London: The Biography

Vessels were moored side by side, with each ship being assigned its place on its arrival. Barges or smaller boats came alongside in order to receive the goods, which were then rowed upstream to the various official quays and wharves. It was a cumbersome procedure, given the general overcrowding of the Pool, and one which obviously led to theft and dishonest dealing on a large scale. As a result of various parliamentary inquiries, however, a decision was eventually taken to build proper docks, where cargo could be more expeditiously handled and enclosed. So began the great scheme of the “wet docks.” In 1799 the West India Dock Company Act was passed, and the whole Isle of Dogs began its transformation into its home. It was followed by the London Dock at Wapping, the East India Dock at Blackwall and the Surrey Dock at Rotherhithe. It was the largest single, privately funded enterprise in the history of London. Great fortress-like structures with gates and high walls were built, beside what were essentially artificial lakes covering some three hundred acres of water. The Isle of Dogs, formerly a wasteland of marsh, was turned into something like an elegant prison island; the sketches and aquatints of a contemporary artist, William Daniell, show grand avenues of brick warehouses. A new road was built connecting the docks to the City of London, from Aldgate to Limehouse; hundreds of houses were demolished in its path, and it entirely changed the aspect of east London. The Commercial Road was in that sense aptly named since this transformation of the city was done solely in the name of profit. 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.” Further changes followed with the building of the Regent’s Canal to connect the docks with the greater world, by means of a waterway going westward until it met the Grand Union Canal at Paddington Basin. Once again the city was opened up to more transport and traffic.

The whole enterprise was considered at the time to be an almost visionary undertaking, and the apotheosis of successful commercialism. 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.” Many of these Wapping warehouses were the work of Daniel Asher Alexander, who also built the huge prisons of Dartmoor and Maidstone; we may see here the association between money and the nature of power. One architectural historian has compared the edifices of Alexander with the architectural engravings of Piranesi. “While Coleridge turned the plates of the Opere Varie and young De Quincey drugged himself into Piranesian frenzy,” Sir John Summerson wrote in Georgian London, “Alexander built these reminiscences of the Carceri into gaols and warehouses.” Here money and power are given visionary, or mythic, potential.

The drawings and engravings which display the dock works in progress also command grand vistas and vast numbers of workmen to emphasise the scope of the enterprise. There were crowds when the work was completed, crowds when the waters of the Thames were allowed to flow into the basins, crowds when the first vessels were admitted. These were schemes of immensity, and resembled “the hydraulic works of ancient river civilisations,” suggesting that London’s great riverine adventure revived memories of ancient empires. “The docks are impossible to describe,” Verlaine wrote in 1872. “They are unbelievable! Tyre and Carthage all rolled into one!” He and his companion, Rimbaud, spent hours in the vast region noting the myriad goods and the myriad types of humanity jostling together; “they heard strange languages spoken,” Enid Starkie wrote in her biography of Rimbaud, “and saw printed on the bales of goods mysterious signs that they could not read.” James McNeill Whistler is generally considered to be the painter who evokes the poetry of the Thames when it is subdued by mist and occluded light, but that opinion neglects half of his achievement as a painter of the river. In his early sketches of the Thames between Tower Bridge and Wapping, the central images are of wharves and warehouses where work and trade are the persistent, essential London element. These etchings in fact elicited a remark from Baudelaire that they manifested “the profound and complex poetry of a vast capital.”