CHAPTER XXII - Southern Blackwall
Blackwall developed southwards along the riverside in
the seventeenth century, but in the early nineteenth
century this development was divided into sections by
the construction of the entrances to the West India Docks
and the City Canal. One effect of the docks was that they
prevented further development westwards, restricting it
to a comparatively narrow strip between the dock company's land on the west and the river and Blackwall Yard
to the east.
Canal Dockyard Area
The small area described here lies immediately to the
south of the Blue Bridge, and consists of two pieces of
ground separated by Manchester Road (at this point
formerly called East Ferry Road) (fig. 223). The eastern
portion, which presents a walled frontage to the road,
was laid out as a dockyard in the first decade of the
nineteenth century, but in 1994 is occupied by some
derelict PLA houses awaiting redevelopment. The portion
on the west side of Manchester Road has been considerably reduced in size since the early nineteenth
century, when it was the site of a group of houses and
gardens associated with the dockyard. It is now little
more than a roadside strip occupied by a row of small
houses built in the 1880s.
Figure 223:
Canal Dock Yard and Glen Terrace area. Plans based on the Ordnance Survey of 1870 (left) and 1967
The whole of this area was once part of the large HallPreston estate, which extended northwards into Old
Blackwall (see page 607). In 1799 the southern end of
this estate was one of the properties purchased by the
City Corporation for making the City Canal (see page
275). After the canal was finished, the Corporation leased
and sold the surplus land on the south side of the
Blackwall entrance to Thomas Pitcher, a shipbuilder at
Northfleet, near Gravesend. Pitcher used the ground on
the east side of Ferry Road to lay out a new dockyard,
with two dry docks, and opposite, on the west side of
the road, he built some small houses for his employees
(Canal Row) and a large detached house for himself
(Lawn House).
Pitcher's yard, renamed the Canal Dockyard by his
successors, continued in operation until the 1920s, but
before describing its history some consideration must be
given to another, much earlier, yard in the vicinity.
Rolt's Yard
Joel Gascoyne's plan of Stepney of 1703 shows a shipyard
to the south of Coldharbour to which he gave the name
'Roults Yard' (fig. 1, page 3). (Gascoyne's orthography
is defective: the proprietor's name was John Rolt.) The
location and layout of the yard as depicted by Gascoyne
looks remarkably similar to Pitcher's, and in 1853 the
local historian William Cowper stated unequivocally that
Pitcher's yard and the Canal Dockyard were the on-site
successors to Rolt's. (ref. 1) In fact, they were in no way
connected. Rolt's yard had disappeared altogether by the
second half of the eighteenth century, and its site, which
was to the north of the nineteenth-century yard, was
swallowed up for the eastern entrance to the City Canal.
Rolt's yard had almost certainly been laid out in the
late 1660s by Robert Browne, a Blackwall shipwright,
who appears to have held the site on a 70–year lease
expiring in the late 1730s. (ref. 2) It was dominated by two
dry docks and its chief business presumably was shiprepairing rather than shipbuilding. At the time of
Browne's death in 1686, Rolt was only 19 years old, and
it is not known when or how he came to take over the
yard. Possibly it was through his father-in-law, another
local shipwright who had been an 'esteemed' friend of
Robert Browne and was one of his executors. (ref. 3)
Rolt appears to have given up the yard about 1717,
when he was on the point of leasing another yard in
Limehouse, but that agreement was never executed. (ref. 4) At
the time of his death in 1730 he had a small yard at
Blackwall next to the Plough inn. (ref. 5)
After Rolt's departure, Browne's former yard seems to
have remained untenanted until about 1724, when
Browne's daughter, Anne Wilkins, assigned the lease to
Richard Harris of Tower Hill, a freeman of the Stationers'
Company and an 'eminent Trader to Africa and to the
