Docks, Tunnels & the Mayflower

A walk through 400 years of maritime London — from Pilgrim Fathers to Printworks

London · 14 stops · 7.0 km · ~2.2 h · Generated

  1. 1. Canada Water Station & the Lake

    Canada Water Station, London SE16 2TQ

    Take a look at the water in front of you. It seems calm, even ordinary... but this lake has a Secret. It's the Only body of fresh water in all of London Docklands. And what you're standing beside is just a fragment of something that was once Enormous.

    This was Canada Dock, constructed in eighteen seventy-six on the site of two former timber ponds. It stretched one thousand five hundred feet long and five hundred feet wide, with a water area of sixteen and a half acres. To put that in perspective... this quiet lake you see today? It's only the surviving northern third. About half of the original dock was filled in, and the Surrey Quays Shopping Centre was built right on top of it. So next time you pop into the shops over there... you're walking on water. Or at least, where water used to be.

    Now, picture this place in its prime. By the eighteen seventies, the Surrey Commercial Docks were handling over eighty percent of the Port of London's timber imports. Timber was unloaded into the water and formed into rafts that were stored in Canada Pond and Quebec Pond. And the men who did this backbreaking work? They were called "deal porters," dockers who specialized in carrying huge baulks of deal — that's another word for timber — across their shoulders, wearing special headgear to protect their heads from the rough wood. The square just by the station, Deal Porter Square, is named in their honor.

    But then came the Darkest night in this dock's history. September seventh, nineteen forty, was a fateful day for Rotherhithe's Surrey Docks. It was the very first major raid of the Blitz. Two hundred acres of timber was burning furiously on the Surrey Commercial Docks. The fire officer on site reportedly phoned central command with the legendary words: "Send all the bloody pumps you've got... the whole bloody world is on fire!" Some historians have described this as the most intense single blaze ever seen in Britain, with three hundred and fifty thousand tons of timber burnt.

    After the war, decline was slow but inevitable. When the shipping industry adopted containers, the docks simply couldn't accommodate the much larger vessels... and they finally closed in nineteen sixty-nine.

    So how does a freshwater lake survive in the middle of a redevelopment zone? Here's the clever bit. During construction works in the nineteen eighties, the lining of the old dock was damaged. Engineers needed to find a way to keep water in. Landscape architect Fraser Borwick discovered that groundwater had historically been extracted here using wind power. After checking borehole results from the Jubilee line construction, they found large amounts of drinkable water underground and sank a borehole eighty metres deep, with the bottom twenty metres reaching into chalk. Today, the lake is kept topped up with fresh water using a windpump — a beautifully old-fashioned solution for a very modern problem.

    And here's one more thing most people don't know. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Surrey Commercial Docks also had refrigerated warehouses to store large wheels of Canadian cheese! So it wasn't just timber floating through here... it was cheddar, too.

  2. 2. Canada Water Library

    Canada Water Library, 21 Surrey Quays Road, London SE16 7AR

  3. 3. The Dock Office

    Surrey Quays Road, London SE16 7PJ

  4. 4. Greenland Dock

    Greenland Dock, Rope Street, London SE16 7SX

  5. 5. Surrey Docks Farm

    Surrey Docks Farm, Rotherhithe Street, London SE16 5EY

  6. 6. Stave Hill

    Stave Hill Ecological Park, Timber Pond Road, London SE16 6AX

  7. 7. Russia Dock Woodland

    Russia Dock Woodland, Salter Road, London SE16 5LW

  8. 8. Finnish Church in London

    Finnish Church, 33 Albion Street, London SE16 7HZ

  9. 9. St Olav's Norwegian Church

    St Olav's Church, 1 St Olav's Square, London SE16 7JB

  10. 10. Rotherhithe Station

    Rotherhithe Station, London SE16 4HJ

  11. 11. Brunel Museum

    Brunel Museum, Railway Avenue, London SE16 4LF

  12. 12. The Mayflower Pub

    The Mayflower, 117 Rotherhithe Street, London SE16 4NF

  13. 13. St Mary's Church Rotherhithe

    St Mary's Church, St Marychurch Street, London SE16 4JE

  14. 14. Watch House Café

    Watch House Café, 193 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3UW