Trafficking in empire

London’s built landscape contains so much evidence of its erstwhile empire: explicitly, in statues and memorials, and implicitly, in the grand and costly structures that colonialism funded. There’s no longer much evidence of the actual work it took to create an empire, though. But here is some. 

The Museum of London has a branch in the Docklands, where merchants built England’s commercial docks and trafficked in empire for close to three centuries. The docks were a primary target of German bombs during the Blitz, but they recovered. Container shipping did them in by the 1980s, when investors transformed them once again, into office and apartment towers.

These days its mostly pleasure boats that tie up at the remaining docks.

Merchants trading in the West India built the first docks in 1802, about three miles down the Thames from the city. Before their completion, incoming ships sat anchored offshore from the city waiting to be unloaded, sometimes for weeks, vulnerable to weather and theft.

At the North Dock, workers unloaded incoming ships; at the other they loaded the outgoing. Massive warehouses lined both docks; only two remain, one of them housing the Museum.



Six hundred ships at once could unload at the two docks.

Every type of storage container—crates, barrels, sacks—had its own equipment for moving it around.

Docks weren’t the only target during the Blitz.


The docks were busy during WWII, storing and shipping military supplies along with commercial goods. Though there were group bomb shelters for the workers, these one-or-two-person units were available for workers caught out during a bombing raid. I can’t find any accounts of people who used them.


New buildings are still rising over the old.


Places to drink and dine line the esplanade.