IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Millpond Place, CARSHALTON, SM5 2JT

This photograph shows Butter Hill Bridge over the River Wandle, and the premises of Vinyl Products Limited. According to information from Gordon Lee who worked there from 1964 to 1979, "Vinyl Products manufactured water-based emulsion polymers based mainly on vinyl acetate which was supplied from the BP oil refinery in Baglan Bay, South Wales, and delivered by road tanker. The polymer emulsions were sold for use in the manufacture of emulsion paint, wood adhesives, paper coating and non-woven fabrics. Vinyl Products was founded before the Second World War by a Cambridge University research scientist, Dr. J E O Mayne and colleagues. In the early 1970s it was purchased by Unilever, who provided the capital for a new manufacturing site at Warrington, Cheshire, to bring it closer to its suppliers and customers, and provide access to an ICI ethylene pipeline. It survived the Margaret Thatcher era and re-organisation by Unilever, but the Carshalton site was closed down and the company was sold on as part of a deal with ICI who later sold it to Celanese. The tradename Vinamul is still in use by Celanese."

This shows sluices which were used to control the level on the Wandle and thus the admission of water to the vinyl works, part of whose plant can be seen in the gap between the foreground buildings.

Public access to this viewpoint was not possible until the industrial premises surrounding were removed.

This small building at the junction of Mill Lane with Butter Hill, is occupied by Design and Print, a Graphic Design and website design company.

To see the same sluices many years earlier, Image

The removal of old industrial premises has made stretches of the Wandle accessible which previously were not so. This shows part of the Wandle upstream of the sluices. The white building in the distance is occupied by a graphic design company.

This is the River Wandle viewed looking downstream as it goes through the central opening of Three Arch Bridge. The fine skew arch bridge carries the railway line between Carshalton and Hackbridge stations over the river and Mill Lane.

This old road is spanned by the ex-LBSCR railway viaduct, which also crosses the River Wandle on the left. Visible through the bridge is an old-style telephone box, and in front of it is seen one of the ornamental sewer vents of which there were some 20 at one time in Carshalton. Whether either of these features survive into 2007 I do not know.

Looking north along Mill Lane from its junction with Butter Hill. This is the ex-LBSCR railway bridge.