The architectural embodiment of smash-and-grab capitalism according to its critics or a blueprint for inner-city regeneration to its free-market supporters – the Docklands area has always provoked extreme reactions. Despite the catch-all name, however, Docklands is far from homogeneous. Canary Wharf, with its Manhattan-style skyscrapers, is the most visible landmark, but it’s by no means typical; warehouse conversions, industrial-estate sheds, left-over council housing and Costa del Thames apartments in a whole travesty of styles, are more indicative. Travelling through on the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), the area comes over as a fascinating open-air design museum, not a place one would choose to live or work necessarily – it still feels apart from the rest of London – but a spectacular sight nevertheless.
From the sixteenth century onwards the Port of London was the trading lynchpin of the British Empire and the key to the city’s wealth. The “legal quays” – roughly the area between London Bridge and the Tower – were crowded with as many as 1400 seagoing vessels forced to wait for up to six weeks to be unloaded, with some 3500 cutters, barges and punts jostling between their hulls. It was to relieve such congestion that, from 1802 onwards, London constructed the largest enclosed cargo-dock system in the world. Each dock was surrounded by 40ft-high walls, patrolled by its own police force and geared towards a specific cargo. Casual dockers gathered at the dock gates each morning for the “call-on”, a human scrummage to get selected for work. This mayhem was only stopped after World War II, when the Dock Labour Scheme was introduced, and by then it was too late. Since the mid-nineteenth century, competition from the railways eroded the river traffic, and with the development of container ships and the movement of the port to Tilbury in the 1960s, the old city docks began to wind down.
In 1981, the London Docklands Development Corporation
(LDDC) was set up to regenerate the area, with the unfortunate slogan
of “Looks like Venice, works like New York”. By the time the LDDC was wound up in
1998, it had achieved more than many thought possible, though it’s certainly easy to
criticize its approach – ad hoc planning, and a lack of basic amenities, green
spaces, civic architecture or public buildings, and consultation with the local
community. Today, however, construction continues apace, with the end result
destined to be, as one critic aptly put it, “a chain of highly polarized ghettos
epitomizing the gulf between the rich and poor, home-owner and tenant”. For the
local community’s views, visit 
wharf.co.uk.
THE THAMES PATH
The Thames Path is a 184-mile National Trail that runs along, or close to, the riverbank of the Thames from its source to the Thames Barrier. The London section exists on both banks, and is clearly signposted, so you can walk the two miles from Tower Bridge, via Wapping and Limehouse to Canary Wharf. And if you’re feeling really energetic, you can continue right round the Isle of Dogs to East India Dock near Trinity Buoy Wharf.
Wapping
Once famous for its boatyards and its 36 riverside pubs (a handful of which remain), Wapping changed forever with the construction of the enclosed docks. Cut off from the East End by the high dock walls, its inhabitants crowded into unsanitary housing, the area became notorious for thieves, attracted by rolling drunk sailors and poorly guarded warehouses. With the destruction wrought during the Blitz and the commercial demise of the docks, Wapping was very rundown by the 1980s and an early candidate for Docklands regeneration. Restoration of existing property rather than demolition and redevelopment has been the rule, so much of Wapping’s Victorian atmosphere remains, and, as it’s only a short walk from the Tower, this is easily the most satisfying part of Docklands to explore.
St Katharine Docks
• skdocks.co.uk • 
Tower Hill or Tower Gateway
DLR
St Katharine Docks were built in the late 1820s – in the process some 11,300 people were made homeless, and the medieval hospital of St Katharine demolished. The docks specialized in luxury goods such as ivory, spices, carpets and cigars, but were very badly bombed in the Blitz and, in the early 1970s, were turned into a luxury yacht marina.
