Ghosts of ports past

Christopher Blackstone considers the history of some great British port cities and the social and economic changes that have affected them

On a recent visit to the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff I reflected that this fine building, surely amongst the greatest opera houses in the world, stands on the site of Bute East Dock, built in 1855.

At the time Cardiff was being developed into one of the world’s largest industrial ports by the Bute family who not only owned most of it but were making fortunes from mining some of the richest high quality coal, steam anthracite, which along with iron and steel was shipped to markets throughout the world.

No longer, and what remains of the port is a small shadow to one side of the original core area run by Associated British Ports for "modern" traditional cargos such as forest products and scrap steel, with a cruise terminal for good luck, while some of the remaining water-filled docks and basins are being developed to fulfil the current craze to live alongside water if only in a high-rise.

Since humans have only been around for a miniscule time relative to the existence of the planet, it is scarcely surprising that there is a fundamental inability to set changes into a meaningful perspective and take an accurate overview of events while they are happening. History itself is always changing due to new "facts" being discovered, and the rise and fall of cities are good examples.

It is only some 10,000 years ago that humans finally populated the entire habitable planet and perhaps only 7,000 years since the first cities were founded in Mesopotamia in the region of modern Baghdad. Urban developments were variously founded on the bases of societal control, religion or trade, and when the key founding criteria was removed, for whatever cause or reason, the city died.

The same is happening today but it is invariably difficult for those living to see the trend when a change is in progress, whether in industry, society or economical wellbeing. Of course there will always those who will claim to have foreseen the changes after they took place, an inevitable part of the spectrum of forecasts, but, I would suggest, most people do not.

London and specifically the port of London is a good example, and I personally was involved in projects before and after the disappearance of what had once been the world’s greatest port.

I suppose that London really took off at the end of the 18th century, having already grown to be Europe’s largest city after the Great Fire of 1666 with a population of some 900,000 in 1790. European merchants and bankers flocked to the city to create the vital economic institutions for the control and administration of a hugely expanding world economy and Empire.

So the port grew to a vast extent right up to Whitehall until in the mid 19th century Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s Embankment swept away wharves, warehouses and private gardens to cover the new sewers to the west of Blackfriars to "cure the miasma" which rather than infected water itself was thought at the time to be the cause of significant mortality; this was a classic example of producing the right solution for the wrong reason!

Nevertheless, it was not until 1967 that the closure of London’s seven dock systems commenced due to reluctance to adapt to modern methods by workforce and employers alike. Within 20 years all had gone. The docks themselves were scarcely discernible from the public landside being surrounded by high walls and gates so visitors to the city were completely unaware of this vast area of vital activity.

Just before the demise of the port of London really set in, I cut my teeth leading a team for the design and construction of automated letter and parcel sorting system for the Post Office in a massive three-storey building with a floor area of 6ha in Canning Town. This state-of-the-art facility was to handle all the mail in and out of the London docks which constituted most of the country’s sea mail.

I recall the walk from the tube station to the site being quite sporting as we were bombarded with calls from sirens leaning out of windows, most of whose husbands I understood to be in jail! Nevertheless, this great sorting office was never really fully utilised since the postmen refused to move from the old plant a few miles away, (some things do not change), and by the time they were cajoled so to do the port was dying.

Some 20 years later I was called upon to plan the conversion of one of two large banana warehouses on Canary Wharf into a smart facility for a major publisher of technical journals, the owner of which had been offered the land and building for the princely sum of £750,000! Sadly for him, his staff also refused to move the one mile from their City offices as there was no Docklands Light Railway in place — another hard learned lesson in the need for connectivity before operations!

The rise and fall of the port of London makes me wonder if we might not be witnessing the move from London of those trades in the City that set off the initial growth since the raison d’être has already gone; if so where does that leave London itself as a major city and the welfare of Britain as a whole? Furthermore there are many ghosts of ports past in Britain which has an abundance of good natural harbours. Maybe there is an opportunity for major hub and spoke container operations based in Europe to provide the first stage of UK national distribution to properly fulfil the potential of mega container vessels. Fanciful surely, but then, as I have sought to discuss, the ability to discern accurately major changes in social and economic behaviour as they are happening is a rare human facility.