Wharfinger: Rise and fall of the docks

There were boats at the end of the road for some - not racks of canoes or upended dinghies de-barnacled by weekend sailors.

No, these were the real thing - hard, industrial 30,000 tonners along with the occasional VIP, such as the luxury liner the Dominion Monarch in 1950 and the SS Mauretania in 1939.

People, stories, bananas, tea, timber, sugar - new arrivals every day - adding a strange cosmopolitan air to a place that was little more advanced than a scene from Dickens.

Fiona, from Hertfordshire, said: "I used to work with a chap called Harry Mann and he and his family used to live in Silvertown for a couple of generations and he used to tell me lots of stories about their time there, particularly about the second world war when the docks were bombed extensively.

"So, in the late '80s, I went to have a look and it was just a wasteland. Trying to marry up his stories of colour and life with what I saw was quite extraordinary. You couldn't see how it could have ever been such a centre of a community."

The docks provided jobs for more than 100,000 men. Families, friends and neighbours were all employed in the trades.

Harry Mann, born in 1934 in West Ham, assumed he would follow his father. But when he was 14, his dad told him he was to be apprenticed with a printer. "There's no future in the docks," his father said.

Back then - that was the place to be and the time to be, if you were Harry Mann. Down in the docks, with their majesty and spectacle and adventure.

Fiona said: "It was a tough place to live but the sense of community made the difference.

"I talked to a lot of people and everybody said what a wonderful place it was to grow up. The children were so entranced by the docks - they were so vast and you saw these huge ships going in and you had the great big dock gates and they watched the dockers arriving every morning and leaving every evening.

"There were several enclosed docks along the banks of the Thames and they each had very different communities. The docks on the Isle of Dogs had a very different feel to the Royals which were further out. Different types of commodities came in bringing different types of people. And it's still the same. If you go to the various sites the areas have very distinct characters.

"You can imagine that the London docks and St Katherine's were quite Dickensian and there are still remnants of that but if you go out to the Royals it's a very industrial place and it always has been.

"With the Surrey Docks communities you've got a mixture of Victorian London and industrial architecture there too."

It's all different now. Hard to reconcile this heavy, dirty civil engineering marvels with the swish waterside developments that use the mighty docks as an estate agent's sign-off.

Fiona said: "All the people who had worked there told me that if they go down to, particularly, the Isle of Dogs, they get lost. They just cannot even imagine where the streets used to be. The only landmark that a lot of people say that places for them is the Connaught pub - Harry remembers going down to get his dad out of the Connaught."

But that was the end, the age of decline, when dockers and docks both became something different and separate.

And Fiona, inspired by the stories, was inclined to dig deeper and examine the DNA of the docklands.

Fiona said: "It was one of those projects that turned into a bit of monster. This subject is so huge where do you stop?"

Or where do you start? If containerisation was the final hammerblow to centuries of loading and unloading, where did Fiona locate the vibrant pulse of her tale?

She said: "The centre of the story was when the enclosed docks began to be built around 1800 - the first in 1799.

"It was interesting to see what had gone on before and then to see the rise during the 19th century and then the steep decline at the end of that century and by the 1960s they were on their uppers.

"I used 1800 as the starting point and worked backwards and forwards from there."
Before the spread to the east, the docks were part and parcel of the centre of London, with ships sailing to the heart of the city to unload to warehouses right next to the markets they were selling to.

But over time, as London developed and ships demanded more room, dedicated resources and a workforce on hand, new areas of land were claimed, some from marshland, to build more efficient, one-stop turn-around centres.

Fiona said: "The docks were instrumental in the development in the whole of east of London. So you have them growing out from the Tower of London, they spread out along the riverside and they were the catalyst for whole communities being created in the east of London. It was the centre of commerce for the whole of London and - in a different way now, of course - it still is."

AND THE FUTURE?
"Those communities are still hanging on and they always will," said Fiona.

"With the advent of better public transport places like Canning Town, which were once remote, are very easy places to reach so they are very viable.

"It will be interesting to see what happens after the Olympics. There's a lot of regeneration along the River Lea, which was a tributary that served the docks, so those communities may well get influenced by all the money.

"But I say this with a tinge of sorrow. I am a huge fan of British industry - I worked in the furniture industry for many years - and it's tragic it's all gone.

"I understand the reasons but with industrial Britain you did have such great communities based around it and in some industries that's gone altogether, which is something to be mourned.

"I hope my book goes some way to helping people recognise how important the docks were in the whole growth of London. And what we've lost along the way."