Seventy years ago it would take at least 10 days for a ship at London Docklands to be emptied and reloaded by around 50 dockers. Pilfering was rife, accidents were commonplace and port business was vulnerable to labour strikes.
Then came the shipping container, an 8ft x 20ft steel box that needed increasingly vast vessels to carry an ever-expanding volume of goods. Such big ships could no longer sail up the Thames to inner London’s docks. The use of cranes to lift the boxes wiped out the need for hundreds of longshoremen.
“You would have seen bagged cargoes being disgorged on St Katharine Docks [to the east of Tower Bridge] in the late 1960s, but by the late 1970s it was a development scheme,” says Paddy Rodgers, director of Royal Museums Greenwich.