Museum of London Docklands by Jeannie Waudby

I grew up in a sea port (Hong Kong) on an island, so travelling by boat was a weekly part of my childhood. I’m still fascinated by rivers and the sea, boats and ships. In fact my first sight of London was from a big ship making its way into the Thames estuary. I love standing by the Thames and being able to smell the sea and feel the sense of connection with the whole world that it gives me.

I visited the Museum of London Docklands at West India Docks. But the river here holds a terrible history. The museum is housed in the sugar warehouse that was built in 1802 to store sugar and rum from the West Indian plantations where enslaved Africans worked.

I decided to focus on the building itself and the London, Sugar and Slavery gallery. This warehouse is only here because by the end of the eighteenth century the system of slavery had become so profitable. The gallery begins with an huge list of trans-Atlantic slave ships cleared by the Port of London in the 1780s and 90s, listing the names of the ships and their owners and captains, the African ports where enslaved Africans embarked, the number of enslaved Africans and their destination in the Carribean. It’s powerful and horrifying to look at that long list of ships and understand that each of them represents hundreds of stolen African lives.

The trans-Atlantic slave trade is sometimes known as the Triangular Trade. Ships sailed from London to West Africa with manufactured goods which they traded for human beings. The middle passage was the journey to the Americas and the Caribbean, in which so many African men, women and children died. Finally the ships returned to London with sugar, molasses and rum and other goods grown by the labour of enslaved people.

The gallery presented me with some stark statistics. London was the fourth biggest slave port in the world, behind the Brazilian ports of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, and Liverpool. Over 3,100 ships left London to carry almost a million Africans into slavery. By the 1790s a quarter of Britain’s income came from imports from the West Indies and in 1781 sugar trade profits for that year came to £1,405,102 which is equivalent to £126,000,000. From this genocide came the wealth of London, and Britain as a whole. Here are some words by Ignatius Sancho:

I found that there was too much even in this one gallery to take in on just one visit. It also covers resistance in the Caribbean, the struggle for abolition and the writings of Africans with first-hand experience. It was their words that informed and led to the abolition of slavery – writers including Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Phyllis Wheatley, Ottobah Cugoano, Robert Wedderburn and Ignatius Sancho..

I will go back to this museum, because there is so much still to see. It also shows how the docks worked in the 20th century, the lives of riverside Londoners, docklands at war and Sailortown, a recreated labyrinth of alleys and shops. This museum, housed in the original building so central to the slave trade, allows us to take a painful look at this history. When I was at school, we didn’t learn about Britain’s pivotal involvement in this crime against humanity – only about the abolitionists. That’s changing now. I think that this museum is fulfilling an important role in shining a light into London’s history.

This chart from 1802 by David Steele shows the West India Dock spanning the Isle of Dogs.

Writing Challenge

The Museum of London Docklands shows what happened when some people’s freedom – a right that every human being should have – was stolen from them. Can you write an acrostic poem for the word ‘FREEDOM’? Or if you love drawing, you could write the word with a beautifully designed first letter. Long ago, when books had to be written by hand, scribes highlighted the importance of their words by taking the first letter, making it larger and illustrating, or ‘illuminating’ it.

You can link to the video here

Some other museums covering the history of Britain’s involvement in the slave trade:

International Slavery Museum, Liverpool

The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol

Bristol City’s Museums, Galleries and Archives

Hull City Museums and Art Gallery

The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

Jeannie Waudby is the author of YA thriller/love story One of Us. She has recently completed a YA novel set in Victorian times.