London's Docks: their Rise and Fall

London’s docks: their rise and fall.

Guest speaker Tony Tuckwell, Chair of Essex Branch of the Historical Association

From the crowded pool of London with its old Elizabethan Legal Quays and a City monopoly of the control of exports and imports to the development of ship technology which required ever bigger wooden ships and high-walled docks to contain them and protect their cargoes. Then came iron ships which pushed the docks even further out to the deeper water of the Isle of Dogs, emaciating the Thames ship-building and naval industries, driving them to the North-East, Ulster and Scotland.  And then the death-knell of traditional restricted practices in the face of competition from deep-water ports for mega cargo ships with containerised cargos with which a silting river could not compete, save for Tilbury which fitted the bill perfectly.

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