The Ledger Building (now a pub)

The Ledger Building in London is a Grade I-listed structure built between 1803 and 1804 to house cargo records for the West India Docks before its conversion into a pub in 2000. Designed by architects George Gwilt and son, its north wall formed part of a secure perimeter. In 1889, a strongroom with granite shelving was added, the same year Ben Tillett led the famous London dock strike from its gates.

London Β· from the walk β€œDocks to Dollars” Β· audio ~3 min Β· Generated

The Ledger Building, 4 Hertsmere Road, London E14 4AL

What was the original purpose of The Ledger Building in London?

Take a good look at the building in front of you. Low-slung, elegant, almost modest compared to the glass towers looming behind it. This Grade one listed, single-storey building was erected in eighteen oh three to eighteen oh four, to the designs of West India Dock Company architects George Gwilt and son. It's called the Ledger Building... and it is, quite possibly, the most historically layered place to order a pint in all of London.......... To understand Why this building exists, you need to picture the Thames in the seventeen nineties. Can you imagine thirteen thousand five hundred ships arriving in London every year... with nowhere proper to dock? By the late seventeen hundreds, around thirteen thousand five hundred ships arrived in London each year. They moored in the river while hundreds of small boats, called lighters, ferried cargoes between ship and shore. Theft was widespread and well organised. Black market trade in local public houses was a steady business! Losses through pilferage were estimated at between two hundred and fifty thousand and five hundred thousand pounds per annum during the seventeen nineties. That's a Staggering sum.......... Enter Robert Milligan... a wealthy West Indies merchant and, it must be said, a slave trader and plantation owner. Outraged at losses due to theft and delay, Milligan headed a group of powerful businessmen who promoted the creation of a wet dock circled by a high wall. The result? The West India Docks, opened on the twenty seventh of August, eighteen oh two... London's first purpose-built cargo handling docks, and the largest structure of their kind in the world at that time.......... And This building, the Ledger Building, was its Brain. It takes its name from its original use... to house the ledgers of the West India Docks. Every barrel of rum, every cask of sugar, every plank of mahogany... was recorded here by clerks hunched over enormous books. In eighteen twenty seven, the books of all the departments at the docks were brought to this building, which then included the General Office, the Dock Superintendent's office, and the Board or Committee Room. A strongroom was built on the east side in eighteen eighty nine, to secure the ledgers and other books that had been stored in the basement... complete with granite shelving and a heavy vault door.......... Now, here's a detail most people walk right past. The whole dock complex was built like a Fortress, with high spiked walls, a moat, and its own police force. The inner perimeter wall was thirty feet high, built with twelve million bricks. And the north wall of This very building... was actually Part of that security barrier. The clerks inside were literally working within the prison wall of the docks.......... But the wealth flowing through these ledgers came at a terrible human cost. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, wealth poured into London from the British trade in enslaved Africans and the sugar produced on Caribbean slave plantations. London became a global centre of finance and trade... but it was built on the trafficking and enslavement of hundreds of thousands of African people. And even the dockers who worked right outside this door suffered. The area between the transit sheds and sugar warehouses was nicknamed Blood Alley, because handling the sacks of sticky West Indian sugar badly chafed and cracked the dockers' skin.......... And it was Here, at these very gates, that history turned! A dispute over payment for unloading the Lady Armstrong in the West India Dock resulted in Ben Tillett leading the dock workers out on strike on the fourteenth of August, eighteen eighty nine. Their main demand? An increase in pay to sixpence per hour... the famous docker's Tanner.......... The Ledger Building remained in use by the Port of London Authority until the nineteen seventies, and then, after the docks closed in nineteen eighty... in the year two thousand, it was converted into a Wetherspoon pub. So the very room where clerks once tallied the sugar wealth of an empire... now serves affordable pints to office workers from Canary Wharf. The ledgers are gone. But the walls remember everything.

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