2. Building the Docks

Pressure to reorganise the port grew towards the end of the eighteenth century. Overcrowding, long delays and concern about the high level of losses from theft led the West India merchants to push for improvements.

All their ships arrived in the port between July and October and lack of warehouse space meant that their cargoes were piled on the quay, an open invitation to crime.

One estimate put their losses at £500,000 a year, including one-fiftieth of all sugar imported. In 1799 the West India Dock Act allowed the West India Dock Company to build on enclosed dock, with its own warehouses and high surrounding walls, on the Isle of Dogs.

With this went the added advantage that all West Indian produce such as sugar, rum and coffee had to be unloaded in the West India Docks for a period of twenty-one years. The first dock was opened in 1802.

But already other merchants had formed the London Dock Company and were building the London Dock in Wapping. This opened in 1805 with a twenty-one-year monopoly on unloading all tobacco, rice, wine and brandy.

The East India Company followed their example in 1806 with a dock at Blackwall which had a monopoly of the tea trade and goods from China and the East. To the south of the river, dock building began in earnest after the Grand Surrey Canal Company opened a dock at Rotherhithe in 1807.

In the following five years several dock companies built a number of docks, later known as the Surrey Commercial Docks, which specialised in timber and trade with the Baltic and North America. In 1828 the first phase of dock building ended with the completion of the St Katharine Dock.