Trinity Buoy Wharf
Lighthouses evoke pictures of stormy seas and Grace Darling bravely heading out to save stricken mariners. The names Forties, Fastnet and Dogger come to mind rather than Blackwall, Bow and Wapping. But all lighthouse keepers had to train somewhere, and for decades it was used both to train lighthouse keepers and to trial lights for Trinity House, the body that to this day runs all the lighthouses in England and Wales.
Trinity House came about in 1514, with a Royal Charter granted by Henry VIII, and its set up reflects its long history. The body is ruled over by a court of 31 Elder Brethren under a Master (currently the Duke of Edinburgh). Their numbers are, in turn drawn from 300 Younger Brethren, largely pilots, harbourmasters, naval officers and the like. It sounds more like the Masons than an essential public service, but for nearly 500 years, Trinity House has been safeguarding seafarers from the perils of the English and Welsh coasts. Trinity House maintains 71 lighthouses, from isolated ‘rock towers’ such as Eddystone, to lights inland, such as that at Southwold in Suffolk.
Since 1998, all have been automated, bringing to an end a romantic if lonely profession. But up until 1988 there was still a need to train these solitary souls and rather than head to Bishop Rock or Flamborough, they headed to a squat structure in E14. On a curve of the River Thames, and at the meeting of Leamouth and Bow Creek, the lighthouse looks over to the Greenwich Peninsula and the Millennium Dome. The Brethren settled on the spot, east of the main activity in the London Docks, in 1803; they used it as a storage depot and maintenance yard for the countless buoys that aided navigation up the sometimes treacherous Thames.
Trinity House also repaired its lightships here, and repaired and strengthened the sea wall in 1822. Then in 1852 they built a lighthouse on the site, designed by its engineer James Walker. A second lighthouse, the one we see today, was built in 1864 by Sir James Douglass (who also helped build the Bishop, Smalls and Wolf Rock Lighthouses.
The two lighthouses then took on their dual role: as a school for lighthouse keepers and a laboratory for lights. Michael Faraday, the autodidact genius of 19th century English science, conducted experiments here too. The working class south Londoner (a native of the Elephant and Castle) was snootily snubbed by the upper crust scientific establishment, but found a home for his lab on the Thames at Blackwall. Here he conducted his experiments into electrochemistry and electrophysics.
The original lighthouse was demolished in the late 1920s, with Bow Creek Lighthouse continuing to test lights and the men who operated them. Then, in 1988, the Corporation of Trinity House closed the wharf, and the site was bought by the London Docklands Development Corporation. What had been a hidden corner of the Thames was thrust into the light, with Urban Space taking a lease on the site ten years later. It became “a centre for the arts and cultural activities”, with artists’ studios and, most strikingly, Container City. Most recently, the University of East London opened its new Fine Art studios at the Wharf.
But its Container City, since expanded which really catches the eye. This brightly coloured studio and office complex, made from recycled sea shipping containers was roundly praised on Channel 4’s ‘Grand Designs’ show. The lights of Trinity House have, for centuries, stopped cargo foundering on Britain’s shores. How appropriate that some of that cargo should be permanently beached at Trinity Buoy Wharf.
* Find out more about the lighthouses around the Essex and Kent coasts and on the Thames at www.michaelmillichamp.ukgateway.net/page2.html, a brilliant site that follows the coastline from Berwick in Northumberland, right round to Carlisle in Cumberland. ‘Local’ lighthouses for Londoners include Purfleet (near Basildon in Essex), Whitstable in Kent, and the eight Thames River Lights: Northfleet Lower, Northfleet Upper, Broadness, Stoneness, Crayfordness, Coldharbour Point, Crossness and Margaretness.