West India Dock, London E14.
North Quay - Warehouses and general offices, 1800-04.
By George Gwilt & Son.
Grade l listed.
The West India Import Dock was opened in 1802 by the West India Dock Company, the first dock in London designed and built for trading. It was built to meet the needs of the West India trade, which in 1797 accounted for nearly a third of London's imports, and nearly a fifth of its exports. Dissatisfaction with existing facilities at the Legal Quays, situated between London Bridge and the Tower of London, led to two rival schemes being proposed; one at Wapping, and the successful scheme at the Isle of Dogs. The West India Docks were to be for the exclusive use of the West India trade, and the Docks were to have a twenty-one-year monopoly of that trade. The chief promoters of the scheme were Robert Milligan and George Hibbert, both men with substantial West Indian interests.
The first warehouses to be built, which included No. 2 Warehouse, were pressed into service when the Import Dock opened in 1802. The other warehouses of the North Quay were completed by 1804. Rum warehouses opened on the south side of the Import Dock in 1806, and the Export Dock opened in the same year.
The trade which the West India Docks were built to facilitate is often described as 'triangular'. Ships left England loaded with goods which would be used to buy slaves on the west coast of Africa; those slaves would then be carried to plantations of the West Indies; and the ships would return to England with the products of those plantations. Goods were stored at the West India Docks to store at either end of this operation. Cargoes carried for trading in Africa included cloth, beads, guns, and even rum produced on the plantations. The principal imports were sugar, rum, coffee, pimento, mahogany and dye wood; cocoa, ginger, Madeira wine (the only non-West Indian cargo) and cotton were also handled. The warehouses on the North Quay would have been used for storing all imports, until the opening of the Rum Warehouses, after which rum and Madeira wine were carried there. Before the opening of the Export Dock the North Quay warehouses would also have been used for export goods; following the 1807 Act abolishing the slave trade, these were destined for the use of plantation owners, residents and slaves, and included clothing, building materials, household goods, victuals and wine.
In 1827 the 21-year trading monopoly of the East India Dock Company expired, and the low warehouses of the North Quay were raised to receive East India private trade goods, sugar produced by slaves in Mauritius, and tea. After the abolition of British colonial slavery in 1833, the West India Docks - together with other London docks - continued to receive coffee from Cuba and Brazil, where slavery was to continue until 1886 and 1888 respectively. The West India Docks remained in use until 1980.
The surviving buildings of the West India Import Dock occupy a unique place in the history of the British slave trade. Intended for the exclusive use of the West India trade, as endorsed by the West India Dock Act of 1799, the warehouses were built expressly to receive the products of slavery, and are the only surviving buildings of their kind in Britain to be linked to the slave trade in this direct and unambiguous way. In November 2007 the Museum in Docklands, housed in No.1 Warehouse, opened a permanent gallery entitled London, Sugar & Slavery, which examines the history and legacy of the capital's involvement in transatlantic slavery.
![[86212] London : West India Dock - North Quay](https://farm66.static.flickr.com/65535/49663120408_c1a92f1655_m.jpg)
