But the objections were met, and a Bill for the construction of docks at Wapping and at the Isle of Dogs passed into law on 23 May 1800. It marked the beginning of a new tidal river. It also changed the nature of the city itself, since by the second decade of the nineteenth century London had become unique in the world as the capital city of finance, seat of government and great port; Petrograd, Lisbon and Amsterdam were not competitors in all of those respects.
As a direct result of the new enterprise, the reaches of the Thames between Westminster Bridge and Greenwich became known as “London River.” There was an area of the river known also as “London Pool,” the “Upper Pool” stretching from London Bridge to Tower Bridge, and the “Lower Pool” from Tower Bridge to Bermondsey. The West India Dock on the northern end of the Isle of Dogs was soon joined by the London Dock at Wapping, the East India Dock at Blackwall and the Surrey Dock at Rotherhithe, thus forming the largest assembly of wet docks in the world. In 1820 the Regent’s Canal Dock was built at Limehouse to allow merchandise to make its way inland through the network of existing canals. It was followed by the construction of St. Katharine’s Dock in 1828. This was a more controversial site in certain respects, since it entailed the demolition of the ancient St. Katharine’s Hospital with its companion church of St. Katharine by the Tower. Many old streets were also torn down in the process, among them such insalubrious riverine locations as Dark Entry, Cat’s Hole, Shovel Alley, Rookery and Pillory Lane. The names are an adequate demonstration of the dark world that could grow up in the immediate vicinity of the river.
The effects of the new docks were immediate and profound. The ships were discharged within three to four days, as opposed to a month under the previous dispensation. Security became of paramount concern, and the hatches of all ships were nailed or tied down at Gravesend before sailing upriver. No carts or porters were allowed to enter the new quays, thus preventing casual or systematic pilfering. Even the loose sugar found in the holds was collected and sold for the benefit of the merchant. The walls around the new docks were fixed at a height of 20 feet (6 m). As we have seen, a new police force—the first statutory police force in the country—was established to protect the traffic of the river.
When a new highway was built to connect these docks with the City of London, it was aptly named the Commercial Road, and the foundation stone of the West India Dock was inscribed with the motto “An Undertaking which, under the Favour of God, shall contribute Stability, Increase and Ornament, to British Commerce.” Its construction had also been financed by British commerce, and the grand scheme became the largest single privately funded enterprise in the history of the country. It is interesting to note, in this context, that the successor to the London docks—the great planning initiative known generically as “Dockland”—now has some claim to rivalling that achievement. The river attracts money, as Defoe noted many centuries before. It is still liquid silver.
The docks themselves were created in a spirit of immensity. The first brick warehouses to appear on the banks of the Thames were as large as palaces, as well defended as castles. Their principal architect, Daniel Asher Alexander, is perhaps best known for his design of England’s prisons, such as Maidstone and Dartmoor, and the docks themselves were a place of maximum security. Yet the river is also a place of vision and in Georgian London (1946), Sir John Summerson compares the work of Alexander to the visionary fantasies of Piranesi—“While Coleridge turned the plates of the Opere Varie and the young de Quincey drugged himself into Piranesian frenzy, Alexander built these reminiscences of the Carceri into gaols and warehouses.”
The tobacco warehouse at Wapping was celebrated for “covering more ground, under one roof, than any public building, or undertaking, except the pyramids of Egypt.” The walls of the London Docks were longer and higher than the walls that had once been placed around London. Artificial lakes were built, comprising some 300 acres of water. The marshlands of the Isle of Dogs were drained.
The plethora of engravings and etchings, lithographs and watercolours, tells its own story of pride and achievement over two centuries. The Opening of the St. Katharine Docks, October 28, 1828 depicts a panorama of great ships, flags and crowds; many of the men are waving their top-hats in the air, while groups of people throng the balconies of the tall warehouses beside the basin. Howland Great Wet Dock, Rotherhithe, 1700 shows from an aerial perspective a large artificial lake set among fields and marshes; there are avenues of trees along both sides of it, designed not as a picturesque accompaniment but as a windbreak. Brunswick Dock at Blackwall, 1803 is a wide riverscape by William Daniell that suggests the scale of the enterprise; some thirty masted vessels are shown arrayed in ranks, while the river winds in the distance down to the sea.