West Indies'. (ref. 6) When Harris died in 1734 his son Nicholas
assigned the lease to another shipwright, Arthur Powis. (ref. 7)
In 1738 the Poplar Sewer Commissioners found the
docks and wharfing in a neglected state with 'great danger
of a breach there'. Powis was by then a bankrupt whose
estate was in the hands of assignees, and Anne Wilkins and
Nicholas Harris both denied liability: Wilkins because she
no longer owned any property in Blackwall, and Harris
because he had assigned the lease to Powis. The Commissioners therefore undertook the repairs themselves,
intending to recover the costs from Powis's assignees. (ref. 8)
Between the late 1730s and the late 1740s the yard
was apparently unoccupied, and from 1756 to 1769 the
site was occupied by a glue house. There is no sign of
the old dry docks on a plan of 1800, which shows
buildings belonging to the cooper John Stewart on the
site of Rolt's Yard. (ref. 9)
The Canal Dockyard: formerly Pitcher's Yard,
1806–1939
Thomas Pitcher, the man responsible for developing
the early nineteenth-century dockyard, was a successful
Thames shipbuilder whose yard at Northfleet, established
in 1788, was one of the largest on the river. The Northfleet
yard built both merchant ships for the East India trade,
and warships for the navy; (ref. 10) the dockyard at Blackwall
concentrated on repairing and refitting. At the time of
the latter's development Pitcher was in partnership with
the Blackwall shipbuilder William Wallis, who took the
lead in securing the initial purchase of land from the
City. But this partnership was short-lived, and in 1808
Wallis assigned his share in the premises to Pitcher. (ref. 11)
The land at Blackwall was acquired between 1806 and
1811. The first piece to be obtained — a freehold purchase
costing £2,283 - became the southern half of the new
dockyard, and it was here that Pitcher and Wallis excavated
the two graving docks which were the yard's enduring
feature. They gave a further £1,377 for a 35hp Boulton &
Watt steam-engine and engine house standing on the site
which had been used in the construction of the City Canal.
The rest of Pitcher's holdings, on both sides of Ferry Road,
were all leasehold, the leases being granted by the City.
(The freehold subsequently passed to the West India Dock
Company when it bought the City Canal in 1829.) The
lease of the plot which formed the northern half of the yard
was conditional on Pitcher spending £1,500 on building a
slip or launch and providing a stone staircase down to the
river for public use. (ref. 12) By 1814 the amenities also included
a repairing slip. (ref. 13)
In its early years the yard employed about 100 men
(rising to 131 in 1810), but the number fell drastically as
competition from shipbuilders in India began seriously to
affect the business of the Thames yards, and in April 1814,
when the sole work at the yard was one ship under repair,
the work-force numbered only 15 men. (ref. 14)
Thomas Pitcher (d.1837) retired in 1815, assigning the
business to two of his eleven sons, Henry and William,
whose partnership survived until 1832. William Pitcher
(d.1860) then took over the yard and remained as proprietor until 1850, when he sold it privately to a local
firm of shipowners, Joseph & Frederick Somes, having
failed to sell it by auction in 1848. (ref. 15) On that occasion the
auctioneers issued a detailed description of the property:
two spacious dry docks for the reception of vessels of the largest
class, wharf ways extensive for breaming ships' bottoms, layby for barges, space for building ships, mould loft, sawpits,
engine-house, store-houses, joiner's shops, timber sheds, steam
kiln, pitch and tar furnaces, landing crane, capstans, smiths'
shop, coal and iron yards, counting-house, lodges, landing stairs
and numerous useful appurtenances. (fn. a)
Although these structures have long since been swept
away, the much-repaired brick retaining wall on the north
side of Stewart Street is a survival from William Pitcher's
time. It contains ten iron tie-bars, some of which have
shallow pyramidal heads embossed with the legend:
'Leiston Works 1844 / Springall's Patent / Made by
Garrett & Sons'.
