London: The Biography

Here the experience of confusion is compounded by the sense of mystery-of something living and alien-that lies at the heart of the city’s life. This is also the effect manifested in Gustave Doré’s engravings of the docks where the carters and the porters, the sailors and labourers, become darkly anonymous figures tending to the trade of London like ancient votaries; the warehouses and custom houses are generally enmeshed in shadow and chiaroscuro, like the thick netting of sails and masts which dominates the foreground. Fitful gleams can be seen upon the dark water “black with coal, blue with indigo, brown with tides, white with flour, stained with purple wine, or brown with tobacco.” These are the ranges of colours which Doré knew, at first sight, to be “one of the grand aspects of your London.” Again his scenes conjure up images of Piranesi, with the rigging and the spars and the ropes and the land bridges and planks blending together to form a picture of endless turmoil. “A whole people toil at the unloading of the enormous ships,” another French observer, Gabriel Mourey, wrote, “swarming on the barges, dark figures, dimly outlined, moving rhythmically, fill in and give life to the picture. In the far distance, behind the interminable lines of sheds and warehouses, masts bound the horizon, masts like a bare forest in winter, finely branched, exaggerated, aerial trees grown in all the climates of the globe.”

Since the docks had become one of the wonders of creation, many travellers felt obliged to visit them. It was necessary to obtain a letter of introduction for the captain of each dock, and then hire a boat from one of the stairs to take advantage of the ebbing tide. “You see shipping at anchor on both sides, many Dutch, Danes, Swedes, with licences I suppose, and many Americans”: this is from the 1810 diary of a French visitor. A German had pronounced upon the same subject in 1787: “It is an area of restless activity,” he wrote, “of constant noise, and of the hubbub of people … broad quays, large splendid warehouses like palaces.” This visitor also commented that “nearby rural pleasures seem to be very far away.” Since those pleasures, at Greenwich and Gravesend, were themselves upon the Thames the sheer imposition of the city’s trading machinery seemed to have obliterated their presence. When Prince Herman Pückler-Muskau visited the docks in 1826 he conceded “astonishment, and a sort of awe at the greatness and might of England … Everything is on a colossal scale” with “sugar enough to sweeten the whole adjoining basin, and rum enough to make half England drunk.” He might have commented, too, that nine million oranges arrived each year, together with twelve thousand tons of raisins. The peripatetic prince had just visited the great breweries of the city and, after his journey to the docks, he went to a freak-show. So the spectacles of London merge into an unnatural phantasmagoria.

The history of the docks is in fact the central story of the commercial Thames in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is the story of a riverside thoroughfare busy for 150 years. In Commercial Road, and Thames Street, and a score of narrow streets between them descending to the riverside, there were wagons and vans; Mile’s Lane, Duck’s Foot Lane and Pickle-Herring Street were filled with the sound of carts, horses, cranes and human voices mingling with the whistles of the railway. On the banks themselves there was a profusion of commercial activity, with factories and warehouses approaching as close to the water as they dared, while its wharves and mills and landing-stages pulsated with the energies of human life and activity. Further upriver, between Southwark Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge, the riverside scene subtly changed; the warehouses and houses here were older and more dilapidated. They leaned towards the river, narrow and lopsided, while between them were the openings of little alleys, through which sacks and barrels were taken from the river into the city. By Ludgate a huge steam flour-mill could be seen, while on the other bank lay a whole range of factory chimneys. This was a true avenue of commerce, with its institutions on both sides.

But there was also less serious business upon the Thames. There were halfpenny steamers, penny steamers and twopenny steamers going to Greenwich or Gravesend, Ramsgate and Margate. There was a Dover boat and a Boulogne boat, an Ostend boat and a Rhine boat; there were coasters to Ipswich, Yarmouth and Hull, and steamboats to Southampton, Plymouth and Land’s End. There were slower boats which made the journey to Kew, Richmond and Hampton Court complete with musical bands.