eastlondonhistory.com

I stumbled across a terrific documentary on BBC1 last night, covering the work of the doughty officers who work out of Wapping’s River Police station. The programme, which the BBC in an admirable lack of hype had simply called River Police followed them over the course of a day, with handheld cameras. The work, unsurprisingly, largely seems to consist of talking people down off bridges or fishing them out of the water if they’ve already jumped.

Superb footage of the Thames by day and especially by night - this was a lovely little film, quite old fashioned in feel, and touching on a part of the city that all of us are aware of but rarely see. If you missed it, don’t worry. Courtesy of the magic of the internet and digital media you can watch River Police on your computer screen or download it to watch later. Just click the following link:

River Police on BBC 1

Panoramas of the River Thames have a long and fascinating history, stretching back to the 16th century. Visiting Dutch and Flemish artists would create oil paintings, pencil drawings, etchings or engravings, capturing in minute detail the buildings and ships of the waterfront.

Into the 20th century, and many Londoners lost touch with their river, as water traffic dropped and they would only see the Thames as they crossed its bridges.

Fortunately, before the old world of the docks, wharves and river trade disappeared forever, a definitive record of the riverfront was produced. The Port of London Authority commissioned a series of photographs in 1937. Stitched together, they comprised a complete panorama of the river’s banks, both north and south.

A couple of years ago, a group of photographers decided that the job needed to be done once more. Charting every inch of the river’s north bank from London Bridge to North Greenwich, and back again on the south side from Greenwich to London Bridge, they offer a fascinating picture of how the East End’s riverfront has changed over the last 60 years.

Brought together in London’s Riverscape Lost and Found the two panoramas provide a startling contrast. The 1937 pictures show a busy waterfront, when the East End was the world’s greatest port and home to a huge number of manufacturing and processing works. By 1997 most of the vistas had moved from industry, through dereliction, and on to residential use.

One of the most dramatic changes is at St Katharine Wharf, right next to Tower Bridge. In 1937 the Steam Packet Wharf still dominated the skyline, but by 1997 the monolithic Tower Thistle Hotel has taken its place.

Much of the docklands was destroyed by German bombing in World War II. In the 1937 pictures, the Union Stairs, with the Turks Head pub, is almost unchanged from Whistler’s 1859-61 Thames Set of etchings. But this ramshackle riverfront, made up of small wharfside buildings of differing heights, was erased by enemy bombs.

Of course, much that wasn’t destroyed has since become a lot more desirable and valuable. The Wapping Pierhead Houses, fine Georgian homes overlooking the river and just yards from the City, are much sought after today. Right next door, Oliver’s Wharf was to undergone a transformation considered revolutionary in 1972. Built in 1870 in a stunning Tudor gothic style, it was still handling cargoes in 1937. Redundant in the early seventies, it was one of the first warehouses to be converted into luxury apartments.

The next building along, Orient Wharf, was not to survive. At first glimpse, though, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Toynbee Housing Association homes that replaced it were part of the original riverfront. Built in 1988, they adopted the mock-warehouse look that has become the style for much new building in Docklands.

In fact moving along the Wapping riverfront, it is often difficult to tell new from old. The derelict Middleton’s and St Bride’s Wharves were demolished, and now the massive Towerside development sits tidily next to the refurbished (but original) New Crane Wharf. The irony – comparing the 1937 vista of a working port to that of the industry-free 1997 – is that the 90s’ waterfront has more wharf and warehouse buildings.

But there’s no risk of confusing the 1980s’ development of Ratcliff’s Free Trade Wharf with the original working model, which shut up shop in 1971. Looking rather like a jumbled heap of cardboard boxes you could never imagine this was part of the old riverscape.

The site of the West India Docks, at the neck of the Isle of Dogs, provides the most dramatic contrast in the two sets of pictures. It’s now the site of Canary Wharf, and the eighties development leaves no trace of the original riverfront.

