Museum of London Docklands

Today we made the long journey across London via the tube and the Thames River boat to Canary Wharf in the east end where the London Museum Docklands is located. A companion to the Museum of London which we visited early on in our trip, the focus of this museum is the importance of the shipping trade to London's development. A central focus of the museum is England's involvement with the slave trade and the terrible cost in human lives associated with that commercial practice. We were surprised to learn that the end of the slave trade wasn't as much moral revulsion, as films like Amazing Grace would have us believe but rather had more to do with basic economics that caused the overall British economy to go into a slump. We also learned cool things about the construction of the original London Bridge and about the poverty of dockworkers and other laborers in the 19th century. We learned about press gangs, and we learned about the whaling trade. We also learned about the damage inflicted on the dockyards by Germany in the Second World War. In a nifty little sideshow we saw samples of various imports collected by the customs house, including Laura's favorite, a jar of "Old Man Eyebrows" from China.