London Guide
Rotherhithe
Rotherhithe, the thumb of marshy land jutting out into the Thames east of Bermondsey, has always been slightly removed from the rest of London. It was a thriving shipbuilding centre even before the construction of the Surrey Commercial Docks in the nineteenth century, and was described as "chiefly inhabited by sailors, ship-carpenters, coal-heavers and bargemen" at the turn of the century. However, no other set of London dockyards took such a hammering in the Blitz, and the decades until their closure in 1970 were years of inexorable decline.
Most of the docks, which took up almost the entire peninsula, have now been reclaimed for new housing estates and more upmarket accommodation. The lack of any relationship between the old Rotherhithe communities, which face the street, and the new ones, which face the water, gives the whole area a strange, dislocated feeling that's typical of Docklands developments.