Butlers Wharf, London 1971

A view across the Thames in 1971 captures Butler’s Wharf in its final years as one of the busiest warehouse complexes in Victorian London. Built in the 1870s, these huge granary- and tea-storage warehouses once formed the largest tea warehouse in the world, handling goods from every corner of the empire—tea, spices, rubber, grain, and tinned food. The forest of cranes visible along the riverfront was typical of the Pool of London at its industrial peak.

By the early 1970s, however, the riverside warehouses were in steep decline. The London docks had been losing business for years to the new deep-water container ports at Tilbury and Felixstowe, and Butler’s Wharf fell increasingly quiet, its blackened brick façades showing decades of grime from ships and industry. Much of the complex stood partially vacant when this photograph was taken, though a few berths and wharfside cranes were still in use.

A decade later the area would become famous for a very different reason. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the empty warehouses became home to artists, photographers, and experimental studios—most notably the Butler’s Wharf complex run by Derek Jarman and others—before the entire riverside was transformed in the 1980s into luxury apartments, restaurants, and the Butler’s Wharf riverside promenade seen today.