel to the Thames Barrier, on the border of Charlton and Woolwich, but then carrying on, through Woolwich to Thamesmead, the satellite town originally built in the 1960s, and used as the setting for Stanley Kubrick’s notorious film “A Clockwork Orange,” and back via Belmarsh Prison and Plumstead, before rejoining the Thames Path once more for the journey back west, and home.

I’m posting these photos in four sets, and this is the last of the four, following Chasing Clouds in Greenwich: Photos of a Journey East Along the Thames,  Industry and Decay: Photos of a Journey Along the Thames from Greenwich to Woolwich and Lost Glories: Photos of a Thames Journey from Woolwich to Thamesmead (also see here, here and here). In those, I recorded the first stage of the journey, through Greenwich under a brooding, rain-filled sky; the second stage, through New Charlton, past the Thames Barrier and into Woolwich, through industrial estates, and with a diversion to an evocative set of river stairs; and the third, through the housing developments in the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, and then on to Thamesmead.

I hope to make a return visit to Thamesmead soon, as I only had a short amount of time before returning home, which I managed in a fairly haphazard manner, after getting lost and emerging near a giant roundabout on the busy A2016, which runs from Plumstead to Erith. From this road, I discovered that I was close to Belmarsh Prison, the maximum security prison — aka Category A prison — notorious for the detention of alleged terror suspects, held without charge or trial. Next to Belmarsh is a Category B prison, Thameside, built and run by Serco, the private security firm dogged by controversy for its work with asylum seekers and in the health service, as well as its involvement with private prisons, and, across the road from Thameside, a number of derelict factories and warehouses which also attracted my attention.

From these ruins, I swiftly made my way home via Plumstead, rejoining the River Thames near the Woolwich Ferry, and then trying to get home ahead of another storm — an aim that failed when, on Greenwich peninsula, I was soaked to the skin in a huge deluge, and was thankful that my camera case proved to be waterproof.

For the next few photo sets, as well as posting some more photos from my Italian holiday last month, I’ll be posting photos I took north of the river in London — just some of the 1500 or so photos I have still to post from my journeys over the last two months. As ever, I hope you’ll be joining me.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed — and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Flickr (my photos) and YouTube. Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in April 2012, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and please also consider joining the new “Close Guantánamo campaign,” and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.