London Docklands, August 2016 - Economic change and the landscape

As I have mentioned before (in a blog of October 2015), I was brought up in west London where the wider world flew over my house daily in the guise of planes landing at Heathrow.  Underground trains from my local station on the District Line passed through the centre of London and headed out east, but I never stayed on them beyond my school stop (Ravenscourt Park) or one of the stations in what is now Zone 1 of the London system. I scarcely knew the eastern part of London at all.

I suppose that at the time London’s docklands were the powerhouse of the city – and one of the driving forces of the UK economy.  We learned all about that in geography at school, where we had to draw maps labelled with the various docks and the goods they handled.  Some of the names were evocative of empire and royalty – East India, West India, George V, Victoria, Royal Albert, Surrey Commercial (with different basins named for Canada, Quebec, Greenland and so on), Milwall, St Katharine’s, and London Dock itself.   The fact that I didn’t explore the docks themselves didn’t mean that I knew nothing of them.  Events there often made the headlines in the London Evening News, ‘events’ particularly involving strikes led by Jack Dash, a communist trades union leader who has posthumously been credited with trebling dockers’ wages between 1949 and 1972.  One of my visits to the docks was actually brought about by a seamens’ (rather than dockers’) strike when with my parents we drove all the way across to the Royal Docks one Sunday afternoon in 1966 to see immobilised ships stacked right across the dock.

My other early direct images of London’s Docklands are few.  We had a school trip to Greenwich which involved a hired boat downstream from near the Tower of London, passing all the wharves while they were still working.  Like many others of my age I retain the image of the cranes lining the Pool of London (between Tower and London Bridges) dipping as the funeral barge of Winston Churchill passed by in January 1965.  I once visited an older cousin who was a serving merchant seaman on a vessel that had come into the Royal Albert dock.  With a friend I went to see Sir Francis Chichester’s ‘Gypsy Moth IV’ moored at St Katharine’s dock in late 1967 after his return from his solo circumnavigation of the globe.  In retrospect I suppose that was an early stage in St Katharine’s becoming basically a pleasure dock.  And with that same friend we drove once to Wapping to visit the ‘Prospect of Whitby’ pub, paying the going rate of sixpence each to the local dockers’ children to ‘protect your car, mister’.

A photo I took near Wapping in 1965.

 Despite living in Sheffield, I now visit London’s old docklands quite frequently.   There are certain comparisons to be made with the Newcastle quayside that I blogged about in March of this year. In both London and Newcastle the old working-class employment in the docks has gone.  Both areas have become strong middle-class residential enclaves. 

But there are also big differences.  In particular, in Newcastle almost all the old quayside buildings have been swept away to be replaced by new constructions.   The western part of the London Docklands has instead seen the retention, refurbishment and improvement of a significant proportion of the historic dock buildings.  And to these have been added a range of new constructions – some of which have merit in reproducing the massing and feel of the old.  (Others do not – the old Design Museum in Bermondsey, created by Terence Conran, sadly being one of them.)  One significant difference between Newcastle and London is that along the Tyne boats tied up to a quayside and goods were then moved into warehouses set back from the river, while along the Thames there was direct traffic from ships into wharf buildings that abutted the river itself. 

I have just walked the stretch from Tower Bridge to Rotherhithe along the south bank of the river, crossing under the Thames on the paradoxically-named ‘Overground’ to Wapping and then walking back along the north shore.  What an atmospheric walk that is now.  First Shad Thames – a narrow cobbled canyon running between high brick-built warehouse buildings that have been converted into apartments.  Then along Butlers Wharf by the river to St Saviour’s Dock – a long muddy inlet where the cranes still stand proudly on the warehouses that are now flats.  On along Bermondsey Wall with a mix of old and new buildings, then the Angel and the Mayflower pubs – the latter on the site where the Pilgrim Fathers left London for the New World.  And to the centuries old houses and church of Rotherhithe village, and the museum and works associated with Brunel’s digging of the first tunnel under the river (now occupied by the Overground line). 

Then back west from Wapping station along Wapping High Street, where a very fine set of warehouses look straight out onto the river.  In the 1840s one of my  ancestors was married from a pub along here – a seaman from Gateshead who was probably employed on a boat bringing Northumbrian coal for London hearths.  The noble lock-keepers’ houses at the former Wapping entrance to the London Docks are still there,  but the dock itself has been filled in and is now a sports pitch. At St Katharine’s Dock many of the original warehouses have been retained, and most of the newer infills are in keeping with these – the exception being the Guoman Tower Hotel, a ziggurat-like monolith of brick that must surely be the ugliest new construction on the Thames over the last 40 years, and in a prestige location next to Tower Bridge, more’s the pity. (Although I can attest that there are great views from the rooms in the hotel, from some of which much of the appalling building itself is hidden.)

Wapping today - at a spot near the earlier photograph

Further east from my morning walk, of course, lie the old Surrey Docks - now mostly housing. And then the northern part of the Isle of Dogs is taken up by the excitement of the Canary Wharf complex, with the watery dock basins providing relief and open space between the high rise of the financial office buildings and associated service operations that create a mass of skyscrapers dwarfing the thousands of business-suited employees that  throng the old dock sides and the stations of the toytown-like Docklands Light Railway  in its red livery – the traditional colour of London’s public transport.  And to the east again there is London City Airport with its runway along the side of the dock where, in the 1960s, I went to visit my cousin’s ship with its refrigerated cargo of New Zealand lamb.

In total there is almost nothing left of the economy of the Docks of when I was a child.  The irony of Jack Dash’s success in raising the wages of the dockers and stevedores (there was a clear trades union distinction between the two, the subject itself of strike disputes from time to time) was that just at the time when the dock workers achieved a viable wage the basis of their existence was cut from them by containerisation and the growth of bigger vessels, too large for the Port of London, to accommodate these metal boxes.  When he became a captain my cousin no longer came into London – instead his ship unloaded at Rotterdam.  Felixstowe became the premier port of the UK.  London’s docks fell into disuse remarkably quickly.  But the renaissance of the area followed with little pause.  I say ‘renaissance of the area’ because this brought few new opportunities for those previously employed in the dock industries.  London’s Docklands provide a case-study of de-industrialisation and globalisation and of the replacement of a working-class economy by one with opportunities primarily for an educated young middle-class population, with many of them being internationally mobile.  And so the old dock buildings have become offices, design studios, flats, bars, restaurants, supplemented by new constructions to serve similar functions.

But in one way London’s Docklands mirror today what they were when I drew maps of them in school geography lessons.  Then they were the powerhouse of London, and to some extent of the UK.  Today they are still part of the powerhouse of the city, and increasingly of the UK as a whole.  It’s just that power now lies in very different economic sectors in a post-industrial Britain.

As I made my way back to my hotel near London Bridge after my early morning return walk to Rotherhithe and Wapping I was struck by one further echo of the past.  In The Waste Land T S Eliot wrote:

“Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.”

As I approached London Bridge Station from Tower Bridge down the pedestrian street curiously named ‘More London’ from the new Mayoralty past the Ernst and Young (EY) Building and other major offices, Eliot’s words came back to me as I fought against the tide of office workers surging now eastwards towards their desks overlooking the old Pool of London.   It was a few minutes before that ‘dead sound’ of the strike of nine.  The offices of the old square mile of London have expanded eastwards into the dock areas along the river but some things haven’t changed that much – except where Eliot saw only men I now saw a crowd made up half of women.  And that’s something that wouldn’t have been so in the old days of the docks.