City and River 1820 -1840

This gallery covers the period 1800 – 1840. This relatively short period of time was a watershed for the docks, and London as a whole. It was characterised by powerful economic, technological and social change. The wide variety of displays in the gallery bares testament to this.

The West India docks were established to accommodate trade from the West Indies. This was built on the back of thousands of slaves forcefully, and horrifically, transferred from Africa to the Caribbean. The slave trade was abolished in Britain in 1807. It was abolished in all British colonies in 1834.

The Museum’s display includes many important artefacts. One of the most fascinating is the ‘Slavery Table’. It was around this table that the leading abolitionists met on a weekly basis to discuss and plan their campaign. The exhibits on display provide a vital, moving and important introduction to the invidious practice and the English people who tried, and ultimately succeeded, in gaining its abolition.

This gallery contains a section examining the whaling trade from the Port of London. At one time London had the largest fleet of whalers in the world. The Museum holds a journal from the London South Sea whaler, the Mary, on a voyage in the years 1823 to 1825. With black tales to indicate whale kills and a grinning whale’s head to record misses it provides a fascinating insight into the voyage.

The display also includes a selection of nineteenth century harpoons, a pot for boiling the whale blubber to extract the oil and some timber from a nineteenth century whaler. The objects have been to the furthest reaches of the globe. The visitor is almost able to taste the salt, hear the crashing waves and feel the biting cold experienced by the hardy seamen who used them.

With the shadow of the French revolution stretching into the nineteenth century along with home-grown unrest, men with a vested interest in the docks feared destructive action. The expected attack on London’s docks never materialised. However, the cabinets of fearsome weaponry bear testament to the fear of social change. These weapons were intended to defend the docks against radical political activists.

The opening of John Rennie's new London Bridge, in 1831, and the demolition of the old medieval one, drew a line between past and present. Wider bridge arches increased the flow of the river, consigning the picturesque Frost Fairs to the history book. As well as new bridges over the Thames, Marc Isambard Brunel's workmen were busy beneath the river bed, building the Thames tunnel between Wapping and Rotherhithe. Constructed between 1825 and 1843, it was the world's first tunnel under a navigable waterway and his commemorated here with detailed models and original drawings.