With little of the original warehouse architecture surviving, the docks’ redeeming qualities are the old swing bridges, the one or two old sailing ships and Dutch barges that moor here, and the central Ivory House warehouse, with its clock tower and wrought-iron colonnade. Built in 1854, at its peak this warehouse received over 200 tons of ivory annually (that’s four thousand dead elephants), plus hippopotamus and walrus teeth and even mammoth tusks from Siberia. Halfway along East Smithfield, you can see the original gates with elephants on the pillars, and on the corner of Thomas More Street, a section of the original dock wall survives, plus the main entrance to the former London Docks, with two Neoclassical Customs and Excise offices from 1805.
Dickens Inn, an eighteenth-century timber-framed brewery warehouse, was airlifted in 1969 from its original site several hundred yards to the east. At the centre of the docks is the ugly Coronarium chapel (now a Starbucks), built for Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee, and as near as possible to the church of St Katharine, which was owned by the Crown.
Tobacco Dock
East from St Katharine Docks down the busy Highway lies Tobacco Dock, a huge warehouse built in 1814 and initially used to store tobacco and wine. A fascinating combination of timber and early cast-iron framing, it was converted into a shopping complex in 1990 by postmodernist Terry Farrell, but the place closed soon afterwards and has been a dead mall for decades now. On the south of Tobacco Dock, a tree-lined canal walk – all that remains of the huge Western Dock that once stood here – will take you effortlessly down to Wapping High Street.
St George-in-the-East
The Highway • Daily 8am–6pm • 
020 7481 1345, stgite.org.uk • Shadwell DLR
Nicholas Hawksmoor’s church of St George-in-the-East, built in 1726, stands on the north side of the busy Highway. As bold as any of Hawksmoor’s buildings, it boasts four “pepperpot” towers above the nave, built to house the staircases to the church’s galleries, and a hulking west-end tower topped by an octagonal lantern. Within, it comes as something of a shock to find a miniature modern church squatting in the nave, but that’s all the parish could come up with following the devastation of the Blitz.
Wapping High Street
If you arrive on Wapping High Street expecting the usual parade of shops, you’re in for a big surprise. Traditionally, the business of Wapping took place on the river; thus tall brick-built warehouses, most now converted into flats, line the Thames side of the street, while to the north – in a stark contrast typical of Docklands – lie the council estates of the older residents. (Alf Garnett, the dockworker of the 1960s BBC comedy Till Death Us Do Part, lived here.) Few tourists make it out here, but it’s only a ten-minute walk from St Katharine Docks, and well worth the effort.
Five minutes’ walk along the High Street will bring you to Wapping Pier Head, former entrance to the London Docks, now grassed over but still flanked by grand, curvaceous Regency terraces built for the officials of the Dock Company (and now home to celebrities such as Helen Mirren). Further east is the unusual neo-Gothic former tea warehouse, Oliver’s Wharf, a trailblazing apartment conversion from 1972, with a couple of preserved overhead gangways crossing the High Street just beyond. You’ll also find one of the few surviving stairs down to the river beside the Town of Ramsgate pub; beneath the pub are the dungeons where convicts were chained before being deported to Australia.
Wapping police station
Further along the High Street from Oliver’s Wharf stands Wapping Police Station, headquarters of the world’s oldest uniformed police force, the Marine Police, founded in 1798 and now a subdivision of the Met. The police boatyard is a 1960s building which features funky, abstract, vertical fibreglass friezes. Down by the riverside here, at the low-water mark, was Execution Dock, where for four centuries pirates, smugglers and mutineers were hanged and left dangling until three tides had washed over them – the worst offenders were then tarred and gibbeted further downstream. The most famous felon to perish here was Captain Kidd, pirate-catcher-turned-pirate, hanged in 1701, and left gibbeted in an iron cage by the Thames for twenty years; the last victims were executed for murder and mutiny in 1830.
Wapping Wall
Beyond Wapping station, along Wapping
Wall, you’ll find the finest collection of nineteenth-century
warehouses left in the whole of Docklands, beginning with the gargantuan
Metropolitan Wharf, its wrought-iron capstan cranes and pulleys still
clearly in evidence. At the far end of Wapping Wall is the venerable Prospect of Whitby pub, and, opposite, the ivy-clad red-brick London Hydraulic Pumping Station, built in the
1890s and once chief supplier of hydraulic power to the whole of central
London; it now houses The Wapping Project, a
restaurant and art gallery ( thewappingproject.com), which puts on occasional
exhibitions.
