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Museum of London, Docklands

 

Yes, there's a comma in the title, but there'd be a good case for leaving it out. The Museum of London has several sites, and this outpost is both in London's Docklands and a museum about them and the key role they've played in the city's development and history.

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Because, especially with the docks long moved downstream from London's center, it's possible to fall into a view of London history that includes royal pageantry, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London, the British Museum and even the London Eye—and lose track of what made London possible, powerful and wealthy: its status as a port, and eventually the world's greatest port.

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This 1840s view, with the Tower of London at the left looks downstream to where Tower Bridge would be built fifty years later—and it shows basically the overflow of the huge protected docks that had been built to move ships out of the river and next to huge warehouses to unload and reload, similar to the ones in the diagram below of the West India Docks, carved into the Isle (actually a peninsula) of Dogs, eventually home to the biggest London docks.

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Before the enclosed docks were built, cargoes were unloaded at the river's edge, space and tide permitting, or were unloaded in midstream into hundreds of small lighters. Aside from space, the development of the docks gave shippers more control over theft, and also enabled them to rely on cheap dock labor rather than pay the fees levied by the Watermen's Guild.

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The museum is located in one of the surviving warehouses. Despite their impressively solid look, they were originally built with huge wood timbers rather than full supporting masonry. Occasionally, and especially during World War II bombing, this made them susceptible to fire, but insurance was seldom enough to do more than rebuild them the same way.

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A lot of equipment on display at the museum, like the two top images above, was for weighing and measuring various kinds of cargo, verifying cargo manifests and preparing it for shipping on. Another big category in the exhibits includes carts, cargo baskets, hand trucks and the like for moving it around, and the specialized hooks workers used for each kind of bale, sack or box. Unlike today's containerized shipping, most of the cargo moving through the port came in bulk, in bundles or in sacks.

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And, of course, a big loud bell, used to signal shifts, and to call workers to line up in hopes of being hired for the day. For most of their history, the docks relied on daily hiring and keeping wages as low as possible.

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The building of the large docks—East India, West India, Victoria, St Katherine's and numbers more—further away from the center of London also moved the growing numbers of working people, most of them quite poor, to areas nearest the new docks, to Limehouse, and Wapping and other communities of the East End, creating a large mass of poor housing and often, poor health. Families lived in cramped tiny apartments; single men in crowded lodging houses.

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By late in the 19th century, dock workers, like many elsewhere, began to organize and demand better pay and steady working conditions. Eventually, in 1889, starting at the West India Docks, thousands of dock workers went out on strike. The strike, with support from workers elsewhere in Britain, Australia and other countries, continued for five weeks, shutting down the port. A deal was reached, raising hourly pay from 5 pence to 6, but leaving other issues unresolved.

P1220789P1220793New strikes in 1911, after all the private dock operators had been put under the Port of London Authority, made new gains, some of which were lost in a strike the following year. In the 1926 General Strike that swept across Britain, the dockworker unions played a significant part.

P1220717All that cargo moving up out of ships or down into their holds led to the development of many kinds of lifting and hauling equipment, long before the huge cranes we see today. Above, a huge wooden wheel in which a worker walked, providing the power for a lift.

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Aside from the heavy lifting, the docks employed many skilled tradesmen as well, from blacksmiths and carpenters to maintain and fabricate equipment to coopers. Unlike most coopers, docklands coopers mainly repaired and resealed the large barrels that arrived and then left again as shipping containers.

P1220719P1220751P1220804In the warehouses, officials kept tallies and sorted goods for display to buyers or shipment to new owners. In one bizarre-to-our-eyes, a huge shipment of tiger and leopard skins is laid out for examination by buyers.

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Another section of the museum recreates a street or two of businesses that would have served sailors ashore while their ships were loading or unloading, including, of course, a tavern and a mission church, along with general goods and ships' chandlery.

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Other exhibits touch, though not in depth, some of the other maritime interests of the port: shipbuilding and commercial fishing, as well as the rather unsavory tale of waterfront executions in the years before the dock system developed.

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In recent years, museums in many UK cities have begun to pay serious attention to Britain's role in the world slave trade, and the Museum of London Docklands is no exception. Exhibits point to prominent public figures who were active slavers and slave traders, and that while London did not see a mass influx of enslaved people, its merchants, ships and bankers were the very heart of the trade. The exhibits are organized under the heading of London, Sugar and Slavery.

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World War II brought the Blitz, with the docks as the main targets of German bombing; only massive efforts kept cargo moving and even growing during the war as the docklands area moved masses of military cargo as well as food. New defenses were built, including the fortifications above. After the war, with the docks rebuilt, London's port reached its all-time peak in the 1960s, just before the development of containerized cargo. Within less than 20 years after that, the last of the classic docks closed, and shipping moved downstream to new container docks nearer the sea.



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Today, most of the old warehouses are gone or converted to other uses including housing; the Isle of Dogs, heart of Docklands, is most often called Canary Wharf these days, though that was only one of the docks, and it is London's second central business district, filled with high-rise offices, hotels and luxury apartments. Perhaps the helmsman, who once adorned a shipfitter's, could still find his way there... or not.

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The best part of every trip is realizing that it has upset your expectations

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