West India Quay & the Import Dock

West India Quay in London features the city's first commercial wet dock, which opened in 1802 after being designed by civil engineer William Jessop. The site's 30-acre Import Dock could berth 600 vessels and stored goods in large warehouses built to hold 80,000 barrels of sugar. Established by plantation owner Robert Milligan, the docks closed in 1980 before transforming into Canary Wharf.

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

West India Quay, London E14 4AE

Why was the roadway at West India Quay in London nicknamed Blood Alley?

Take a look around you. This stretch of water... these old brick warehouses... this is where modern London began to take shape. You are standing at West India Quay, on the edge of the Import Dock... the First commercial wet dock ever built in London, designed by the civil engineer William Jessop and opened in eighteen oh two.......... Now, before these docks existed, the Thames was pure chaos. Ships were backed up for Eleven Miles along the river, and the losses from theft and delay were staggering. 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. Something had to change.......... Enter Robert Milligan... a Scottish merchant who had managed his family's sugar plantations in Jamalca. Outraged by the chaos, Milligan assembled a group of powerful businessmen and lobbied Parliament to create something radical β€” an enclosed dock, circled by a high wall. The foundation stone was laid on the twelfth of July, eighteen hundred, by none other than Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger.......... When the docks opened... they were Immense. The Import Dock alone covered thirty acres of water, and together with the Export Dock, they could berth over six hundred vessels. The whole complex was built like a Fortress β€” with spiked walls, a moat, and its own private police force. The Times newspaper called the dock itself "a great lake... an object of beauty and astonishment."

...... But here's a detail most people don't know. That warehouse behind you β€” Number One Warehouse β€” was built to hold Eighty Thousand giant barrels of sugar and Twenty Thousand barrels of rum. And the men who carried those sugar sacks paid a terrible price. The roadway between the warehouses was nicknamed "Blood Alley"... because handling the sacks of sticky West Indian sugar badly chafed and cracked the dockers' skin. Their necks, shoulders, and hands were rubbed raw.......... Now... you might notice an empty stone plinth nearby. For over two hundred years, a bronze statue of Robert Milligan stood here, first unveiled in eighteen thirteen. By the time of his death, Milligan owned two sugar plantations and Five Hundred And Twenty-Six enslaved people in Jamalca. On the ninth of June, twenty twenty, that statue was removed, following the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd. The bronze now belongs to the Museum of London's collection, where it can be fully contextualised.......... From the nineteen sixties, London's docks began losing business as ships grew too large and adopted containers that these old docks simply couldn't process. West India Docks closed in nineteen eighty. Then the transformation came β€” and the docks were reborn as Canary Wharf, a towering financial district.......... So look across this water... from Blood Alley to billion-dollar towers. Two centuries of London's story, layered right beneath your feet.

Nearby stories