Shadwell Basin
Shadwell Basin, over the swing bridge to the
north of the Pumping Station, is one of the last remaining stretches of
water that once comprised three interlocking docks, known simply as London
Docks and first opened in 1805. Now a watersports centre, it’s enclosed on
three sides by characteristically gimmicky new housing finished off in
primary reds and blues. Rising up majestically behind the houses to the
north is St Paul’s ( stpaulsshadwell.org), the
“sea captains’ church”, with a Baroque tower.
Limehouse
East of Wapping, Limehouse was a major shipbuilding centre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hub of London’s canal traffic and the site of the city’s first Chinatown, a district sensationalized in Victorian newspapers as a warren of opium and gambling dens, and by writers such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sax Rohmer and Dickens: “Down by the docks the shabby undertaker’s shop will bury you for next to nothing, after the Malay or Chinaman has stabbed you for nothing at all.” Wartime bombing and postwar road schemes all but obliterated Limehouse: the only remnants of the Chinese community are the street names: Canton, Mandarin, Ming and Pekin among them. London’s contemporary Chinatown is in Soho. Narrow Street, the main thoroughfare, is sleepier than Wapping High Street, and famous primarily for its pub The Grapes, currently owned by the actor Ian McKellen. On the shoreline (and visible from the pub terrace) is one of Antony Gormley’s statues, who is standing on a mooring pile and appears to be walking on water at high tide.
St Anne’s Church
Newell St • Open for Sun service 10.30am • 020 7987 1502, stanneslimehouse.org • Limehouse DLR
Limehouse’s major landmark is Hawksmoor’s St Anne’s Church, rising up just north of the DLR viaduct. Begun in 1714, and dominated by a gargantuan west tower, topped by an octagonal lantern, it boasts the highest church clock in London. The interior was badly damaged by fire in 1850, though it does contain a superb organ built for the Great Exhibition the following year. In the graveyard Hawksmoor erected a pyramidal structure carved with masonic symbols, now hopelessly eroded; opposite is a war memorial with relief panels depicting the horrors of trench warfare.
Limekiln Dock
A pedestrian bridge carries the Thames Path over the entrance to Limehouse Basin and then the tidal inlet of Limekiln Dock, overlooked to the north by a picturesque gaggle of listed warehouses, and to the south by the gargantuan Dundee Wharf development, sporting a huge grey freestanding pylon of balconies. Beyond lies the mock-Egyptian development that houses the Four Seasons Hotel. The Thames Path eventually ploughs its way right round the Isle of Dogs, but for now it’s still a bit stop-start once you get past Canary Wharf Pier.
Isle of Dogs
A whole people toil at the unloading of the enormous ships, swarming on the barges, dark figures, dimly outlined, moving rhythmically, fill in and give life to the picture. In the far distance, behind the interminable lines of sheds and warehouses, masts bound the horizon, masts like a bare forest in winter, finely branched, exaggerated, aerial trees grown in all the climates of the globe.
The Thames begins a dramatic horseshoe bend at Limehouse, thus creating the Isle of Dogs. The origin of the peninsula’s strange name has been much debated: a corruption of ducks, or of dykes, or, in fact, a reference to the royal kennels which once stood here. In 1802, London’s first enclosed trade docks were built here to accommodate rum and sugar from the West Indies. The demise of the docks was slow in coming, but rapid in its conclusion: in 1975, there were still eight thousand jobs; five years later they were closed. Now at the heart of the new Docklands, the Isle of Dogs reaches its apotheosis in the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf. Yet while some ninety thousand workers trek to Canary Wharf each weekday, the rest of the “island” remains surreally lifeless, an uneasy, socially divided community comprised of drab council housing, encompassed by a horseshoe of crass, super-rich, riverside developments.
