Labour must make itself a movement again

‘As you enter the dock the sight of the forest of masts in the distance, and the tall chimneys vomiting clouds of black some, and the many coloured flags flying in the air, has a most peculiar effect … Nearly everywhere you meet stacks of cork, or else yellow bins of sulphur, or lead-coloured copper-ore. As you enter this warehouse, the flooring is sticky, as if it had been newly tarred, with the sugar that has leaked through the casks.’

This was how Henry Mayhew described the 90 acres of London docks – stretching across St George, Shadwell and Wapping – in the 1850s. It was where the riches of the Empire came in, and the finished wares of the Workshop of the World went out.

But it was also a landscape of Dickensian abuse, immiseration, and exploitation as dockers fought to make a living. ‘The scuffling and scrambling, and stretching forth of countless hands high in the air, top catch the eye of him whose voice may give them work … It is a sight to sadden the most callous, to see thousands of men struggling for only one day’s hire.