History
The area was once known as Spike Island after the workhouse that was situated there. The area is mainly residential although there is a large industrial bakery in Belmont Road. Much of the housing stock is Victorian with some 1940's council developments and a Cottage estate built for local Vickers armaments workers in 1916. Nearest Railway stations are Erith and Barnehurst. There is a large Catholic church in Bexley Road (Our Lady of the Angels) with a friary attached, and a Church of England (St Paul's) in Mill Road. A conservation area on Brook Street safeguards some terraces that represent early examples of municipal housing.
Read more about this topic: Northumberland Heath
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“... that there is no other way,
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—Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)