The purchasers of the yard, J. & F. Somes, gave
£14,380 for the property and spent further large sums
on alterations and improvements. These included lengthening the lower (north) dry dock (see below), rebuilding
the boundary wall along Ferry Road in brick, and erecting
a wooden mast-house with sail loft above. (ref. 17) In 1866 the
yard was acquired by the Merchant Shipping Company
Ltd, a company set up in 1864 - with members of the
Somes family as the largest shareholders - to purchase the
premises and carry on the business. Other shareholders
included several architects and surveyors, among them
J. R. and F. P. Cockerell. (ref. 18) In 1868 the company surrendered the leasehold property on the west side of Ferry
Road - though they retained the use of some of the
workmen's houses there - and they exchanged the lease
of the northern part of the dockyard for a new lease of a
smaller area, the north end of the yard being curtailed to
allow for the widening of the pierhead at the South West
India Dock Entrance. (ref. 19)
The Merchant Shipping Company's tenure lasted until
1886, when the yard was bought by the Dry Docks
Corporation of London for £30,000. This firm was soon
in difficulties, however, and in 1889 its assets were
auctioned by the liquidator. (ref. 20) William Walker, a shipbuilder with an address in the City, agreed to buy the
yard for £9,000, but in 1891 he sold it on to the Blackwall
engineering firm of John Stewart & Sons for £13,500. (ref. 21)
The firm was based at the Blackwall Iron Works in Folly
Wall - to the south of the Canal Dockyard - where they
made marine engines and boilers (see page 537). By 1891
their premises also included the riverside site adjoining
the Canal Dockyard. The acquisition of the latter
extended the firm's river frontage to about 1,000ft, broken
only by the intrusion of the Prince of Wales public house.
In 1912 Stewart & Sons were in liquidation and their
assets, including the Canal Dockyard, were purchased by
the PLA. A reconstructed firm, John Stewart & Sons
(1912) Ltd, arose from the ashes of the old, leased the
Canal Dockyard from the PLA and continued in business
as hull and engine repairers until 1923. The yard then
closed. Within a few years it had been cleared and the
two dry docks filled with spoil taken from the entrance
to the South Dock of the West India Docks, which was
rebuilt in 1927–8 as part of an improvement scheme.
Under that scheme the northern end of Manchester Road
was realigned to the east, over part of the old yard. The
concrete and artificial-stone wall along the western side
of the dockyard site was erected in 1928 following the
re-routing of the road. (ref. 22) (The northern end of the old
road survives as an access road in front of Nos 591–613
Manchester Road.)
The one constant feature of the yard between 1806
and 1927 was its two dry docks. Excavated by Thomas
Pitcher and William Wallis in 1806, they were both
originally of similar size, being about 230ft in length,
with wooden sides and floors and wooden gates. (ref. 23) The
City authorities allowed Pitcher and Wallis to lay a 4in.diameter cast-iron pipe across the site to bring water to
the docks from the City Canal. When J. & F. Somes took
over the yard they extended the lower (north) dock to
290ft, giving it a brick-lined rounded head. This was
designed by Allen, Snooke & Stock of Tooley Street,
architects, and built by James and George Munday. (ref. 24) By
1895 the lower dock had again been extended, to 295ft,
and given a more pointed head. (ref. 25) As this brought the
head very close to the boundary wall, a stretch of the
wall was lowered to allow the dock to take large ships
with high bows, as can be seen in the well-known
photograph looking north along Manchester Road about
1919 (Plate 98a). The two docks were filled with
rubble in 1927–8. On the riverside the blocked-up former
entrances are still visible, between round-ended projections of brick and stone with wooden fenders (Plate
99c).
Canal Row and Lawn House
Canal Row was the name given to the terrace of six
houses on the west side of Ferry Road, opposite the
dockyard, which Pitcher built before 1813 as accommodation for some of his 'officers'. (ref. 26) (fn. b) They were twostorey houses with attics and basements and two rooms
on each floor; the 1848 sale notice describes them as 'neat
residences for officers and foremen of the dockyard, with
a garden to each'. (ref. 28) Pitcher's successors used them to
house some of their employees until 1875. In 1861, when
the Dockyard was in the hands of J. & F. Somes, the
occupants were two shipwrights (one a foreman), a shipsmith, a ship-joiner, a boiler-smith and a sailmaker. (ref. 29)
Canal Row was demolished in 1877 for the widening of
East Ferry Road, and the Merchant Shipping Company's
workmen then living there moved to new houses provided
by the East and West India Dock Company. Among the
latter was a three-storey brick house, with a two-storey
canted bay, erected in 1876 on the opposite side of East
Ferry Road, at the north-west corner of the dockyard,
and called Canal Villa, later No. 412 Manchester Road
(Plates 98a, 99b). Designed by the dock company's surveyor, Augustus Manning, and built by B. E. Nightingale
(whose tender was for £743), this house was assigned to
the Merchant Shipping Company's foreman-shipwright.