Further down the Island it’s little different. Unlike Wapping, where preserved facades concealed gutted and gentrified interiors, most of the riverfront developments are new. In the 1937 pictures, Morton’s Sufferance Wharf (the works employees’ football team was later to become Millwall FC) can still be seen with a steam tug moored out front. By 1987 it had been replaced by the dramatic Cascades apartment block, much hated and criticised by Prince Charles.

But some Island wharves were already going in the thirties. In the 1937 pictures, the Workmen’s Dwellings were just being completed on the site of the old Phoenix Wharf, where Duckham’s Paints used to do business. And not all eighties developments were for moneyed newcomers. Maconochie’s Wharf was demolished to be replaced by a scheme known as the Great Eastern Self-Build Association. By 1990, 89 houses had been built by and for local people.

It’s almost a relief to get to the end of the northern stretch and find one site that’s recognisably the same. Island Gardens, with its trees and the dome of the Greenwich foot tunnel is unmistakable. The most dramatic difference is the looming tower of 1 Canada Square, which dominates almost every one of the 1997 pictures.

London’s Riverscape Lost and Found, Chris Ellmers and Alex Werner, ISBN 1-874044-30-9, www.londons-found-riverscape.co.uk

ONE thing we all take for granted today is clean, fresh water and – barring the next Thames Water hosepipe ban – plenty of it.
But until just a century ago, East Enders were more likely to be killed by their water than revived by it.
In the 1800s, as Tower Hamlets multiplied in size with the influx of immigrants from the countryside and abroad, cholera became a chronic threat to human health.
Look left out of the train window as you travel from Bromley-by-Bow to West Ham and you will see the distinctive rococco form of Abbey Mills pumping station.
It may look like something from a horror film but, in its day, it made the East End a safe place to live and work, as it carried sewage out to the Thames.
London had a problem getting rid of its rubbish for centuries, and for a long time the East End benefited. There was no mains drainage in the middle ages – instead excrement would be stored in cesspits under the houses.
This ‘nightsoil’ would then be carted away to ‘laystalls’, and then from there to the new market gardens around the Essex villages of Stepney, Bethnal Green and Bow.
If that sounds unsanitary, it was an improvement on the earlier system in the City, where a gulley down the middle of the street would be awash with rubbish and human excrement.
The lack of concern of Londoners was shown by Samuel Pepys observation in his famous Diary, recording how his wife “stooped down in the street to do her business”.
The Tower Hamlets market gardens may have flourished, but by the mid-1800s they had been buried under bricks and mortar, and cholera epidemics were sweeping the borough.
In desperation, the newly- formed Metropolitan Commis-sion of Sewers decreed in 1847 that cesspits were now banned.

The move was a disaster, as the main sewers and underground streams now discharged their filth straight into the Thames. A decade before, salmon had still been seen jumping in the river at Wapping. By the 1850s nothing could live in what had become a huge, stinking open sewer.
The matter came to a head in the long, hot summer of 1858. Wapping windows had to be draped with lime chloride soaked curtains, and tons of chalk and carbolic acid were tipped into the Thames.
But nothing could mask ‘The Great Stink’ as it became known. Prime minister Benjamin Disraeli himself described the river as “a Stygian Pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror”.
It was the last straw, and in that year a Bill for the purification of the Thames was passed – but the first step was to find an answer to the removal of the human waste of three million Londoners.
One plan was proposed by the painter John ‘Mad’ Martin. Rather unfairly named, his plan was to pipe the filth out to Essex to propagate land – pretty much what the East Enders had previously done for their farmland.
But the task eventually fell to the great engineer Joseph Bazalgette. He constructed a huge system of sewers running east from London Bridge for a distance of eleven miles, assisted by pumping stations such as Abbey Mills.
When Bazalgette was finished, London boasted 1,300 miles of sewers, along with the London Underground, one of the great engineering marvels of his age.
And as with the Under-ground, many of the same tunnels are still serving East Enders today. Others, like that beneath Stratford’s Greenway, have now gone out of service.
But all were part of the hidden network that saved the East End from the cholera-ridden hell it was a century ago.