Canary Wharf
The strip of land in the middle of the former West India Docks, Canary Wharf was originally a destination for rum and mahogany, and later tomatoes and bananas (from the Canary Islands, hence the name). It’s the easiest bit of the Isle of Dogs to explore on foot, though the whole place feels a bit like a stage-set, a spotlessly clean business quarter policed by security guards, with make-believe streets like Wren Steps and Chancellor Passage. The most famous building is Cesar Pelli’s 800ft-high stainless-steel Canary Wharf Tower (closed to the public) – the highest building in the country for two decades after it was completed in 1991. Officially known as One Canada Square, the tower is flanked by Norman Foster’s HSBC and Pelli’s Citigroup skyscrapers, both of which are 656ft high, glass-clad and rather dull.
TRAINS, BOATS AND (SORT OF) PLANES – A TOUR OF DOCKLANDS
The best, all-weather way to get a sense of the scale and architecture of Docklands is to use the driverless, mostly elevated Docklands Light Railway or DLR. Arriving by DLR at Canary Wharf (from Bank or Tower Hill) is particularly spectacular, with the rail line cutting right through the middle of the office buildings, spanned by Cesar Pelli’s parabolic steel-and-glass canopy. At this point, you could switch to Canary Wharf’s tube station, which has its Norman Foster-designed, stingray-like entrance on West Plaza, amidst a forest of public clocks, and take the tube one stop to North Greenwich, home of the Dome (or O2).
From close to the Dome, you can leap aboard the most recent (and unusual) addition to London’s transport system, the £60 million Emirates Air Line, a Swiss-built cable car (Mon–Fri 7am–9pm, Sat 8am–9pm, Sun 9am–9pm; £3.20 single with Oyster card), which will whisk you silently over the River Thames to the Royal Docks, the last remaining swathe of Docklands that has yet to be fully developed. Take the return trip to North Greenwich, and you can catch a boat into central London and enjoy a great river view of Docklands and Greenwich.
West India Quay and around
North of Cabot Square, you can cross a floodlit floating bridge to West India Quay, probably the most pleasing development on the Isle of Dogs. Here, two Georgian warehouses (out of nine) have survived and now house flats, bars, restaurants and the Museum of London Docklands. On the water, among other boats, is London’s only floating church, St Peter’s Barge (talks Wed & Thurs lunchtime & services on Sun), a Dutch freight barge that’s run by St Anne’s Church, Limehouse.
Immediately to the west of the warehouses is the old entrance to the West India Docks, heralded by the Ledger Building (now a pub), which sports a dinky Doric portico and, round the corner, a splendidly pompous plaque commemorating the opening of the docks from 1800. Opposite, across Hertsmere Road, stands a small, circular, domed building, the lone survivor of two guardhouses that flanked the main entrance to the docks; behind it lies the former cooperage, now the Cannon Workshops.
To the northeast, behind the Ledger Building, are more little-known remnants of the old docks, among them the stately Dockmaster’s House, built in 1809 as the Excise Office and now a restaurant, with a smart white balustrade. Behind here, on Garford Street, there’s a prim row of Dock Constables’ Cottages, built in pairs in 1802, with the one for the sergeant slightly detached. Before you reach them, you’ll pass Grieg House, a lovely yellow-and-red-brick building, built in 1903 as part of the Scandinavian Seamen’s Temperance Home, with a little cupola and lovely exterior mouldings.
Nothing will convey to the stranger a better idea of the vast activity and stupendous wealth of London than a visit to these warehouses, filled to overflowing with interminable stores of every kind of foreign and colonial products; to these enormous vaults, with their apparently inexhaustible quantities of wine; and to these extensive quays and landing-stages, cumbered with huge stacks of hides, heaps of bales, and long rows of casks…Those who wish to taste the wines must procure a tasting-order from a wine merchant. Ladies are not admitted after 1pm. Visitors should be on their guard against insidious effects of “tasting” in the heavy, vinous atmosphere.
