Opening of the London Docks on 31 January 1805.
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| Opening of the London Docks on 31 January 1805. |
Docks at Wapping were under construction even before the Regent's Canal and dock were finished.
The London Dock Bill was passed in 1800 and the dock itself opened in 1805.
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| An elevated view of the docks at Wapping, c. 1805. |
The entrance to the dock was from the Thames at Shadwell and a high wall surrounded the whole site.
The chief designer was Daniel Alexander, Surveyor to Trinity House, for whom he built several lighthouses.
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| The London Docks at Wapping in 1824. |
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| Pennington Street Warehouse no. 2, London Docks. |
The splendid warehouses of brick, with stone plinths carved with ammonites and sea patterns, were four storeys high.
One of the warehouses was built to store 24,000 hogsheads of tobacco weighing 545kg (1200lb) each (the equivalent of about 30,000 tons).
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| London Docks, looking west, in 1831. |
The London Docks Company had a 21-years monopoly to unload all vessels entering the port with tobacco, rice, wine and brandy (except from the East and West Indies).
Henry Mayhew visited the London Docks in 1849. He recorded his impressions of the surrounding area of Wapping:
The courts and alleys round about the London Docks swarm with low lodging-houses, and are inhabited either by the dock labourers, sack-makers, watermen, or that peculiar class of London poor who pick up a precarious living by the water side.
The open streets themselves have all, more or less, a maritime character. Every other shop is either stocked with gear for the ship or for the sailor. The windows of one house are filled with quadrants and bright brass sextants, chronometers and compasses….
The passengers alone would tell you that you were in the maritime districts of London.
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Mayhew said this about the docks:
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Along the quay, you see new men with their faces blue with indigo, and now gaugers with their long brass-tipped rule dripping with spirit from the cask they have been probing; then will come a group of flaxen-haired sailors, chattering German; and next a black sailor with a cotton handkerchief twisted turban-like around his head….
The sailors are singing boisterous songs from the Yankee ship just entering, the cooper is hammering at the casks on the quay, the chains of the cranes, loosed of their weight, rattle as they fly up again; the ropes splash in the water; some captain shouts his orders through his hands; a goat bleats from some ship in the basin; and empty
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