London Through a Looking Glass: A Straightened Thames
18th Century merchants using the Pool of London (the stretch of the Thames between London Bridge and Limehouse) faced several problems, the most notable being how crowded the river was with ships moored at (or waiting to moor at) the various quays, and the time it took to navigate the meander of the river around the Isle of Dogs to the east. Architect William Reveley proposed an ambitious scheme which he believed would solve both of these issues: straighten the Thames.
Reveley presented four different plans, each of which would create a more direct route between the Woolwich Reach and the Pool of London, and also turn the bends of the river into giant docks. An extra effect of the plans was that the straightened waterway would create a better outflow for the sewage-polluted waters of the Thames.
Plan No. 1 would have seen a channel across the top of the Isle of Dogs, with the tips of both the Rotherhithe and Greenwich peninsulas also cut away. The southern bend of the river, sealed by locks, would have become Greenwich Dock.
Plan No. 2 showed a more diagonal channel across the Isle of Dogs, and another to the east, creating a small North Greenwich Island, and an additional Blackwall Dock.
Plan No.3 was perhaps the most audacious, and is the one most often cited when the subject of the straightened Thames proposals are brought up. This would have had three channels, two like those from Plan No. 2, with the third running through Rotherhithe and creating Ratcliff dock.
Plan No. 4 was the most different, showing two channels cutting off large parts of Greenwich and Rotherhithe, with only a small canal (if required) running across the top of the Isle of Dog. This proposal would have resulted in larger Ratcliff and Blackwall Docks than the previous plans.
Reveley’s scheme did not come to pass – partly due to its sheer scale, and also due to opposition from the City of London and West India merchants, who did not want to lose trade at their existing warehouses to the proposed newer, bigger docks. A few years after Reveley’s plans, the City Canal would be dug across the top of the Isle of Dogs – and eventually form part of the network of bigger docks in East London.