Museum of London Docklands
West India Quay • Daily 10am–6pm • Free • 020 7001 9844, museumoflondon.org.uk/docklands/ • West India Quay DLR
If you’ve any interest in the history of the docks or the Thames, then a visit to the Museum of London Docklands is well worth it. Housed in a warehouse built in 1803 for storing rum, sugar, molasses, coffee and cotton, the museum takes a chronological approach, beginning on the top floor, where you’ll find a great model of old London Bridge, one side depicting it around 1450, the other around 1600. Also here is the Rhinebeck Panorama, an 8ft-long watercolour showing the “legal quays” in the 1790s, just before the enclosed docks were built. On the floor below are diverse sections on slavery, frost fairs and whaling, a reconstructed warren of late nineteenth-century shops and cobbled streets called “Sailortown”, plus mock-ups of a cooperage, a bottling vault and a tobacco-weighing office. Look out, too, for the model of Brunel’s Leviathan, the fascinating wartime film reel and the excellent even-handed coverage of the docks’ postwar history. Those with kids should head for Mudlarks (daily 2–5.30pm; school holidays 10am–5.30pm), where children can learn a bit about pulleys and ballast, drive a DLR train or just romp around the soft play area.
Westferry Road
Points of interest elsewhere on the Isle of Dogs are few and far between, but one or two monuments are worth pointing out around Westferry Road. One of Docklands’ more playful monuments is Pierre Vivant’s Traffic Light Tree, west of Heron Quays, at the top of Westferry Road, which features a cluster of traffic signals all flashing madly – a strangely confusing sight for drivers after dark. Impossible to miss, to the southwest, is Cascades, a wedge of high-rise triangular apartments that’s become something of a Docklands landmark. Equally unavoidable is Millennium Harbour, a gated development whose weatherboarded top-floor penthouses jut out like air-traffic-control towers.
Burrell’s Wharf
At the southern end of Westferry Road, you come to Burrell’s Wharf, a residential development based around the industrial relics of the old Millwall Ironworks, built in the 1830s. The boiler-house chimney survives, as does the Italianate Plate House, where the steel plates for Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s 19,000-ton steamship, the Great Eastern (aka the Leviathan), were manufactured. Built at a cost of £1 million, the Leviathan was four times larger than any other ship in the world at the time, but enjoyed a working life of just sixteen years as a passenger liner and cable-layer. The timber piles of the ship’s 1857 launching site can still be seen, a little further upstream.
Mudchute and Island Gardens
In the southeast corner of the Isle of Dogs is a hilly area called Mudchute, where the soil from digging out the nearby Millwall Docks was dumped in the 1860s. It’s now home to Mudchute City Farm, one of the largest in Europe, with a great café to boot. From Mudchute, the DLR goes directly under the river to Greenwich, but it’s worth considering getting out at Island Gardens, in the far south of the Isle of Dogs. From the eponymous park here, Christopher Wren used to contemplate his masterpieces, the Royal Naval College and the Royal Observatory, and you, too, can do the same, before heading across the river via the 1902 Greenwich Foot Tunnel.
Trinity Buoy Wharf
64 Orchard Wharf • 020 7515 7153, trinitybuoywharf.com • Longplayer Sat & Sun: April–Sept 11am–5pm;
Oct–March closes 4pm; free • longplayer.org • East India DLR or boat from the O2 QEII
Pier (Mon–Fri 5am–8pm; £2)
Hidden to the east of East India Dock is the bizarre little enclave of Trinity Buoy Wharf. Built in 1803, it is home to London’s only lighthouse, one of a pair built by Trinity House for experiments in optics and used by, among others, Michael Faraday. The wharf also houses offices, artist studios and flats, built out of old shipping containers, an original 1940s American mobile diner where you can get a bite to eat, and a whole array of boats. In the lighthouse itself, there’s a musical installation called Longplayer, a twenty-minute recording of Tibetan singing bowls, manipulated to create a one thousand-year-long loop, and due to play until December 31, 2999. The wharf is a ten-minute walk from East India DLR station, at the end of Orchard Place, where the Bow Creek (part of the River Lee) winds its way into the Thames.