This does not mean that the riverside wharves and warehouses were rendered useless by the shifting of the Port. So great had been the congestion that even with the relief of the new docks there was still—and there always has been—plenty for them to do. To-day there are miles of private wharves in use: from Blackfriars down to Shadwell the River is lined with them on both sides all the way; and they share with the great docks and dock warehouses the vast trade of the Port of London.
Let us take a short trip down through dockland, and see what this romantic place has to show us. We must go by water. That is essential if we are to see anything at all, for so shut in is the River by tall warehouses, etc., that we might wander for hours and hours in the streets quite close to the shore, and yet never catch a glimpse of the water.
Leaving Tower Bridge, we find immediately on our left the St. Katherine’s Docks. These get their name from the venerable foundation which formerly stood on the spot. This religious house was created and endowed by Maud of Boulogne, Queen of Stephen, and lasted through seven centuries down to about a hundred years ago. It survived even the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which swept away all other London foundations, being regarded as more or less under the protection of the Queen. Yet this wonderful old foundation, with its ancient church, its picturesque cloisters and schools, its quaint churchyard and gardens—one of the finest mediæval relics which London possessed—was completely destroyed to make way for a dock which could have been constructed just as well at another spot. London knows no worse example of needless, stupid, brutal vandalism! St. Katherine’s Dock is concerned largely with the import of valuable articles: to it come such things as China tea, bark, india-rubber, gutta-percha, marble, feathers, etc.
London generally is the English port for tea: hither is brought practically the whole of the country’s consumption. During the War efforts were made to spread the trade more evenly over the different large ports; but the experiment was far from a success. All the vast and intricate organization for blending, marketing, distributing, etc., is concentrated quite close to St. Katherine’s Dock, and in consequence the trade cannot be managed so effectively elsewhere. The value of the tea entering the Port of London during 1913, the year before the War, and therefore the last reliable year for statistics, was nearly £13,500,000.
Low water, Dockhead Bermondsey
A little below St. Katherine’s, on the Surrey shore, is one of the curiosities of dockland—a dock which nobody wants. This is St. Saviour’s Dock, Bermondsey—a little basin for the reception of smaller vessels. It is disowned by all—by the Port of London Authority, by the Borough Council, and by the individual firms who have wharves and warehouses in the vicinity. You see, there is at one part of the dock a free landing-place, to which goods may be brought without payment of any landing-dues; and no one wants to own a dock without full rights. Shackleton’s Quest berthed here while fitting out for its long voyage south.
From St. Katherine’s onward for several miles the district on the north bank is known as Wapping. This was for many years the most marine of all London’s riverside districts. Adjoining the Pool, it became, and remained through several centuries, the sojourning-place of “those who go down to the sea in ships.” Here, at famous Wapping Old Stairs or one of the other landing-steps which ran down to the water’s edge at the various quay-ends, Jack said good-bye to his sweetheart as he jumped into one of the numerous watermen’s boats, and was rowed to his ship lying out in the stream; here, too, there waited for Jack, as he came home with plenty of money, all those crimps and vampires whose purpose it was to make him drunk and rob him of all his worldly goods. Harbouring, as it did, numbers of criminals of the worst type, Wapping for many years had a very bad name. Now all that has changed. The shifting of the Port deprived the sharks of their victims, for the seamen no longer congregated in this one area: they came ashore at various points down the River. Moreover, the making of the St. Katherine and later the London Docks cut out two big slices from the territory, with a consequent destruction of mean streets.