The London bobby on the beat is probably the most famous figure of the hundreds of police forces worldwide.
When home secretary Robert Peel finally forced through his Metropolitan Police Bill in 1828, after six years of Parliamentary and public resistance, he established a properly organised, city-wide law enforcement service for the first time.
Their distinctive blue uniform and top hats were chosen to emphasise to a hostile populace that this wasn’t an army set up to control the general public. Despite riots and attacks on the new force, the ‘Peelers’ were here to stay.
But it’s a common misconception that the Met – replacing the rag bag of detective agencies, watchmen and Bow Street Runners which patrolled the old London – was the first modern force. That honour goes to the Thames River Police, established some 30 years earlier. As so often before, the East End led the way, and certainly had a more pressing crime problem!

Silks, rum, tobacco

In the 1700s, London became the busiest and most important port in the entire world, sitting as it did at the hub of a huge new empire. The West Indies, the Americas, the Far East and India – all were stations in this huge global enterprise by British merchants. And as a result, tea, coffee, sugar, rum, spices, silks, furs, tobacco and many other valuable commodities flooded through the wharves of Wapping.
The East End had a valuable inshore trade, too, with coal from Newcastle and fishing fleets landing hauls from the North Sea. The merchants of Wapping flourished… but so did the thieves.
Some of the inbound ships never made it to the Pool of London. Pirates operating further down the Thames toward Tilbury would waylay the vessels as they came in.
Wapping locals would have all the time in the world to observe craft being laden with outgoing goods during the working day and would brief the pirates, who would intercept the unfortunate captains at night. Robbery with violence was the norm – any resistance would be dealt with at knifepoint.

Stolen goods

The processing of the stolen booty was a highly organised Wapping business in itself, with 12 factories in the town receiving the goods and selling them on throughout the City.

But the greatest criminal element was within the docks themselves. There were around 33,000 lumpers, as the 18th century dockers were known, and 11,500 of them were known thieves. With no organised force to patrol the river, the assorted band of mudlarks, long apron men, scuffle hunters, light horsemen and heavy horsemen (as the various types of thief were colourfully known) were free to steal without fear of capture.
The Rum Boat Act of 1761 was intended to prevent theft but was never enforced. Fortunately, in 1797, a man came along with a vision and a plan to establish law and order on the river.
John Harriot, a mariner and a ‘man of many parts’, constructed a plan for a force and took it to the Lord Mayor of London. The Mayor, also Conservator of the River, amazingly declared it to be of ‘no concern to London’.
Undeterred, Harriot teamed up with Patrick Colquhoun, an energetic Scot from Dumbarton who had founded the Glasgow Chamber of Commerce, the first in the UK. Colquhoun was now a London magistrate and worked with Harriot to set up the Marine Police Establishment. On July 26, 1798, the office was set up at 259 Wapping New Stairs – as near as possible to the vulnerable incoming craft.
Businessmen such as the West India Planters, which alone reckoned to be losing an astonishing £250,000 a year from theft, breathed a sigh of relief. The first modern police force had been born.
Patrols in rowing galleys commenced from Wapping, and the present headquarters of Thames Division still occupies this site.
The force cut cargo losses and led to the arrest of so many criminals that on October 16, 1798, a riot took place and an attempt was made to destroy the court building. During the riot two police officers were shot – one in the hand and the other subsequently died from his wounds.
The police officers were ordered by Harriot to fire into the crowd. The crowd dispersed and Dr Colquhoun set a legal precedent by allowing one hour to elapse before pursuing the ring leaders of the riot who were by this time known to the authorities. One was hanged and a further six were transported.
The Marine Police became an officially recognised body in 1800 when parliament passed a Bill to run for seven years. This was extended for a further seven years in 1806.