It was demolished about 1930. (ref. 30) The other replacements
for Canal Row were on the east side of New (now
Preston's) Road (see page 624).
The gardens of Canal Row backed on to the extensive
pleasure grounds of the large detached house — later
called Lawn House - built by Thomas Pitcher for his
own occupation. Situated at the northern end of Pitcher's
land on the west side of Ferry Road, it originally overlooked the City Canal and the Canal Quay, and was a
prominent landmark until its demolition in 1941. The
house was erected under a contract with the City dated
June 1811, whereby Pitcher agreed to spend £500 on
erecting brick buildings to be completed within two years.
No doorway or opening was allowed on the north side,
nor any projection which might impede the canal traffic,
and the plans had to be approved by the surveyor to the
City's Port Committee, James Mountague. (ref. 31) Building
work seems to have been completed by 1812, but for
some reason the lease, expiring in 1872, was not executed
until 1818. (ref. 32)
Figure 224:
Poplar Sailors' Home (Lawn House) in 1854. This
view shows the north and east fronts.Demolished
No contemporary illustrations of the house are known.
Later engravings and photographs show a brick building
of two main storeys, and an attic storey contained within
a slated mansard roof (fig. 224). In photographs the
parapet and narrow bandcourse between the ground and
first storeys, being apparently of stone, stand out against
the darker brickwork of the walls. On the first floor the
windows were set within shallow recessed arches. The
dominating feature of the exterior, however, was the four
tall chimney-stacks. The south front overlooked gardens
and pleasure grounds which extended southwards behind
the backs of the houses in Canal Row.
The Pitcher family occupied the house until the late
1840s. (ref. 33) In 1848 it was described as 'a spacious and very
commodious modern Residence, adapted for a proprietor,
acting manager or officers, with lawns and gardens stocked
with fruit trees, coach house, stables, offices and yards'. (ref. 34)
But the purchasers of Pitcher's yard, J. & F. Somes,
evidently had no use for it and in 1853 they presented
the house, rent-free, to the Sailors' Home Institution, a
newly formed organization set up to establish moderately
priced yet comfortable board-and-lodging houses for
seamen 'of all types'. (ref. 35)
Under the energetic command of its founder and
managing director, Captain (later Admiral) W. H.
('Nemesis') Hall, the Sailors' Home Institution aimed to
provide more than just board and lodging. There were
medical facilities, an information service about jobs and
vacancies on merchant ships, savings banks (to encourage
'provident habits'), and reading-rooms, which it was
hoped would keep the sailors out of 'low public houses'.
In its first year the Institution established 11 homes.
Several local firms supported its work, including Messrs
Somes, the East and West India Dock Company, and the
shipbuilders, Money Wigram & Sons. (ref. 36)
The conversion of Pitcher's old house into the Poplar
Sailors' Home was carried out under Hall's superintendence in 1853–4, the official opening, which was
'somewhat expedited, in consequence of Captain Hall
having volunteered to serve in the Baltic', taking place
in February 1854. The Poplar home then contained 50
beds, but had room for double that number. As well as
a dining-room, located in the main part of the house,
there was a refreshment-room serving tea and coffee and
basins of 'wholesome soup'. The refreshment-room and
the 'comfortable' reading-room were both situated in
what may have been a newly built range to the west of
the house. Hall presented the reading-room with a copy
of Nemesis in China, his own account of the war in which
'the gallant Captain took so distinguished a part'. (ref. 37)
For all its good intentions the Poplar Sailors' Home
was a failure and soon closed. (ref. 38) The premises, renamed
Lawn House, reverted to private occupation, being let in
1858 to William Arrowsmith, a prosperous steamship
broker and shipowner. (ref. 39) In 1868 he surrendered his lease
to the freeholder, the East and West India Dock Company,
which in 1870 converted the house into two separate
residences for its Principal Engineer and his foreman. In
1891 the occupants were both dockmasters. (ref. 40) Lawn House
was demolished in 1941, having twice suffered severe
bomb damage. (ref. 41) (fn. c)
Glen Terrace: Nos 575–615 (odd) Manchester
Road (Nos 575–577 demolished)
This row of houses on the west side of Manchester Road
consisted originally of a uniform terrace of 17 houses
(Nos 575–607) and four differently designed houses at
the northern end (Nos 609–615). It was the product of
two separate campaigns of development, in the early and
late 1880s, but there is no tidy match between the breaks
in chronology and design.
