The Creekside Discovery Centre is a 0.5-hectare (1.2-acre) natural habitat in Deptford in the London Borough of Lewisham. It is owned by the National Grid and managed by the Creekside Education Trust. Formerly a gas works, the centre is a brownfield habitat incorporating the only existing sloping beach into Deptford Creek. Other habitats on the site include a pond, constructed in a project coordinated by the Creekside Education Trust in partnership with Lewisham College, and a sandbank, built in 2001.

Deptford is an area on the south bank of the River Thames in southeast London, in the Royal Borough of Greenwich and London Borough of Lewisham. It is named after a ford of the River Ravensbourne. From the mid 16th century to the late 19th it was home to Deptford Dockyard, the first of the Royal Dockyards. This was a major shipbuilding dock and attracted Peter the Great to come and study shipbuilding. Deptford and the docks are associated with the knighting of Sir Francis Drake by Queen Elizabeth I aboard the Golden Hind, the legend of Sir Walter Raleigh laying down his cape for Elizabeth, Captain James Cook's third voyage aboard HMS Resolution, and the mysterious apparent murder of Christopher Marlowe in a house along Deptford Strand.