In 1907 a petrol/paraffin engine was developed at Wapping and was first installed into the rowing galleys. This unfortunately affected the balance of the craft and several capsized – leading to the death of one officer.
In 1914, purpose-built craft were in use, and a civilian engineering and carpenters workshop was opened, releasing the police officers to do what they do to this day: patrolling the river, keeping users safe and catching crooks.

Visit the Thames River Police Museum, 98 Wapping High Street, E1 (tel: 020 7481
1212). The archives contain
a comprehensive collection
of photos, documents
and artefacts.

St Katharine Dock is probably the best known of all the
old London docklands to outsiders .
While the huge docks of the Isle of Dogs and beyond were hidden to anyone but East Enders themselves, tourists and Londoners alike only have to wander a few yards east of Tower Bridge to be in the heart of one of the relics of the Pool of London.
It was also one of the first of the moribund docks to be brought back to life: long before Canary Wharf and Yuppie housing were a twinkle in the planners’ eyes, St Katharine’s Dock had become a berth for luxury watercraft and a popular watering hole, thanks to the Dickens Inn and the Tower Hotel.
Royal connections
The Dock was a hugely ambitious but, in reality, never particularly successful venture. It was carved out of the banks of the Thames in 1827, marking a triumph of commerce over religion and bringing to an end the area’s centuries of history as a sacred site.
When St Katharine’s Hospital was pulled down in 1827 it brought to an end an association dating back to 1148, when Matilda of Boulogne, the wife of the usurping king of England, Stephen, established a hospital for the repose of her two deceased children.
It was also the start of a
long association with queens
of England. In 1273, Queen Eleanor, the widow of Henry III, kicked out the Prior
and brothers who had
been purloining funds, and re-established St Katharine’s with a new master.
Philippa of Hainault, the queen of Edward III, was
next to grant funds and found
a charity to benefit St Katharine’s, and the two Henrys V and VI later became benefactors.
The hospital benefited
further when its master, Thomas de Bekington, later the Bishop of Bath and Wells, obtained a Royal charter of privileges in 1445.

21-day feast
Thomas had cut a marvellous deal. The precincts of the hospital were declared free from all jurisdiction, be it civil or ecclesiastical, other than that of the Lord Chancellor. And to bolster funds, an ann-ual fair was to be held on Tower Hill, starting on the Feast of St James and lasting a full 21 days.
Short of being declared an independent state with its
own tax-raising powers, St Katharine’s couldn’t have had it better.
And St Katharine’s even escaped the grasp of that great dissolver of holy establishments, Henry VIII. In 1526, the king confirmed its rights, supposedly as a favour to his new queen, Anne Boleyn.
But the hospital was too rich a plum to remain unplucked forever. And in Edward VI’s reign, its lands were seized by the Crown. Then Dr Wylson, the secretary to Elizabeth I, tore up Henry VI’s charter and swiftly drew up a new one, conveniently leaving out any mention of Tower Hill Fair. He sold rights to the fair to the Corporation of London for the sum of £466, 13s and 4d.
The beleaguered hospital was ravaged by fire in 1672, when 100 houses were destroyed, and a storm in 1734 razed 30 more. Then, during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, a Protestant mob tried to destroy the church – its sin being that it was built in ‘Popish times’.
In the end it was not the greed of kings, the vagaries of nature, nor the bigotry of rioters that ended St Katharine’s. Big business saw it off in 1825, when the church was demolished to make way for the new docks.
The Gothic building, with stalls dating back to 1340, was unceremoniously razed and the hospital was no more.

