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Worshipful Company of Shipwrights
Ironmongers' Hall
Shaftesbury Place
Barbican
EC2Y 8AA

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Home Company History The Industry
Industry History Print E-mail
Shipbuilding is one of mankind's oldest and most significant technologies. The ancestors of the aborigines could only have reached Australia, as they did 50,000 years ago, by making an voyage of over eighty kilometres in the open sea, which indicates not only that they could build seagoing craft, but that their techniques were sufficiently well-established and reliable to give them the confidence to undertake such a momentous journey. Thus vessels must have been built on the Thames from the very earliest days of human settlement, but the Shipwrights do not enter the picture until relatively recently.
 
 It must be supposed that there were shipyards in and very near what is now the City of London, but it seems they moved out of the immediate area and down river in 11th and 12th centuries. There are various reasons for this, but the most likely seem to be that they constituted a major fire hazard in a city of timber and thatch (compare how for this reason Venice made the glass makers move to the neighbouring island of Burano), and that it is much more profitable to shift merchandise across a river frontage than it is to build ships on the same land.
 
 There are few records of the Thames shipbuilding industry before 16th century, prosperous though it must have been - the first written reference to a shipwright dates from 1297 - but between 1512 and 1915 it reached an apogee, becoming the greatest shipbuilding area in the world. Its largest ship, at 27,000 tons displacement, was Brunel's GREAT EASTERN, launched in 1858, but otherwise, in four centuries, some 5000 ships were launched into the Thames from both the Royal dockyards at Deptford and Woolwich, and the many private shipyards along its banks. 
 
More information? Visit 'The Museum' located at Docklands.
 
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 13 August 2008 08:17 )