There have been important Tide Mills on the Deptford Broadway section of the Creek since medieval times, and some relatively small scale pioneering chemical manufacturing lower down the Creek since the 17thcentury.  But otherwise the swampy Creek remained largely a neglected backwater well beyond the orbit of London - until all changed at the beginning of the 19th century.  With the arrival of the coal powered Industrial Revolution, London entered the new century with a population rapidly heading towards a million. By1845 there were two million Londoners, and by 1885, four million.  They needed better transport, by land and sea, more power, improved health and safety, more food, and manufactures of every kind.  And inventers and manufacturing entrepreneurs flocked to London in response.  But as early as 1825 it was becoming increasingly difficult to find the right conditions within the heart of London for start-up ventures: cheap land, easily accessible sea-borne supplies,  especially of coal.  Plus access to existing engineering and technical skills.  Nearby, though, Deptford Creek ticked all the boxes.  So, between 1825 and 1900, a series of innovative Creek-based ventures helped London expand into the world’s first mega city.  On the transport front, John Penn’s Greenwich-built marine steam engines, and the Brocklebank brothers’ General Steam Navigation Company led the way in using steam power to transform sea transport.  In 1836, London’s first railway, between London Bridge and Greenwich, did the same on land.  By this time, Deptford Creek was also becoming a hot bed of new chemical manufacturing techniques and production. In 1845, John Bennett Lawes started the world’s first Super Phosphate fertilizer factory here –  to help struggling farmers keep pace with the growing appetites of urban factory workers, in London and round the world.  To keep London’s overcrowded workers healthy and safe, between 1857 and 1865 Joseph Bazalgette provided London with the world’s first effective mass sewage system.  And from the beginning the Greenwich Pumping Station played the key role it still maintains, with the 21st century addition of the modernised Thames Tideway Super Sewer.  Meanwhile, from the 1870’s Merryweather’s prize winning fire engines were leaving the Creek not just for London, but for every corner of the world. As steam power reached its limits in the 1880’s, it was at the mouth of Deptford Creek that the young Sebastian de Ferranti masterminded the creation of the world’s first modern-style electricity power station – and in 1891, put Greenwich High Road among the world’s earliest streets to be illuminated by power-station generated electricity. This scale of influential industrial innovation and manufacture couldn’t last.  London,  and especially places like Deptford Creek, were physically too small to sustain the levels of production their 19th century successes now required.  So as the 20th century developed, one after another, aging Creek industries re-located beyond London.  They were replaced by much more basic activities where water transport was still an asset, like the removal of scrap metal and urban rubbish, and the delivery of building aggregate. The Creek and its communities survived the two World Wars, but by the 1980’s, even those basic activities were failing, leaving the Creek to the 21st century property developers.  First results have seen an uneasy mix of older and newer communities, united in little except the general amnesia about the Creek’s 19th century glory days.  CreekLink was founded to help make this forgotten historical legacy available once again to all the Creek’s communities, via a new public realm equally accessible to all, and proudly shared at the heart of a newly vibrant Creek neighbourhood.