Royal Victoria Dock

This long stretch of water was dug out of marshland and opened in 1855. It was the first dock in London built for the big new steamships, the first to be linked to the national railway network, and the first to run its machinery on hydraulic power. Within five years it was handling twice as much cargo as the older London Docks upriver. The engineer behind it was George Parker Bidder, and his story begins at country fairs in Devon. Bidder was a stonemason's son with a gift nobody could explain. Before he had any real schooling, his father was touring him round the country as the Calculating Boy. He was asked how many times a coach wheel five feet ten inches round would turn on a journey of 800 million miles. In under a minute he answered: 724,114,285,704. The boy who did sums for coins at fairs grew up to be one of the great engineers of the railway age, and designed this dock. The cranes along the quay were kept as monuments when the docks closed in 1981. They have seen worse days than this. On 7 September 1940, the first day of the Blitz, German bombers came for London's docks, and the warehouses along this water burned through the night.