A few days ago, I was pratting about online as normal when I thought I would see if I could find anything about the history of Woolwich. I go to Woolwich fairly often these days, either on a walk, to get some shopping, or to catch the DLR or Elisabeth Line. It’s a vibrant, bustling place in the midst of constant development: there’s a high street full of shops, a huge Tesco, and a public square with a massive screen where people gather to watch public events. Yet I get the impression that Woolwich is an area with a lot of history behind it: there are remnants of the past everywhere, from creaking old pubs to the old gatehouse to the famous Arsenal, once a secret, closed-off military compound.

With that in mind, I thought I’d see if I could find anything on Youtube which would show me what Woolwich used to look like. Like most of London the area feels so modern and up to date, but I wanted to see what it looked like before the big screen, DLR and Tesco. I wasn’t disappointed: I soon came across this treat of a Youtube channel, dedicated to the history of Woolwich and the Royal Arsenal. From the look of it, the channel was only recently created, but it already has dozens of films, some dating back decades, showing us what Woolwich used to look like.

I was instantly struck by just how much that area has changed. Cars used to drive down the high street, which I only know as a pedestrianised shopping street; there used to be a road going through the market square, in front of the old gatehouse where it now goes behind it. Woolwich looked like a noisy, dirty, run-down place, and you get the impression that people there felt very cut off from the rest of London. One of the videos which fascinated and thrilled me the most though, was this one about the Arsenal itself. Thirty or forty years ago the Arsenal was a secret, dying area: it’s old munitions factories were by then dormant and unneeded, and it was still closed off to the public. All the buildings were empty and crumbling. As it says in the video, for four hundred years that riverside area had been a cacophonous warren, making artillery for the British Empire, but by then had become an unused wasteground.

What I find awesome is that, these days, tens of thousands of people go into and out of that area every day on their way to the Elisabeth Line station. The area itself seems to be thriving, it’s old warehouses and military buildings converted into theatres, dance studios and trendy bars. You can still, however, recognise what was there before: watching the video, I could clearly see buildings I trundle past quite regularly; they look so forsaken in the film, compared with how I know them. For instance, one of the buildings, the Dial Arch, was once a cannon foundry, but I now know it as a trendy pub. In the video it is empty and roofless, but I now know it to be full of life. The cool thing is, it still has the big sun dial over it’s entrance: the countless factory workers who must have once passed under it have been replaced with revellers, many coming out of the nearby tube station. Moreover, where Woolwich once felt so cut off, you can now get into central London within minutes on the Elisabeth Line, the pleasing irony being that we go through what was once it’s most neglected, forgotten areas to do so.

Things like this captivate me. I’ve written here before about how interested I am in London’s history, and how thrilling I find it to see glimpses of the city’s past underneath all the glittering modernity. The city is thus a palimpsest: an old document which has been erased and written over, yet you can still make out fragments of what was written there before. If you look, you can still make out such fragments, perhaps nowhere moreso than Woolwich, making it the ultimate palimpsest.