A structure in Greenwich that was instrumental in the first transatlantic telephone calls has been given the same protection as Stonehenge and the Tower of London.
The cable hauler and winding gear by the Thames at Enderby Wharf, last used in 1978, have now been declared a nationally-important historical site by Historic England, after a campaign by Alan Burkitt-Gray, a former technology journalist, to protect it from development.
Burkitt-Gray had asked Historic England to look into listing the structure, which sits opposite Enderby House, now used as a pub. The heritage body then opted to go one stage further and declare it a scheduled monument.
The decision, approved by Lisa Nandy, the culture secretary, means there is now a cluster of listed structures on both sides of the Thames that were vital in the development of today’s modern communications.
At Enderby Wharf, the winding gear was used to load cable straight from the adjacent Standard Telephones and Cables (STC) factory onto ships that went out into the Atlantic.
Those ships then laid the TAT-1 cable, which went into service in 1956 between Oban, in the west of Scotland, and Newfoundland, meaning ordinary people on both sides of the Atlantic could place phone calls across the ocean for the first time.
Burkitt-Gray, who lives in Blackheath, told The Greenwich Wire: “We take instant global communications, text messages, pictures and voice, for granted in 2025, but this place in Greenwich is where it all started, way back in the middle of the 19th century.”
The cable industry had already been in Greenwich for more than a century, with the first cross-Channel and transatlantic telegraph cables made at Enderby Wharf in the 1850s.
Scheduled monuments are usually ancient or historic sites rather than individual buildings: the remains of Greenwich Palace, in the Old Royal Naval College, form a historic monument. Eltham Palace is also a scheduled monument, as are fortifications by the Rotunda in Woolwich Barracks.
But more recent structures have also become scheduled monuments, including the slipway on the Isle of Dogs where the SS Great Eastern was launched. The Great Eastern was originally designed as a passenger ship by Isambard Kingdom Brunel but was later converted to lay cables that had been made at the Greenwich factory.
Much of the STC site at Greenwich has been redeveloped for housing but the factory still exists and is now owned by Alcatel Submarine Networks.
A report confirming the listing said the structure “represented a major milestone in the history of global communications during this period”.
“The gantry and cable hauler are rare surviving examples of dockside equipment used for the loading of submarine telecommunications cables,” it continued.
“Both structures survive well, being largely complete, and through their orientation clearly illustrate both the relationship between the former factory and the riverside and the process of hauling cable out of the factory and onto cable-laying ships.”
The report also said there was a “group value” because the gantry and winding gear were next to “the Grade II-listed Enderby House, an early-mid C19 building that is one of the few surviving structures associated with the former submarine cable factory at Enderby’s Wharf”.
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