Limehouse Hole.
Entrance to Wapping Old Stairs.
Close to Wapping Old Stairs was the famous Execution Dock. This was the spot where pirates, smugglers, and sailors convicted of capital crimes at sea, were hanged, and left on the foreshore for three tides as a warning to all other watermen. Now, with the improvements at Old Gravel Lane, all traces have vanished, and the wrong-doers no longer make that last wretched journey from Newgate to Wapping, no longer stop half-way to consume that bowl of pottage for which provision was made in the will of one of London’s aldermen.
The goods which enter London Dock are of great variety—articles of food forming a considerable proportion.
Limehouse follows on the northern shore, and is perhaps, even more than Wapping, the marine district of these days. Here, in a place known as the Causeway, is the celebrated Chinese quarter. Regent’s Canal Dock, which includes the well-known Limehouse Basin, a considerable expanse of water, is the place where the Regent’s Canal begins its course away to the midlands. The chief goods handled at Limehouse Basin were formerly timber and coal, but since the War this has become the centre for the German trade. Here are frequently to be seen most interesting specimens of the northern “wind-jammers.”
Leaving Limehouse, the River sweeps away southwards towards Greenwich, and then turns sharply north again to Blackwall. By so doing it forms a large loop in which lies the peninsula known as the Isle of Dogs—a place which has been reclaimed from its original marshy condition, and covered from end to end with docks, factories, and warehouses, save at the southernmost extremity, where the London County Council have made a fine riverside garden. In the Isle are to be found the great West India Docks and the Millwall Docks. The former receive most of the furniture woods—mahogany, walnut, teak, satin-wood, etc.—and also rum, sugar, grain, and frozen meat; while the latter receive largely timber and grain.
On the Surrey side of the River, practically opposite the West India and Millwall Docks, are the Surrey Commercial Docks, occupying the greater portion of a large tongue of land in Rotherhithe. To these docks come immense quantities of timber, grain, cattle, and hides—the latter to be utilized in the great tanning factories for which Bermondsey is famous.
Blackwall, the last riverside district within the London boundary, is famous for its tunnel, which passes beneath the bed of the River to Greenwich. This is but one of a number of tunnels which have been made beneath the stream in recent years. There is another for vehicles and passengers passing across from Rotherhithe to Limehouse, while further upstream are those utilized by the various tube-railways in their passage from north to south.
Blackwall has a number of docks, large and small. Among the latter are several little dry-docks which exist for the overhauling and repairing of vessels. There was a time when shipbuilding and ship-repairing were considerable industries on the Thames-side, when even battleships were built there, and thousands of hands employed at the work; but the trade has migrated to other dockyard towns, and all that survive now are the one or two repairing docks at Blackwall and Millwall.