Deptford.org is a superb new website, put together by local journalist Elia Kabanov.
In the 22 years Londonist has been running, we've seen countless local website come and go, and some excellent ones stick around (especially in south-east London, for some reason). Few have got our attention quite like Deptford.org, a new-ish website covering news, culture and particularly history from the titular riverside town.
For starters, it's joyously slick. Click on any link and you get a slidey, scrolly transition-filled story, but done in a way that serves the narrative rather than looking showy-for-the-sake-of-it. The stories themselves are all highly engaging. Case in point is this article, about how the Isle of Dogs might have got its name thanks to some Deptford wordplay. Or this early map of Deptford dockyard.
We spoke to Elia — who has a background in science journalism — about his love of Deptford, and his hopes for the website.
Tell us a bit about your background, and how you came to be writing Deptford.org
My wife and I came to London in September 2022. After a month in glorious Beckton, we ended up in Deptford and have been here ever since. I knew almost nothing about the area beforehand. But once I started looking around, I immediately had questions. Why are there skulls on the gateposts of St Nicholas? Who was Benbow, after whom our street was named? Where did all those grand houses on Albury Street come from?
I started reading a lot, and over time I realised I had accumulated far more stories than I could keep to myself. The obvious way to share them was through guided walks for friends. After about 80 of those, I remembered that I’m actually a writer, not a tour guide. That's how Deptford.org began: as a place to collect what I was finding, share it with other people, and hopefully make them fall in love with Deptford too.
What made you set this up as a website, when most people would these days tell local stories through Instagram or TikTok?
Maybe it's a midlife crisis, but I've become nostalgic for the pre-social-media internet: all those strange independent websites made by people who were obsessed with one small thing. Deptford.org is partly an attempt to make something in that spirit.
A website also gives the stories room to choose their own form. One might work best as an ordinary article, another as a map, an infographic or a game. None of them has to fit whatever format an algorithm currently prefers.
And, more prosaically, most of this can be made at a desk. Researching an archive, writing, coding a map or building a visualisation comes much more naturally to me than scouting locations, filming and worrying about lighting and sound.
You've got a science writing background. How do you think the skills learnt as a science journalist are transferable to telling local history stories?
As a science writer, I've always thought of myself as a professional dilettante. You can't become an expert in everything happening across science, so you learn how to research new subjects, fact-check them and rely on experts who know far more about these topics than you ever will.
I try to bring the same approach to local history. Every Deptford.org piece starts with research, including primary sources where possible. I try not to repeat colourful urban legends simply because they make good stories. When I'm unsure about something, I find someone who knows the subject properly and ask them.
That matters in a place like Deptford, where centuries of history have produced many wonderful stories, but also plenty that have been repeated so often nobody remembers where they came from. Yes, I'm talking about Peter the Great and the wheelbarrow races.
Which features on Deptford.org are you particularly proud of?
Perhaps it’s cheeky, but one of my favourites is a little game about the birds of Brookmill Park. People have played it thousands of times, and while matching herons, kingfishers and moorhens they hopefully learn a little about the wildlife. I'm also very happy with the recent piece about the origins of the name Isle of Dogs. It takes Laura Wright's research and turns it into a visual story about how a possible shipwrights' joke may have survived on the London map. And I love the interview with Adam Wiseman, who photographed every single shopfront on Deptford High Street. What a way to document Deptford's ever-changing face!
Is it a one-man show or do you have a group of collaborators?
For now, I make the site myself, but many of the stories depend on other people: historians, local councillors, residents who know things I don't. Over time, I'd like more of those voices to appear on the site. There are enough people with a story or 10 about Deptford to keep it going for a very long time.
How would you like to see it develop over time? Live events? More contributors? Taking the concept to other parts of London?
My main goal is simply to publish more. I have features in various stages of development about its industrial past, culture and environment, and I'm collecting datasets of books and songs connected to the area.
And I've recently started a section called Beyond Deptford, where I use data visualisation to explore London more broadly. So the site can occasionally wander across the rest of the city, while Deptford remains its centre of gravity.
Deptford.org can be found here, and I urge you to go have a play. Elia also has a Substack called Hypertextual.org, where he plays around with data journalism.