Figure 225:
Glen Terrace, Nos 575–607 (odd) Manchester Road,typical front (east) elevation and plans of houses without rear extensions. George Larman, builder, 1888–90
Following the demolition of Canal Row and the widening of the roadway in 1877, the dock company did not
itself bring forward any plans to redevelop the site, and
in 1880 they adopted a scheme for letting the ground on
building leases presented to them by Bradshaw Brown, a
surveyor and auctioneer with offices in Westferry Road
and the City. (ref. 42) (fn. d) As it turned out, there was virtually no
demand for the building plots here, and only one house
was erected under Brown's plan. This was No. 615, a
plain flat-fronted house built in 1881 by H. G. Smith of
Bromley, and leased to William Jabez Davis, coffee-house
keeper, of Bromley Hall Road, Bromley, who opened
another coffee house here, which he called the South
Dock Coffee House. (ref. 44) It was originally only three storeys
high, above the basement, and had a shop-front on the
ground floor (Plate 98c). A fourth storey has been added
since 1928. No. 615 continued to be occupied as a cafe
(variously described as dining rooms or coffee rooms)
until the early 1920s; in 1924–5 it was converted for
occupation by a PLA police family. (ref. 45)
Undeterred by its failure to let the other plots, the
dock company continued to advertise them through the
1880s. There were many enquiries but no takers. According to a report in 1887 the reason was that 'a higher price
has been asked for land than could have been obtained
in even the most prosperous days of the Isle of Dogs'. (ref. 46)
After this the company gave up trying to let the ground,
and it was sold to raise money to help pay for the costs
of making Tilbury Docks. The purchaser, who offered
£1,550 for the freehold, was William Warren, an estate
agent in East India Dock Road, who immediately set
about developing the site in association with George
Larman, a builder from Plaistow. (fn. e) In March 1888 Larman
gave notice to the District Surveyor of his intention to
build a row of 20 houses here. The work was completed
in 1890. (ref. 48)
The new houses (with the earlier coffee house) were
called Glen Terrace, after the Glen Shipping Line
(McGregor, Gow & Company) which temporarily had
occupied the site in the early 1880s, (fn. f) and they were
numbered 1–21, from north to south. A stone tablet with
the name Glen Terrace was affixed to No. 21 (later No.
575). In 1891 the houses were renumbered as part of
Manchester Road.
Part of the finance for the development was provided
by the Orient Permanent Building Society, of which
William Warren was a director. Established in 1880, with
an office in East India Dock Road, the Society promoted
the virtues and advantages of owner-occupancy in East
London: 'their great contention was, and they believed
it should be of all similar institutions, that borrowers
should occupy their houses'. (ref. 50) A few individuals did
borrow from the Society to buy houses in Glen Terrace,
but most of the money that it put into the development
was advanced to the builder, George Larman.
Larman originally intended to erect six three-storey
houses with basements at the north end of the site
adjoining the coffee house, and 14 slightly narrower twostorey houses with basements on the southern part of the
site. In the event he built a uniform terrace of 17 twostorey houses over semi-basements (Nos 575–607); a pair
of differently designed two-storey houses with shops (Nos
609 and 611); and one three-storey house, also with a
shop (No. 613). The chronological sequence seems to be
that No. 613 was built first (Plate 98c) - it was occupied
before the end of 1888 - and that some of the houses in
the uniform terrace were begun, and possibly completed,
before work started on Nos 609 and 611. At No. 613 the
first occupant was the proprietor of the adjoining coffee
shop, then William Dickinson; the shops at Nos 609 and
611 were originally a tobacconist's and a boot-maker's
respectively. The Inland Revenue's valuation survey of
1909–15 dismissed the shops here with the comment
'very poor business neighbourhood'. (ref. 51)
The remainder of Glen Terrace — the uniform range —
was begun in 1888 and completed by 1890, when all the
houses were occupied. The date 1889 was carved into
the stone capitals of the piers shared by the porches at
Nos 575 and 577 and Nos 587 and 589. Though not
distinguished as architecture, the houses here are both
larger and more elaborately elevated than most latenineteenth-century terraces in the area (Plate 98a, b; fig.
