London Museum Docklands

Completed in 1802 at West India Quay in London, Number One Warehouse was designed by George Gwilt and Son as a fortified sugar repository that now houses the London Museum Docklands. Originally built to store 80,000 barrels of sugar produced by enslaved Africans, it survived September 1940 Luftwaffe bombings that destroyed neighboring warehouses. The structure reopened as a museum in 2003.

London Β· from the walk β€œDocks to Dollars” Β· audio ~4 min Β· Generated

London Museum Docklands, West India Quay, London E14 4AL

Why was Number One Warehouse at West India Quay originally built like a fortress?

Look at the building in front of you. Those old brick walls, those elegant arched windows with ornate ironwork... this is Number One Warehouse, West India Quay. It was designed by George Gwilt and Son, and completed in eighteen oh two. And if you look closely above the ground-floor restaurants, you might notice something curious. Dotted between the upper windows are the chain remnants of several pulleys and winches reaching to the very roof... silent witnesses to what this building really was.......... This was a Fortress of sugar.......... By the seventeen nineties, a quarter of Britain's entire income came from West Indies imports, and most of it landed right here in London. But the old riverside wharves were chaos. Robert Milligan, a wealthy West Indies merchant and slave trader, was outraged at the staggering losses from theft along eleven miles of open Thames-side wharves. His solution? Build an entire dock complex that operated like a prison. The docks were lined by enormous warehouses to keep goods safe, built like a fortress with high spiked walls, a Moat, and its own police force. The entrance gate was equipped with two guardhouses and detachments of government troops who sounded a bell at regular intervals to confirm all was well.......... And what was locked behind those twenty-foot walls? Number One Warehouse alone was built to hold eighty thousand giant barrels of sugar, and twenty thousand smaller barrels of rum... all produced by enslaved Africans on Caribbean plantations.......... Now here's a detail most people walk right past. Each storey's height was dictated by the cargo to be stored. The ground floor held two tiers of hogshead barrels of clayed sugar. The upper floor stored a single tier of heavier muscovado sugar. The top floor held lighter goods like coffee, cocoa, cotton, and pimento. The building itself was Engineered around barrels.......... Dock workers hated carrying sugar sacks. The moist, gritty sugar would crack and cut their hands, necks, and heads so badly that a passageway between two warehouses became known as Blood Alley.......... And here's a fact that connects this very spot to the name Canary Wharf. In nineteen thirty-six, a new warehouse was built nearby to handle fruits and vegetables from the Canary Islands, off the coast of Africa. That was the original Canary Wharf. Not bankers... bananas!......... Then came the night of September nineteen forty. Luftwaffe bombs fell on the eastern part of the warehouse row. Barrels of highly flammable rum were stored there, and the result was an explosion that destroyed Warehouses Three through Nine. Only Warehouses One and Two survived... and you are standing in front of Number One right now.......... The West India Docks thrived beyond the banning of slavery in eighteen thirty-three, and were actually busiest in the nineteen sixties. But shipping moved out of London in the nineteen eighties, and the docks were transformed into Canary Wharf... the towering financial district you see glittering behind you. This building sat derelict for over twenty years before reopening as a museum in two thousand and three.......... From nineteen ninety-seven until twenty twenty, a statue of Robert Milligan himself stood just outside this building. Milligan traded enslaved Africans and owned sugar plantations in Jamaica. In the wake of the twenty twenty Black Lives Matter protests, the statue was removed by Tower Hamlets Council. It now sits inside the museum... no longer a monument, but an exhibit, forcing us to reckon with the full story of where London's wealth began.

Nearby stories