London Guide
Limehouse
Limehouse was a major shipbuilding centre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hub of London's canal traffic and the site of the city's first Chinatown, a district sensationalized in Victorian newspapers as a warren of opium and gambling dens, by the likes of Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sax Rohmer, and Dickens. Wartime bombing and postwar road schemes all but obliterated Limehouse; the only remnants of the Chinese community are the street names: Canton, Mandarin, Ming and Pekin among them.