Abbey Wood · South-east London
Abbey Wood takes its name from the ruins of Lesnes Abbey, founded on the edge of the Thames marshes in 1178. This is the story of the abbey and the district around it — from a penance for the murder of Thomas Becket to the Elizabeth line.
Richard de Luci, Chief Justiciar of England — the king's right hand — founds Lesnes Abbey for Augustinian canons. It is widely believed to be his penance for a part in the quarrel with Thomas Becket, murdered in Canterbury eight years before.
De Luci lays down his great office, becomes a humble canon of his own abbey, and dies within months. He is buried in the chapter house, and pilgrims come to the founder's tomb.
With the marsh below the hill comes a duty the canons can never escape: the river wall along the Plumstead and Erith levels is theirs to keep. It will drain the abbey's purse for the rest of its life.
The king's justices amerce — fine — the abbey for letting the marsh flood at Plumstead. The land came with the obligation, and the courts will not release them from it.
The greatest storm-tide in living memory — the same that drowned Old Winchelsea and recut the coast of Kent — breaks over the Thames marshes. No wall in England was built for it.
The Great Mortality reaches the London road and the cloister. Small houses like Lesnes never fully refill their empty stalls.
Abel Ker of Erith raises the men of the marshes in one of the first sparks of the great rising, and the rebels come to the abbey gate to demand their oath.
The abbey's debts stand at nearly £200 — more than a whole year's income — much of it spent, as ever, on the walls against the river.
Cardinal Wolsey dissolves Lesnes — one of the very first monasteries suppressed in England — to fund his grand new college at Oxford. The buildings are pulled down; only fragments and the abbot's lodging survive. The abbey has stood for 347 years.
The former abbey manor passes to Christ's Hospital, the London school, which will hold the land and its woods for nearly three hundred years.
Abbey Wood station opens on the new North Kent line, linking the quiet, marsh-edge hamlet to London and the Kent coast — and beginning its slow change into a London suburb.
The Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society lays out garden-suburb housing on the slopes above Bostall Heath, homes for the workers of Woolwich Arsenal just to the west.
Antiquarians excavate the buried foundations of Lesnes Abbey, laying bare the outline of the church, cloister and chapter house that can still be walked among today.
Lesnes Abbey Woods pass into public hands as open space — today loved for their spring carpet of wild daffodils, their ancient woodland, and the Eocene fossils in the sandy beds.
The Greater London Council begins building the new town of Thamesmead on the drained Erith and Plumstead marshes — the very levels the canons had fought for centuries to hold.
Abbey Wood becomes the south-eastern terminus of the new Elizabeth line, around ten minutes from Canary Wharf. The marsh-edge village is now a gateway to the City — and Lesnes Abbey still stands quietly above it all.
The ruins of Lesnes Abbey and Lesnes Abbey Woods are open to visit,
free, in Abbey Wood, London SE2.
Part of Around Abbey Wood — a local guide to Abbey Wood, Thamesmead, Plumstead,
Belvedere and beyond.