West India Docks

I celebrated the start of June and a beautiful warm day by visiting the Museum of London Docklands.  This is in an old warehouse at the West India Docks, the first docks built on the River Thames, designed to provide a secure environment for unloading tobacco and sugar brought in from the West Indies (before the docks, there was too much pilfering of the goods as they were transferred from the ships to the shore in smaller boats!).  My blip is of another part of the warehouse; the ground floor, at least, is now a restaurant.

I wanted to see the exhibition "Secret Rivers" about the many rivers which used to feed into the Thames from north and south, but most of which disappeared through human activity - primarily dumping waste and sewage into them.  Most of them still exist - but now run underground in pipes and culverts.  The subject is interesting, although I wasn't particularly inspired by the exhibition whose layout and presentation I found rather tame by today's standards.

A lot of people out today enjoying the weather.  I hadn't realised that the Canary Wharf area would be so busy on a weekend.