SE10, SE7 and SE18 · Royal Greenwich
Greenwich data recovery. A show build and a season of orchestral parts: one copy each, no way to make another.
The Royal Borough does two entirely different jobs. West of the peninsula is a World Heritage town — the Old Royal Naval College, the Royal Observatory, the National Maritime Museum, the Cutty Sark. East of it are Woolwich, Plumstead, Abbey Wood and Thamesmead, a district that lost its defence industry when the Royal Arsenal closed in 1994 and has spent thirty years being rebuilt as housing. Between them sits the newest part of all. Woolwich Works opened on 23 September 2021 across five listed Arsenal buildings and now houses the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, Punchdrunk and Protein: orchestral libraries and parts, rehearsal and performance recordings, show-control and lighting data, set and technical drawings, and immersive builds heavy with 3D, audio and game-engine assets. That is production media on fast local storage, not documents on a server. Out on the peninsula the Design District — sixteen buildings by eight architecture practices, opened in September 2021 for around 1,800 workers — runs on single-machine studios and external SSDs, with Ravensbourne University London next door and 8,685 students behind it. And the postcodes are simpler than they look: the arena, Ravensbourne and the Design District are SE10, as are Greenwich town and the Cutty Sark, and only Charlton's SE7 is wholly Greenwich. Eastward the work is plainer — Queen Elizabeth Hospital in SE18, small trades through Eltham and Charlton, and Peabody's twenty thousand homes going up at Thamesmead, which spans two boroughs and has no station of its own. Nothing is collected anywhere here. Media travels tracked and insured, assessment on arrival is free, and the price goes on paper before anything else: cards and sticks at £250 + VAT, one disk on its own at £300 + VAT, multi-disk work from £500 + VAT.
Put it to an engineer — the first look costs nothing
0203 0868633
Five jobs Greenwich sends in.
Different fault? Try the finder →| What is going on | What arrives from here | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| A studio SSD that mounts and then disappears | A whole immersive build, held in one place only | Unplug it, leave it be, post the drive on its own |
| A rehearsal machine that will not finish starting | Recordings and show states written straight to the local disk | Send the disk and leave the machine where it stands |
| A design-studio tower that has begun clicking | Drawings, renders and every client job in one folder tree | Off at the wall, and no more attempts to start it |
| A four-bay NAS bought by the studio, not by IT | Plugged in once, filled up, and never looked at since | It travels whole, cased as it is, and nobody opens it |
| An office server that stopped part way through a rebuild | Every current job, every invoice and the whole mail store | Power off, bay numbers on the disks, then post them bare |
Before it leaves the Royal Borough.
Four Greenwich questions.
Is the O2 in Greenwich or Tower Hamlets?
Greenwich: the O2, North Greenwich station, Ravensbourne and the Design District are all SE10. The E14 North Greenwich on old maps was a nineteenth-century name for the tip of the Isle of Dogs opposite, in Tower Hamlets. Greenwich town, the Cutty Sark and the Old Royal Naval College are SE10 too; Charlton's SE7 is the only district wholly this borough. None of it alters the terms, because nothing is picked up from any postcode.
How long does a drive posted from SE18 take?
Posted on a weekday, it is generally with an engineer by the next morning. There is no charge for that look, and it produces one price, put in writing. File-system faults and deleted-file work are usually done within two working days. A mechanical fault runs longer, since a donor has to be sourced and then matched to your drive. You are told which of those two you are in from the start.
The show build sits on a studio SSD and it will not mount. What now?
Cut the power to it and go no further. Repair utilities do harm, and reinstalling Windows over a failing disk can be the end of it. A read-only image comes first, every later step is run on the copy, and the drive itself returns to you unaltered. If a rehearsal or an opening turns on particular assets, name them and those come out ahead of the rest.
How should a studio NAS travel from the peninsula?
Ring 0203 0868633 before anyone touches it. NAS units come whole, still cased; there is nothing to gain by opening one. Servers and RAID sets want the opposite treatment — draw each disk out, mark it with its bay as it comes free, and let nobody guess the ordering later. The member that dropped out belongs in the parcel too, bare like the rest, with any rebuild stopped before the box leaves.
Begin here if yours is doing the same thing.
Next door to Greenwich, on the same terms
Post it from SE10 or SE18 and work starts on arrival.
Cut the power to it and then leave it be. What was the machine doing at the moment it stopped? That answer is generally worth more to us than anything else you can send. The examination costs nothing, the price arrives in writing, and no billable work happens until you have said yes to it.