The former Noah’s Ark pub in Deptford

A newspaper feature about ‘homes in former pubs’ transported me back to Deptford. A two-bedroom apartment in what used to be the Noah’s Ark was yours for £435,000. I cannot say if that represents value. Our first flat not far from there cost £40,000.

I worked on Deptford High Street for the best part of ten years, and retain an affection for the area, based on nostalgia and not being as young now as then.

The Noah’s Ark was a local landmark. Standing at the corner of the High Street, it had a distinctive curved frontage. A long time ago now, but I’m sure we sometimes drank in there at lunchtime.

Once I went there to interview the Flying Pickets, a group formed by left-wing actors. You may recall they had a number one hit with their acapella version of Yazoo’s Only You. One of the singers, Brian Hibbard, later enjoyed a run in Coronation Street.

Many people I interviewed in those days went on to have second or third acts, including Jools Holland of the band Squeeze, long before his big band days and long before presenting Later for a hundred years or whatever it is.

Dire Straits also once played at a festival on Crossfields Estate in Deptford. The flats were stacked up around a courtyard, and the band had a square of grass for a stage. With student friends I watched from above on a balcony belonging to someone or other.

A little light digging unearthed a further story about the Noah’s Ark. Planning enforcement officers from Lewisham Council visited the former public house after a complaint from a local resident.

They discovered that the building had been substantially demolished with only the ground floor frontage remaining. As the building stands in a conservation area, the developers were told to rebuild what had been destroyed.

The newspaper where I once worked is long gone; undue disappearance being something local pubs and local newspapers share. The office was next to Deptford station, with a view of the platform and its choreography of passing legs, cut off at the knees. A world of typewriters and carbon copies, ashtrays on the desks, lunchtime tipples in days when people still tippled.

Deptford has a grand old church, St Paul’s, consecrated in 1730. The priest, David John Diamond, was a great friend of our editor, Roger Norman. Drinks parties were sometimes held there. When Father Diamond died in August 1992, an obituary in the Independent described him as “one of the most remarkable parish priests in the Church of England”.

Roger Norman was remarkable too in his way, especially in how in the 1970s he used the South East London Mercury to stand against the National Front. He could also, after a pint or more of lunchtime Guinness, be touchy in the afternoon.

Deptford earns a few mentions in Peter Ackroyd’s book Thames, Sacred River, including that it is “perhaps most famous as the location of Christopher Marlowe’s death”. The Elizabethan playwright and poet was killed in a local pub, aged 29.

I knew about that and other unfortunate incidents. But it was new to me that, as Ackroyd also records, Peter the Great lived for several months at a house owned by the writer and horticulturalist John Evelyn. During that stay his “favourite pastime was to be driven in a wheelbarrow drunk, through Evelyn’s neat hedges”.

Other historical facts mentioned by Ackroyd include the riverbank at Deptford having once been home to “the first high-voltage power station in the world”. More gruesomely, he also mentions that the U-bend in the Thames between Deptford and the Isle of Dogs can delay the drowned in their course to the sea, earning the grim nickname Deadman’s Dock.

Another label given to the place was Dear Dirty Deptford, which could be seen as both affectionate and a reflection of the area’s poverty. The phrase was perhaps adopted from Dear Dirty Dublin, as used by James Joyce about the home city he escaped but never left.

The late historian Gillian Tindall once went in search of old Deptford. She reported that “Deptford, long ago, was a place of fertile green water-meadows, facing the Thames and adjacent to a creek. Here Henry VIII established his Royal Dockyard, in the days when he was a popular young sovereign rather than an obese tyrant. Ships built in Deptford went out all over the world for the next three-and-a-half centuries. By Shakespeare’s time, the scattered country village that had been medieval Deptford had expanded into a riverside settlement. Well-to-do Londoners came down by river to drink there on summer evenings…”

Perhaps they still do. I have always meant to return. Maybe one day I will.

Like most people, I’d never heard of the poor man; and yet there he was, in the headlines every day…

A lifetime in and around newspapers teaches you that journalists and commentators can benefit society – and also that sometimes their behaviour is appalling.

The latter is certainly the case for those who relentlessly hounded Jason Arday, a former Cambridge University professor of sociology, who died by suicide earlier this month. Arday resigned from the role after media investigations into his academic credentials.

Like most people, I’d never heard of the poor man; and yet there he was, in the headlines every day. Sociology professors are not normally granted such attention, or any attention.

Yet Arday had hundreds of articles and comment pieces written about him. His worth as an academic, and whether he only won such a coveted role for being black, was discussed endlessly, and without mercy.

I have no idea if he was suitable for the job he did, or if he made mistakes or suffered from poor judgement. But no-one deserves such a mauling.

Following his death, certain usual suspect columnists deleted tweets and social media posts attacking Arday. Others carried on laying into him, for theirs is a shameless pursuit.

I honestly don’t know enough about this to comment further, other than to say that I do know a witch hunt when I see one. Oh, and surely Cambridge University must have questions to answer about staff care.

And those columnists and presenters who hauled up this one man as a gotcha example of what they think is wrong with society really are beyond the pale.