Daniell himself finished many aquatints of the new docks, all of them on a large scale, and has some claim to being the artist of that mercantile revolution. His New Docks and Warehouses, On the Eve of Completion, 1802, on the Isle of Dogs near Limehouse is the view of a miniature city, itself the size of Venice. His A View of the London Dock, 1808 is of a great city within a city; but there are as many ships upon the river itself as in the dock. He was an exact draughtsman, concerned with detail as well as perspective, but there is no doubt concerning the grandeur of his conception. A passage from Ezekiel was often quoted by those who wished to emphasise the spiritual as well as physical blessings manifested by the new port—“O Thou that are situate at the entry of the sea, which art a merchant of the people for many isles…Thy borders are in the midst of the seas, thy builders have perfected thy beauty.” Anything pertaining to the river can elicit a religious response.
And so there emerged Lady Dock and Russia Dock, Albion Dock and Lavender Pond, Greenland Dock and Acorn Pond, Canada Dock and Quebec Pond. What is perhaps most remarkable of all is that, from the river itself, they were all but invisible. They were hidden behind the high warehouses and factories and channels, so that it seemed as if the city itself had swallowed up the ships. But the docks built in the first decades of the nineteenth century were not enough. The use of steamships on deep sea voyages made it necessary to construct ever larger and deeper docks. The largest sailing ship might reach a maximum size of 1,500 tons (1,524 tonnes); but the steamship Great Western, which made its maiden voyage across the Atlantic to America in 1838, was already 2,300 tons (2,337 tonnes). By 1855 a great new complex, the Victoria Dock, had been constructed on marshlands between Blackwall Reach and Galleons Reach. It was followed thirteen years later by Millwall Dock. Then in 1886 the new docks at Tilbury were opened. The older docks had to be rebuilt or extended for the larger vessels, and in 1904 a new Greenland Dock was built as part of the Surrey Docks. Some twenty-five years after its own construction the Victoria Dock was joined by the Royal Albert Dock. At a length of 3/4 miles and a water area of 87 acres (35 ha), it was capable of receiving vessels of 12,000 tons (12,192 tonnes). These were all great plains of calm water, lacustrine cities within which floated fleets and argosies from all over the world, moving in and out on every tide; this was a world of masts and funnels, sails and rigging. It was a treasure house and a refuge, a fort and an industry.
In the nineteenth century there was enough rum imported to make the entire city drunk, and one vat in the Rum Quay at the West India Dock held 7,800 gallons (35,450 l). There was enough sugar to sweeten the Thames and enough indigo to dye the river blue. Sealed under bond, in the warehouses, were generally £10 million by cost of pepper, £23 million of tobacco and £51 million of tea. There was rubber, and coffee, and cinnamon, and dates and canned meats. A single cold store in the Royal Albert Dock could accommodate 250,000 carcasses of mutton, and the Surrey Docks could hold a million tons of timber. The wine terminal at West India Dock could contain almost a million gallons (over 4.5 million l).
After the construction of the docks, the trade of London grew ever larger and more exotic. Young elephant tusks known as scrivelloes and young ostrich feathers called spads were imported from the colon
ies. The huge tusks of mammoths, retrieved from the frozen wastes of Siberia, were shipped to the London Ivory Market. Ambergris came from the bellies of whales, and liquid aloe was poured into monkey skins where it hardened into cadaver shapes.
As a result of this trade, much of it highly specific or rare, the old wharves and quays still flourished in the shade of the great docks. Although the owners of the docks wished to maintain their monopoly of trade, the free enterprise of the Thames was a stronger force. It has always been a levelling river. The lightermen had been granted permission to work in the new docks but, when the monopoly on the dockyard storing of goods expired, the old wharves redoubled their business. There were seventeen hundred wharves on the river between Brentford and Gravesend. In the short stretch between London Bridge and the Tower of London there were thirty-four wharves, from Fresh Wharf to Brewers Key on the north bank and from Toppings Wharf to Hartleys Wharf on the south.