IT was the middle of the Christmas holidays, 1664, when Dr Nathaniel Hodges “was called to a young man in a fever, who after two days’ course of alexiterial medicines, had two risings about the bigness of a nytmeg broke out, one on each thigh”.
Dr Hodges’ young patient was to recover. He was lucky, being the first recorded victim of an epidemic that was to kill around 100,000 Londoners over the next year and a half.
The onset of the Great Plague hit Whitechapel and Aldgate worst of all. It was to lead to the building of a pest-house, or hospital, in Stepney, with a specially constructed road to cope with the enormous traffic of sick people, and turned Aldgate into a vast plague pit for stricken corpses.
The East End was no stranger to plagues. The first had been recorded back in 664AD, the Black Death decimated the population in 1348, and 20,000 Londoners were killed in 1499.
And in 1603, London was hit by a plague that originated in Stepney. 2,798 died in just a week and Stepney dwellers fled into Essex, where they were less than welcome.
“The sight of a Londoner’s flat cap was dreadful to a lot, a treble ruff threw a village into a sweat,” recorded one observer.
But the Great Plague was the worst yet. It started slowly. London was in the grip of a black frost, so cold that even the River Thames had frozen over and the cold weather delayed the onset of the virus.
But in April 1665, the weather became milder and during the second week of that month, 398 were officially logged as dead.
May and June were unusually warm and the few remaining doctors – most had fled for their lives – were recording hundreds of deaths.
They often cited ‘dropsy’, ‘griping of the guts’, ‘winde’, ‘worms’, ‘French pox’ and ‘lethargy’ – anything but the panic-inducing ‘plague’ – as the cause.

Samuel Pepys, a frequent visitor to the East End, walked through town on “the hottest day that I ever felt in my life” and noted the plague houses, shut up and with a red cross on the front door.
The graveyards were filled, and Aldgate was turned into a giant plague pit. Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, wrote: “They dug the great pit in the churchyard of our parish of Aldgate. A terrible pit it was… about 40ft in length, and about 15 or 16ft broad… about 9ft deep, but it was said they dug it about 20ft afterwards.
“For though the plague was long a-coming to our parish yet, when it did come, there was no parish in or about London where it raged with such violence as in the two of Aldgate and Whitechapel.”
The Lord Mayor and justices of the peace, desperately searching for a cure, ordered that all cats and dogs be destroyed, lest they be carrying the contagion. It was a disastrous move. The real villains were the rats and, with no natural predators left, they multiplied a hundred-fold.
Meanwhile, the animal corpses joined the piles of human ones rotting, and often exploding, in the baking sun.
By mid-July, 1,000 were dying every week and King Charles and his courtiers fled for Hampton Court. East Enders took to boats, mooring off Wapping and Limehouse in an attempt to beat the infection. Many survived this way, and then, the deaths suddenly declined.
Cold weather set in again and, from a high of 4,000 deaths in the last week of September, just 900 died in the final seven days of November.
Life slowly returned to normal, albeit briefly.
Just a few months later, the Great Fire would sweep much of London away.

If you wake up on a Monday morning cursing your job and moaning about your boss, spare a thought for the East Enders of Victorian times – and thank your lucky stars you don’t have to scrape a living as a tosher, a mudlark, a scavenger or a riverman.
The Tower Hamlets of the 1800s was a byword for poverty and degradation, inspiring words and actions from some of the greatest world figures of the day.
William Booth was spurred by his work among the poor in the area to set up the Salvation Army, Karl Marx was inspired by his observations on the causes and solutions of poverty in east London to pen the Communist Manifesto. And itinerant Californian novelist Jack London was driven to write his best-selling novel about Docklands life after staying in Wapping. The title – People of the Abyss – says it all.
Between the day work on the docks and piecework in the sweatshops making garments, matches and the like, a whole raft of occupations grew up seeking to make some profit from the detritus of society.
The recent TV adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend paints a picture of the people who made a living from the Thames but the reality was, if anything, even worse.
Mudlarks were mostly children who prowled exposed Thames mudflats at low tide looking for bounty that had been dropped or washed into the river. Coins and jewellery were the greatest prize, but even items of clothing or driftwood were worth collecting. Clothes could be cleaned up and sold on to the rag-and-bone men, or totters, driftwood could be dried and sold on as firewood.
But if the mudlarks had a messy and dangerous job – many were swept away by the tides or became marooned in the soft mud – the rivermen chose an even nastier way to scrape a living.

