Hibernia Wharf, River Thames 1973

A hauntingly atmospheric view of Hibernia Wharf in 1973, captured at a time when London’s riverside warehouses were rapidly falling into disuse. The building’s smoke-blackened brickwork, its bricked-up windows, and the maze of exposed pipes all reflect more than a century of hard labour on the waterfront. In the foreground, temporary buildings carry the Sir Robert McAlpine sign, signalling that change was already underway.

Hibernia Wharf stood just east of London Bridge on the south bank of the Thames, part of a dense belt of Victorian wharves that once dominated this side of the river. Constructed in the mid-1800s, it handled a mixture of cargos—grain, flour, preserved foods and general provisions. Its name, Hibernia, referenced long-standing trade links with Ireland, whose agricultural produce once flowed into London via the Thames.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries the wharf would have been packed with barges, cranes, sacks, hoists and warehousemen. Its thick fireproof structure, iron shutters and deep floors were typical of riverside grain warehouses built to handle volatile products like flour and barley.

Rather than being demolished during the great clearances of the 1970s and 1980s, Hibernia Wharf was later restored and incorporated into the broader redevelopment of the London Bridge / Tooley Street area. Its riverside façade—still recognisably the same structure seen here—was cleaned, stabilised and converted for modern commercial and residential use, becoming part of the revitalised waterfront that emerged in the 1990s and 2000s.

Behind the building rises Southwark Cathedral, its pale Gothic spire strikingly at odds with the soot-darkened warehouse below. The photograph captures a fleeting moment when industrial London seemed on the edge of disappearance—yet, in the case of Hibernia Wharf, the past managed to cling on.