Their names, and some of their structures, survive still in the large apartment blocks on both sides of the river. The configuration of Oliver’s Wharf and Orient Wharf at Wapping, for example, stands as a ghostly presence within the old and new buildings upon the site. Beyond them St. John’s Wharf, and Sun Wharf, and Swan Wharf, remain almost unchanged. Some of the ancient watermen’s stairs, such as Wapping Old Stairs by the station of the river police, exist still.
The entire system of docks became the province of the poet and the painter, and the novelist, as much as the mariner or the merchant. Joseph Conrad, who knew the docks at first hand as a master seaman, wrote an essay on “London River: The Great Artery of England” in 1904; he compared the great conglomeration of wharves to “a jungle by the confused, varied, and impenetrable aspect of the buildings that line the shore…London, the oldest and greatest of river ports, does not possess as much as a hundred yards of open quays upon its river front. Dark and impenetrable at night, like the face of a forest, is the London waterside.” He described how the “lightless walls seem to spring from the very mud upon which the stranded barges lie.” The port was for him a thing “grown up, not made,” representing an organic life that obeyed its own laws of growth and change. In that sense the river reflected, or mirrored, the condition of the city through which it flowed.
For him each dock had its own life and character. St. Katharine’s Dock evinced “cosiness” and seclusion, while the great London Docks were “venerable and sympathetic” with “an old-world air.” He believed that these sites were “as romantic as the river they serve,” principally because they seemed to partake of the antiquity of the Thames itself. They had become imagined places, unique places, “by the long chain of adventurous enterprises that had their inception in the town and floated out into the world on the waters of the river.” So the sacredness of the river cast its blessing even upon “the vast scale of the ugliness” that the docks created. Even what was then the most modern of them, Tilbury Dock, had for Conrad the indefinable quality of enchantment in its “remoteness and isolation upon the Essex Marsh.” The Thames was “an historical river” that cast its spell upon the life and industry of its banks. “The docks are impossible to describe,” Verlaine wrote in 1872. “They are unbelievable! Tyre and Carthage all rolled into one!” The protagonist of J. K. Huysmans’s novel, A Rebours (1884), sees in reverie “vistas of endless docks stretched farther than the eye could see, crowded with cranes and capstans and bales of merchandise…gigantic warehouses bathed by the foul black water of an imaginary Thames, in a forest of masts.” When Baudelaire saw Whistler’s etchings of the wharves and docks between Tower Bridge and Wapping, he remarked that they manifested “the profound and complex poetry of a vast capital.” But it is also the poetry of the river.
Just as Defoe employed the poetry of trade in his accounts of the eighteenth-century Thames, so the writers of the nineteenth century vied with each other in descriptions of the docks’ immensity. The commerce of the river was somehow touched by the myth and mystery of the Thames, so that its harshness and squalor were consumed in the general invocations of spectacle and magnificence. The sacredness of the river throughout human history also affected the perception of its trading activities; they, too, are described with a vague but evident religiosity.
The engravings by Doré of the London riverside, in his London: A Pilgrimage (1872), are preceded by an image of Old Father Thames as some wild and ancient deity with his hair streaming down his back. He presides over a dark world of labour and sacrifice, with the workers of the docks as his votaries. The crowds of small anonymous figures proceed in endless array through yards and warehouses that tower above them. They swarm; they seem to move in rhythm, dimly outlined. They are caught in chiaroscuro, enmeshed in shadow and fitful light, with the thick network of sails and masts and funnels dominating the foreground. The water itself, when it can be seen, is black—black with coal-dust, or hides, or tobacco. The Docks—Night Scene depicts a world of frantic activity with a background of mast upon mast like some dark wood from a dream.
So London itself loomed along the banks with its corona of perpetual smoke, its dust, its noise and its smell. At the end of the nineteenth century, too, the first high-voltage power station in the world was built on the banks of the river at Deptford. This was followed by the power stations of Battersea, Fulham and Bankside. There were other tokens of the future world. In 1880 the first consignment of American oil came ashore at Thames Haven; it was discharged from a sailing ship, but the arrival was the harbinger of all the great oil-refineries that would emerge by the side of the estuarial Thames.