In those days, bodies floating down the Thames were not an uncommon sight. London was a more dangerous and violent place than it is now and it was not uncommon for cutpurses to murder their victims and toss them into the river. The bodies of sailors were often washed up, who had died after drunken fights in the docks or after falling over the side of the hundreds of ships moving up and down the waterway.
Rivermen would operate from the banks in flat-bottomed boats, hauling the corpses from the water with long boating hooks, rifling through their pockets, then tossing back the raided bodies.
A load of rubbish
And scavengers, as their name suggests, would rummage through the rubbish tips and markets of the East End searching for coins, rags and old pieces of rope which could be sold on for a pittance.
Meanwhile, many of the rag-and-bone men, the forerunners of Steptoe and Son, grew rich. The rags could be sold on to rope and garment makers, the bones to pet-food or fertiliser manufacturers who would grind them down for bone meal.
But the worst job of all was probably that of the tosher. Much of the bounty that ended up in the river was washed down there through the sewers.
The toshers decided to cut out the middle man and it was a common sight in 19th Century Wapping for whole families to whip off a manhole cover and go down into the sewers, where they would find rich pickings.
Reek of the sewers
Unsurprisingly, the toshers were not popular with the neighbours. Many became rich, but carried a constant reek of the sewers. The word tosher was also used to describe the thieves who stripped valuable copper from the hulls of ships moored along the Thames.
One unexpected side-effect of the sewer work was that they built up a strong tolerance to typhus and the other diseases that swept the ghettos.
The word “tosh” for rubbish entered the language, though toshing – and the other dirty jobs of the era – have long since gone.

Nowadays, most of the traffic on the Thames consists of pleasure boats and tourist launches. The big ships dock downriver at Tilbury and couldn’t get into the Pool of London even if
they wanted to – the QE2 bridge at Dartford has sealed the city off forever from heavy vessels.
A century ago it was very
different. London was built as a port in Roman times, and back in the 1890s it was still teeming with craft of all
shapes and sizes, many of them built on the Thames and its tributaries.
And the remarkable story of one of those ships begins at Blackwall. Not a destroyer, or a grand liner but a plucky little steam coaster – the SS Robin – which defied all the odds to survive to this day.
For centuries, before the railways and metalled roads criss-crossed the country, the only reliable way to transport bulky goods was by ship. With the coming of steam power and the invention of screw propulsion, the steam coaster evolved – replacing the sail-driven ketches, brigs and schooners, which had plied their trade up and down the coast of Britain. And though the little coasters weren’t big or glamorous, they were as vital to the British economy as the deep sea fleet – carrying goods from Glasgow to Liverpool, from London to Newcastle, and distributing goods to and from the great ocean terminals to the smaller towns around the country.

