WOOLWICH REACH.
The Victoria Dock is very roomy, and comparatively quiet. It is a series of great basins, with surrounding quays and projecting jetties. Here are vast tobacco warehouses, and coal-sidings, and cellars for frozen meat. Not many passengers come to or depart from Victoria Dock, which is used chiefly by cargo steamers, bringing for the consumption of Englishmen every variety of foreign produce. The tobacco warehouses are one of the sights of dock-side London. They contain as much tobacco, in bales of raw leaf, as would seem to be a sufficient supply, not for England alone, but for the whole world, for many years to come. The refrigerating chambers, spreading far underground, and designed for the reception of frozen meat from Australia, New Zealand, the River Plate, and Russia, provide accommodation for no less than 60,000 carcases. At the Victoria Dock are now located the furnace and chimney which jointly make up “the Queen’s Pipe.” Here, also, are landed many of the cattle which are slaughtered on the other side of the river, at Deptford.
The Royal Albert Dock was opened for traffic no longer ago than the year 1880. It is used by the great lines of passenger steamers—the Peninsular and Oriental, the British India, the Orient, the Star, and a score of others. Immense sheds run alongside the quay, capable of storing a prodigious number of cargoes, and a vessel may be unloaded and loaded in the course of a few hours. In the centre of the basin there is a movable crane, which will take up a waggon containing twenty tons of coal, and empty it in a few seconds into the hold of a ship. The Royal Albert is at once the most pleasant and the most exciting of all the docks of London. From the quays, it looks like part of a great river unusually busy with ships. There is no cessation of activity from the dawn of the day until dark. By one tide a great steamer is departing for Australia, by another for Calcutta or Bombay. It is no unusual thing to find that five or six great ocean steamships are timed to leave the dock on a single day, to sail for ports so widely divided as Sydney, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Port Natal, Japan, and the River Plate. So important, indeed, has become the traffic of the Albert Dock that it has become necessary to make for it a new inlet from the Thames.
Between the river and these gigantic docks lies the little colony of Silvertown, still looking new and clean, so recently has it been founded on the verge of the Essex marshes. Originally the Messrs. Silver commenced a rubber manufactory here, and, finding how far they were from the centres of population, had to build rows of cottages for their workpeople. Silvertown is now renowned for its electrical engineers, and has become quite a busy and prosperous centre of industry.
But in reaching Silvertown we have almost missed the fine sweep of Woolwich Reach, which is just as long as the Albert Dock, and is one of the most beautiful stretches of the Thames. When night has settled down upon the river, and the moon makes “a lane of beams” along the slowly heaving water, and the lights burning on the misty banks tremulously reflect themselves in broken pillars of flame, Woolwich Reach, with its level shores, and its indications of great activities in temporary repose, is in itself sufficient to relieve the Lower Thames of the common and vulgar reproach that it lacks beauty. There is a quiet, solemn, lapping of the waters; barges at rest, sailing ships at anchor, a yacht lying here and there, break the line of the sky with their tapering masts and their sails partially furled; a belated steam-tug pants upward, with asthmatic breath, and from either shore comes the dull regular throb of half-suspended life. The Lower Thames is never so imposing as in the night-time, when the moon is pouring down long streaks of light on the throbbing waters, and even the brown piles of the river bank seem tinged with gold.
The three prominent objects on the Woolwich side are the barracks, the dockyard, and the arsenal. Not that the arsenal can be said to be very prominent, either, for it lies by the side of the river like a low line of sheds, very bare and poor-looking, very disappointing, very unlike what one would expect the chief arsenal of England to be. The barracks alone relieve Woolwich from monotony. They rise high above the town, with their great central quadrangle, and its four spires, looking not unlike an enlargement of the Tower of London. Not far away rises the square tower of Woolwich Church, with a populous graveyard beneath, climbing over the summit of a hill. The houses of Woolwich rise above each other like irregular terraces, for here the land is more abrupt and uneven than elsewhere on Thames-side, as if it were asserting itself before it came to the dead level of the neighbouring marshes.
The once-famous dockyard, closed in 1869, is represented by great, empty, stone spaces, sloping to the river, and a pair of large, singular-looking sheds, stored full of gun-carriages and implements of war. Looking on it nowadays, it is hard to believe that up to comparatively recent years it was employed in the construction of our navy. No hammers resound there now, and the dockyard, silent and sleeping, might well be the type of an age of national amity and absolute peace.