At the beginning of the twentieth century it seemed that the commerce of the river would endure for ever, as long as there were oceans and tides. In 1909 the Port of London Authority was created to supervise this continuing project, and in its first programme of works it envisaged new docks and basins at the West India Dock, Millwall Dock and Albert Dock. A scheme of wholesale extension and improvement was agreed, and by 1913 the port was handling 20 million tons (over 20 million tonnes) of cargo each year. In 1921 the King George V Dock was opened in Silvertown, further enlarging a complex of docks that had spread over 234 acres (94.6 ha) of interconnected water. The Royal Albert Dock itself had a basin 1 mile in length, so that it could have been some inland sea. The docks at Tilbury encompassed 106 acres (43 ha) of enclosed water and 4 miles of quay frontage. By 1930 the port and docks of London afforded employment to one hundred thousand people, most of whom lived in the immediate vicinity of the Thames, and handled 35 million tons (35.5 million tonnes) of cargo within its riverine empire of 700 acres (283 ha).
At the beginning of the twentieth century the industries of the river were in fact increasing at what seemed at the time to be an alarming rate. The river at Brentford had become wholly industrial, while there were factories and mills at Lambeth, Nine Elms, Battersea, Wandsworth and Fulham. There were soap-works and rubber-works at Isleworth, manufacturers of roll shutters at Teddington and of motor-cars at Ham. There were saw-mills in Pimlico, which became one of the centres of the timber trade. The vast army of one hundred thousand workers included dockers and stevedores, lightermen and sailors, all of them owing their livelihood to the tides of the river.
In 1931 Virginia Woolf wrote an essay, “The Docks of London,” in which she described how the “banks of the river are lined with dingy, decrepit-looking warehouses. They huddle on land that has become flat and slimy mud…Behind masts and funnels lies a sinister dwarf city of workmen’s houses. In the foreground cranes and warehouses, scaffolding and gasometers line the banks with a skeleton architecture.” For her it was a “dismal prospect,” and she can perhaps be forgiven for not understanding the imperatives of trade.
The twentieth-century French novelist, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, adopted a more enthusiastic and celebratory tone in Guignol’s Band (1944) where he expatiates upon the
phantasmagoric storehouses, citadels of merchandise, mountains of tanned goatskins enough to stink all the way to Kamchatka! Forests of m
ahogany in thousands of piles, tied up like asparagus, in pyramids…rugs enough to cover the Moon, the whole world…Enough sponges to dry up the Thames! Enough wool to smother Europe…Herrings to fill the seas! Himalayas of powdered sugar…
But then, within two generations, all had gone. The advent of large container ships could not have been anticipated in the first half of the century; their cargo could now be lifted from ship to truck, without need of warehouses, and the vessels themselves were too large to be accommodated by the existing dock facilities. The emergence of great ports in other parts of the world, and the restrictive practices of the London dockworkers, only served to hasten the end. The docks fell silent. The East India Dock closed in 1967, after a life of 160 years, while the London Dock and St. Katharine’s Dock followed two years later. The West India Dock survived until 1980, after a span of 178 years, but by then the trade of the Thames was depleted beyond remedy. The last of the docks, the Royal Victoria, the Royal Albert and King George V, were closed in 1981. By the end of the twentieth century the docks had disappeared, vanished as if they had indeed all been a dream—the dream of toil, and suffering, on the banks of the river.
The author of the official History of the Port of London (1921), Sir Joseph Broodbank, suggests at one point that “with few exceptions once a great community establishes itself on a site, that site permanently remains a dwelling place of crowded humanity.” He was no doubt inferring that the dockland of London would remain a centre of mercantile and commercial activity, which he believed to be “as secure as the future of any human institution can be,” but he was correct in quite another sense. Dockland has once more become a place of “crowded humanity,” but not one concerned with trade. It has become a new city, opening up what is known as the “Thames Gateway” to create ever expanded communities. Out of the deserted docks, ten years after they had been consigned to weed and ruin, rose the shining edifices and refurbished warehouses that have become the single most important extension of London since the growth of the suburbs in the early twentieth century. That is a story for another chapter in the history of the Thames.
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