London Museum of Docklands

Monday afternoon’s walk was supposed to be a straightforward leg stretcher. I set off round the loop of the Isle of Dogs, with a purposeful stride and the wind at my back. I’ve done the walk a few times now, so when I got as far as Island Gardens station, right at the loopiest bit of the loop, I veered off my usual path and headed out through Millwall Park to jazz things up a bit.

It’s a nice park. There are many green spaces in London. From royal parks to manicured squares, from greened over bomb sites to urban allotments, play parks to scrub land and everything in between. A lot of the parks are now practicing re-wilding, leaving whole areas to develop their own eco systems. Some of these are clearly cost cutting exercises by the council which have been rebadged as environmental forward thinking. You can tell these ones by the number of plastic bags, bald patches of compacted dirt and the monoculture of whatever plant blew in on the wind and kicked the crap out of more fragile and less invasive species. Other parks seem to be gently managing their wild areas so that they actively encourage diversity and support beetles, bugs and butterflies.

Millwall Park is one of the more cared for spaces. There are areas of meadow with beautifully rustling grasses which, in these Autumn days are really going to come into their own. There are also some good sculptures and a nice balance of useful bits of park and parkish bits of park. I very much enjoyed my walk through it.

As I started to walk back up through Canary Wharf, the wind really picked up and the rain began to squall. I wasn’t ready to go home but I didn’t want to get wet and I didn't want to shelter in a bunch of overpriced shops selling things I didn’t want, so I went to the Museum of London Docklands. It was free to get in, was nearby and was on my list of places to revisit. The last time I went, the kids were small and I spent large parts of my visit shouting ‘Look with your eyes, not with your hands!’ which is always a bit of a mood killer.

It’s a great museum. I could only access the standard floors as they are currently installing the new, Fashion City exhibition, but there was more than enough to keep me in there for well over an hour, and I cherry picked what I wanted to see. If I’d looked at everything I would have been considerably longer.

I definitely had a far richer experience now that I live in Poplar and have visited so many of the areas that feature in the exhibitions. I particularly loved the film of the journey of the river Thames from the coast at Southend up to Canary Wharf. As the cameras pan out across the Essex salt marshes and you see the width of the river and its many tributaries you really do appreciate the title of the film, Liquid Capital. It made me itch to push my adventures further out along the line of the river.

There are excellent sections on the slave trade and the wealth that came from sugar and other exports that relied on it. They pull no punches in laying out our guilt and complicity. At one stage, a quarter of the wealth of this country came from what we took from Africa and the Caribbean. It’s a sobering figure. Even into the Twentieth Century we were still taking what was not ours. We may have drawn the line at trading in humans, but animals were still fair game. Photographs show warehouses stacked to the rafters with animal skins. Wealth came to few at the cost of suffering for so many.

The section on the effects of the war on the docklands area was also really well curated. Despite being the most heavily bombed area of Britain in the war, with over a quarter of the housing stock being completely destroyed, the docks stayed open and played a vital part in many of the government’s plans. During the worst of the bombing, some areas caught fire and blazed for five days at a time while fire fighters struggled to douse the flames. At one stage, two thirds of the population of the Isle of Dogs was evacuated and thousands of people returned to find they had no homes to come back to. The figures are just staggering. Film footage and photographs from the Imperial War Museum and a series of astonishingly atmospheric paintings by William Ware really help to bring the period to life. I was particularly taken by the paintings, which at first glance look abstract. It’s only when you look again that you realise that they are realistic renderings of what it was like in the middle of a fire storm. Smoke whirls, water jets mist out against the shimmering heat of burning buildings. Dark figures scurry about, picking up bodies, pointing hoses, moving debris and in the midst of the darkness, embers and sparks fly into the smoky air. Buildings shatter starkly, blackening into the sky. They are beautiful and awful.

As I was leaving, aware that I had let time run away with me, a lady asked me to fill out a satisfaction survey. As I was very satisfied I said I would. When I ticked the box to say I was a local resident she asked me where I came from. As soon as I told her, the conversational floodgates opened. I’ve found that living on a boat is the best conversation starter of all time, followed closely by admitting that I have a Blue Peter badge. Twenty minutes later after she had told me everything about herself and given me strong tips on the best websites to get discounts on theatre tickets, I managed to wrenched myself away and get home about thirty seconds before Jason was about to send out tracker dogs to find me.