Portcities London

View of shipping at the Royal Victoria Dock from Silvertown Way. © NMM

The hydraulic lift at the Victoria Dock. © NMM

The dock could accommodate most vessels until 1935 when repairs made to the western entrance lock resulted in a significant reduction in depth. After this, the dock was restricted to barge traffic until it was reconstructed in the 1960s.

• The original dock was constructed with five ‘finger’ jetties, each measuring 177 metres long and 42.7 metres wide. They provided nearly 3 miles (4.8 kilometres) of quays.
• The entrance lock measured 24.4 metres wide, 99 metres long and 8.5 metres deep.
• The dock had the latest hydraulic machinery to open the lock gates (it took 1.5 minutes) and operate the cranes on the quays.
• Royal Victoria Dock was the first dock to be brought into the national railway system. It had good connections at Shoreditch and Fenchurch Street Station, through the Eastern Counties Railway.
• A number of warehouses were built nearby, and were connected to industries in the Midlands via the Great Northern Railway.
• Large warehouses were built to house American hogsheads of tobacco, each weighing half a ton. They were stored five high using electric cranes. Warehouse M was 6 storeys high, and had 42,475 cubic metres of storage space. At any one time there would be 15,000 – 20,000 tons of tobacco in bond.
• The Orange Warehouse had 3,716 square metres of floor space, complete with covered platforms for transport.
• The Banana Berth housed mechanical bucket conveyors which could process 80,000 stems of bananas per day.
• When the dock was reconstructed, the main quay measured 366 metres in length, with a return quay to the pontoon dock measuring 171 metres.