No.1 Warehouse, West India Dock Rd,
London E14 4AL
Thursday
October 22 2015
This museum is an offshoot of the
Museum of London, using the very generous space of
the West India dock warehouse for its substantial display which effectively
covers the history of London as a port.
The house style is very reminiscent
of that of the Barbican site with a mixture of displayed historical objects/reproduced
documents, some short audio-visual presentations and reconstructed room, or in
this case street, displays so you wander over wooden and cobbled floors as
appropriate. The Museum occupies four floors with the main displays on 3 &
2, admin and generous meeting venues on 1 and commercial and play opportunities
on the Ground Floor. I will leave Jo to explain the many pleasures of the
Mudlarks scheme to which she has often brought her grandchildren. This may be
the most suitable destination for children as I bumped into several somewhat
scared toddlers who described parts of the exhibitions as ‘dark and spooky’.
Great cities need rivers or bays (be
they commercial or not), and London of course has both the river and a long history
of thriving commerce and trade which passed through the variously situated
London ports. With international trade comes settlers from overseas and the
start of a diverse city population.
The entrance lobby by the lifts shows
how the building used to be with a model of a rowing skiff – how imports/exports
were taken up and down the river, as this building was used for both loading
and unloading. Being part of the Roman
Empire until the fall of Rome to the Visigoths in 410 this part of the River
Thames was where the Romans chose to build their port. The Saxons favoured
further upstream – Aldwych/Strand way and not till 900 or so did trading return
to this area. The Danes/Vikings were active sailors and traders but found it
difficult to get their large ships under the one bridge built to cross the
Thames. By the time the Normans had been
in London a 100 years or so they decided to import some smart Caen stone for a first stone bridge. For me one of the star exhibits of
the Docklands museum is a large scale reproduction of London Bridge, with the
individual buildings identified one side for the 14th century the
other for a later period. It is atmospherically lit and conjures up the range
of purposes the buildings on the bridge were used for. From the very beginning
ships have always been charged to dock and unload and there have been ‘inspectors’ of said loads, otherwise known as customs officers
– the Museum reminds us that Geoffrey Chaucer’s job was exactly that and it must have been easy for him to conjure up
the range of his ‘pilgrims’ from the types he met in his working life… With the imports came the rats and with the
rats the ‘Black Death’, which had already taken many lives in Europe, spread in
London too.
The Trade Expansion gallery includes
models of ships, which have a tendency to make me glaze over whereas small
coins and finds of the era are more evocative... Interestingly as early as 1393 the Lord
Mayor
of London was given responsibility for
the Thames and managing the potential clashes between the need for food,
conservation and trade.
Following the steady growth in
enterprise and trading thanks to the opening up of new trade routes, the 16th
and 17th centuries saw the growth of the major Merchant companies,
including of course the East India Company, and the concomitant growth of the
Insurance companies, such as Lloyds, famously founded in a Coffee house and
reproduced here, both in models and re-enacted videos… In
many ways they had the monopoly on trade for nigh on 200 years and at some
point their ships became too large to
dock so far in – hence the building of warehouses at this point of the river
and the need for watermen to bring down the stock from where the ships actually
berthed.
This building was used for trade with
what used to be called the West Indies , that is the Caribbean, for which the
main commodities were sugar and ‘slaves’. This section of the museum has been
built up and the experiences of the enslaved peoples carefully explained and well
documented in pictures, in testament from the period and most impressively in a
‘Sound & Light’ installation which runs every 20 minutes or so. The
displays painstakingly follow the lives and experiences of the captured
communities of West Africa and their journey to work on sugar plantations of
the Caribbean … The numbers but of course not the names are there for all to
see, and this was the main destination for several school parties. Marking the
beginnings of the human rights movements there were some moving statements from
the various debates around the Abolition of Slavery.
As trade increased there needed to be
improvement in the port facilities – inevitably this lead to massive scale
demolition of the houses and shops of those who worked along the river and for
the port – the displacement of the poor and working classes to make way for
commerce and larger more impressive buildings is of course a never ending story
in London, and repeats itself through the centuries as with today’s shortage of
affordable housing (by which I mean social housing not fancy rental).
By the time we reach the
industrialisation of England building of all sorts is happening – above ground
the bridges spanning the Thames proliferate (sending the bigger ships, now iron
clad and steam and coal driven, eventually out to Tilbury) and underground Brunel’s
tunnel at Rotherhithe (been there blogged that) and Bazelgette’s sewerage
system to replace the open sewers and put an end to the ‘big stink’ and cholera
outbreaks. London called itself the
warehouse of the world and most of the industry was located river or port side
– the Third Floor recreates ‘Sailor Town’ with lodgings, chandlery, shopfronts
for ‘letter writers’ and of course the taverns.
At this point you see how the
warehouse might have been with weighing scales, piled up tools, cooperage (barrel
making), wheelbarrows and porterage trolleys scattered near the huge doors ,
which presumably look out over the water of the dock. The tobacco trade was
huge and wines and spirits one of the oldest businesses, doubtless all still in
the hands of the same few families?!
The Docklands at War is what you
might expect – the port was a major target for the Luftwaffe and while trade
had been re-located to the Clyde for the duration the docks still suffered
badly, as did the nearby residential areas, which for many years had received
little attention with commerce taking priority. With fewer ships docked for
commerce once the plans were in place the dockyard was used for building sections
of the Mulberry harbours (portable ports so to speak) used with great success
in the D-Day landings.
After the bustle and success of the
previous centuries, the post-war decades were bleak. Labour relations between
management and dockers deteriorated and a third of all warehousing had been
damaged. The 1953 floods which led to loss of life downriver in Essex prompted
those with foresight to build the Thames Barrier,
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