SS Robin was typical of the classic steam coaster design, which evolved in the 1840s and stayed the same until the 1950s. Her keel was laid down in Orchard House Yard, on Bow Creek, Blackwall, alongside that of sister ship Rook.
Shipwrights Mackenzie Macalpine passed the finished vessels on to the East India Dock, where they were fitted out and, on September 16, 1890, launched.
The pair of steam coasters now went their separate ways. Robin was towed to Dundee, where the famed engine builders, Gourlay Brothers,
fitted her boiler.
Rook had a long career, which sadly ended when she ran onto rocks off Clipperau Point near Holyhead on October 4, 1925. The vessel, now renamed Samoa, was a total wreck. But Robin would go through many owners and a change of name before she came to rest.
Robin’s maiden voyage began on December 20, 1890. Under the ownership of Arthur Ponsonby of Monmouth, 20 men signed on at Liverpool for a voyage to Bayonne, in south-west France.
For the next decade, Robin plied her trade between Britain and Ireland – with side trips to French ports – hauling grain, coal, iron ore, china clay and railway steel.
Then, on May 17, 1900, Blanco Hermanos of Oviedo ,Spain bought the little ship. Renamed Maria, her work transferred to the north-west coast of Spain, working out of Bilbao. Then, in 1913, she shifted to Santander, under the ownership of Perez y cia.
The Maria ran coal from Gijon to Santander, and played her part in the First World War supplying iron slabs for the French Government, escorted by two destroyers to protect her from U-boats.
And so her work continued until 1966, when she had her first major refit – the coal furnaces were converted to fuel oil and the mizzenmast taken out. But it seemed that time had caught up with the coaster when, in 1974, she was finally sent to the breakers.
But there was to be a reprieve. The director of Britain’s Maritime Trust heard of the ship’s plight and, rushing to Bilbao, inspected the craft and decided she was worth preserving.
On May 24, 1974, the sole survivor of the once-mighty British steam coaster fleet was saved for the nation.
Maria was sailed back to Britain. At an average speed of 7.5 knots, running on an
84-year-old boiler, she reached Chatham in the Medway on June 17 at 11.30am.
Robin probably cost a few hundred pounds to build back in the 1890s. By the time restoration was complete it was estimated that a quarter of a million had been spent.
But one item cost nothing to refit – her name. And now she lives again as SS Robin, part of the Historic Ship Collection, and the final memory of the Blackwall’s shipbuilding past.

Many thanks to Joseph Brown of Poplar.

In many ways, the history of the River Thames is the history of the East End.
Ever since the Romans discovered that the area that would become London was a handy spot to cross the river, there have been settlements in the City and to its east.
And over the centuries, as the small settlement grew to become England’s capital, the crucible of world trade and the most famous city in the world, the East End has been the gateway to London.
It is via the East End’s docks and waterfronts that the goods and people who built London first set foot in the city.
And Tower Hamlets Libraries official 1998 calendar gives recognition to the great river that built our special corner of London.
The “On The Waterfront” calendar gives the Thames a starring role. You may be snug indoors as 1998 begins, sheltering against the worst of the winter, but the front cover will give you a blast of summer.
It features the “Tower Beach” – the strand of river front under Tower Bridge where the import of several tons of sand provided East Enders with a pleasure beach, while saving the train fare to Southend!
But the scene in February is a sharp contrast. A snapshot from the riverbank at Limehouse in 1895 graphically shows one of the worst winters for centuries. The Thames is frozen over, trapping ships in the ice, with snow piled high on the beach.
The decline of the docks over the last half century is apparent. Ships loom large in these pictures – literally so in October, which shows Manchester Road, on the Isle of Dogs, in 1918.

The prow of the Milverton thrusts over the dock wall, right over to the houses on the land side, dwarfing the children playing beneath its shadow.
And in January’s shot of the London Docks in 1890, a previous generation of ships are shown in their dying years, huge three-masted merchantmen queueing up to unload their wares.
The sheer number of vessels waiting in line shows just how busy the Pool of London was.
Even in 1940, the contrast is marked. St Katharine Wharf is shown when it was a bustling dock, not the spick-and-span tourist attraction it is today.
July takes us back a generation again. A pen and ink drawing shows a lighterman standing in his skiff at the entrance to West India Docks in 1810.
Once the goods of the world had been unloaded at the docks, it was the arterial system of canals, leading from the East End, which carried them to all corners of Britain.
Today, the canals have been cleared, cleaned and buzz once again with pleasure traffic.
But September shows Old Ford Lock, on the Regents Canal, in 1933, when working boats had yet to be supplanted by railways and roads.
And the lighter side of East End watersports show up in May, with the Poplar and Black- wall Rowing Club being put through their paces on the Thames in 1960.
June sees children splashing in Victoria Park Lake, in 1957, while November shows a battalion of improbably dressed 1934 bathers, waiting to take the plunge at Poplar Baths.
n On the Waterfront Calendar 1998 is available now from all Tower Hamlets Libraries, priced £3.99.