Family celebration at Museum in Docklands
6 March 2003
On Saturday 24 May 2003, one of London’s oldest warehouses will again come to life as the Museum in Docklands opens its doors to the public for the first time.
In a FREE day of family celebrations, characters from Docklands’ past will entertain visitors with tales of distant lands and exotic cargoes, of ships and smuggling, to reveal the secret world that lay behind the high dock walls. Children are invited to dress as pirates and take part in the world’s largest treasure trail.
Charting an unexplored area of London’s history, the Museum in Docklands tells the story of the river, port and its people, from the arrival of the Romans to the rise of Canary Wharf. Housed in the first warehouses of the enclosed docks - built 200 years ago for storing sugar, coffee and rum - the Museum stands on the edge of West India Quay in the heart of the Docklands.
The quayside, nicknamed Blood Alley after the damaged hands, necks and backs of dockers who once heaved sacks of raw sugar from nearby sailing ships, is today overlooked by American-style skyscrapers, built in the last 20 years to challenge the Square Mile as the capital’s financial powerhouse.
The Museum’s thousands of objects and pictures capture the people and places behind the area’s dramatic transformation. Many are unique, having been rescued during the 1970s and 80s after containerisation and competition forced London’s port to move downstream. Interactives, videos, models and recreations explore the lives of those who built and shaped the port’s long riverfront, from yesterday’s gentleman pirates to today’s city workers.
Led by Time Team’s Tony Robinson, visitors can explore the early ports of London, from the Saxon settlement in Covent Garden to the Medieval port at Billingsgate. Enormous whale-bones mark one of the uses of the early wet docks at Rotherhithe in the 18th century, when London was at the centre of the world whaling trade, while a gibbet cage set at the end of a recreation of a legal quay reveals the fate of those engaged in organised crime.
In Sailor Town, visitors can wander through a series of mid-19th century alleyways, when ships jostled to unload their wares, the air was suffused with the smells of exotic goods, and the sound of a dozen different languages echoed along the wharves. Throughout the Museum are the stories of people from every corner of the globe, from the Lascars of India, to the Irish, Scandinavians and Chinese, all of who came to settle on the Thames waterside.
Historic photographs and printed materials from the Port of London Authority Archive show the vast scale of the docks at the turn of the 20th century, providing tantalising glimpses into a time when everything, from snakeskins to cinnamon, cars to live elephants, were brought into the Warehouse of the World.
Original plans, pamphlets and engineering drawings uncover the debate surrounding the founding of the new docks from 1802. Workshop reconstructions stand as testimony to the many traditional port trades now mostly lost.
Rarely seen film from the Metropolitan Fire Brigade and captured Nazi footage in Docklands at War documents the impact of the Blitz on the area during 1940. For the first time, oral testimonies are combined with footage from the Imperial War Museum to explore the port’s role in secret projects such as the Pipe Line Under the Ocean. A series of original canvases by official war artist William Ware dramatically capture the full extent of the destruction.
A series of proposed plans show what could have happened to the area before the London Docklands Development Corporation began their controversial regeneration of the docks in the 1980s. The transformation from wasteland to new city is seen through the eyes of both communities and developers, as gentrified warehouses and soaring offices attract more and more people to Docklands each year.
Editor’s notes:
- The Museum’s May opening has been made possible following a recent merger between the Museum in Docklands and the Museum of London. The Museum in Docklands is funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Corporation of London and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, with substantial support from Canary Wharf Group plc and the Port of London Authority.
- In Mudlarks’, the Museum’s interactive gallery for children, under 11’s can learn to winch and weigh cargos, get a diver’s eye view of work under water, discover archaeological finds on the foreshore, or even reconstruct a simple model of Canary Wharf.
Press enquiries:
Mairi Allan 020 7814 5511