225), and were doubtless intended to appeal to the owneroccupier. (A contemporary development by Warren and
Larman in Coldharbour, where the houses were let to
weekly tenants, was much more modest.) It is not known
who designed the houses, but a likely candidate must be
Harry Hooper, a surveyor and estate agent in Westferry
Road who was one of Warren's fellow directors on the
board of the Orient Permanent Building Society. Hooper
had earlier been a partner in an architectural practice
(Hooper & Lewis) at the same address in Westferry Road,
which was also Bradshaw Brown's.
In the uniform range (Nos 575–607) the houses are
arranged as mirrored pairs, with one half of a pair (No.
607) at the north end. Built of brick, with stone dressings
and slate roofs, the houses are two storeys high over
raised basements, and have full-height square bays with
gables, front areas with iron railings and steps up to the
front doors. The stone dressings round the porches and
the bay windows are decorated with carved foliage and
individual heads, the latter showing a variety of headgear,
including a top hat and a bowler. Several of the faces
sport handlebar moustaches (Plate 99a). Because the
ground level rises from south to north the ground floors
at the south end of the terrace are much higher above
the roadway than those to the north. Larman had intended
to provide all the houses with back extensions, but nine
were built without them.
Warren and Larman sold the houses as freeholds, the
average price being about £350. But this attempt to
extend owner-occupancy in Poplar was not particularly
successful, as most buyers let their houses to tenants. (ref. 52)
One of the few purchasers to live there was a ship's
steward, John Mancar, who bought No. 601 in 1889.
Another was a berthing master, James M. Smith, at No.
575. At the time of the 1891 census no fewer than nine
houses in the uniform terrace were already in divided
occupation. Not surprisingly, most heads of household
were 'blue collar' workers, with just a sprinkling of 'white
collar' occupations. (fn. g) Four householders were able to
employ a single servant each. They included James M.
Smith at No. 575, one of the few houses still in single
occupation. (ref. 53)
The original house at No. 599 was destroyed by
bombing during the Second World War and the cleared
site remained unoccupied until 1986–7, when a small
mildly Post-Modern block of flats was built there. Nos
575 and 577 were demolished in 1991.
The Britannia Works Site
To the south and south-west of Glen Terrace a triangular
piece of land was occupied between 1893 and 1922 by
the Britannia Works of Messrs Lane & Neeve, sailcloth
and sacking manufacturers of the Minories. Much of this
site had formed the southern end of the garden of Lawn
House. In 1876 it was leased by Messrs Money Wigram &
Sons, shipowners of Blackwall Yard, who appear to have
been responsible for erecting some industrial premises
there which Lane & Neeve took over when they bought
Wigram's lease in 1893. Lane & Neeve added a singlestorey drying-room in 1894. In 1899 the firm bought the
freehold of the adjacent vacant site behind Nos 575–597
from Warren and Larman. After Lane & Neeve went
into liquidation in 1922 the Britannia Works site was
acquired by the PLA and had been cleared of buildings
by 1937. (ref. 54)
The Former Dockyard Site
After the closure of John Stewart & Sons and the levelling
of the yard nothing was done with the site until the 1940s.
It was then used by the PLA for houses for assistant
dockmasters and police officers (Plate 99c). Four pairs of
semi-detached houses, with garages and gardens, were
erected in 1946–8 and numbered 3–10 South West India
Dock Entrance. (The intended Nos 1–2 were never built.)
These are solidly built two-storey houses, traditional in
style, with brick cavity walls and hipped tiled roofs. The
large-pane metal-frame windows are a deviation from the
original design, which shows small-pane Georgian-style
windows. Nos 3–4 and 6 stand directly above the old dry
docks and No. 5 partly so. A four-bedroom detached
house and garage (No. 14) for the Dockmaster of the
India and Millwall Dock (who was being moved out of
Bridge House) was added in 1955 in the south-west
corner of the site. It was built by Mowlems. (ref. 55)