Stothert And Pitt Cranes On North And South Sides Of The Royal Victoria Dock

Fourteen cranes located in pairs along the north and south docksides of the Royal Victoria Dock in Silvertown—three pairs to the north and four to the south. This is the most concentrated ensemble of cranes surviving in London's Docklands.

The cranes are electrically-operated and were originally mounted on rails running the length of the quayside, though they are no longer travelling cranes and are now fixed in position. All fourteen are manufactured by Stothert & Pitt, the world's most famous crane makers.

The two types exhibit important visual and technological differences. The westernmost pair on the south side, dating possibly from the 1920s, have a traditional appearance with rivetted-steel lattice towers and jibs and a glazed cabin bearing the makers plate 'Stothert & Pitt Ltd / Bath, England'. The remaining twelve cranes date from 1962 and are early examples of Stothert & Pitt's revolutionary DD2 dockside crane, an all-welded tubular steel design introduced in 1959. The DD2 achieved critical acclaim and commercial success, winning the Council of Industrial Design Award in 1968, by which date hundreds were being used worldwide.

Photographs from the 1950s and 1960s show that originally far greater numbers of cranes were present, particularly alongside the neighbouring Royal Albert Dock where none survive now.

The Royal Victoria Dock, opened in 1855, was the largest dock in the world and the first of the Royal Docks, followed by Royal Albert (1880) and King George V (1921). It was the first London dock designed specifically to accommodate large steam ships, the first to use hydraulic power to operate its machinery, and the first to be connected to the national railway network. The dock consisted of a main dock and a basin to the west, providing an entrance to the Thames on the western side of the complex. It was deeply indented with four solid piers, each 152 metres long by 43 metres wide, on which were constructed two-storey warehouses, later filled in after the Second World War. Other warehouses, granaries, sheds and storage buildings surrounded the dock, which had a total of 3.6 kilometres of quays.

The dock was an immediate commercial success, easily accommodating all but the very largest steamships. By 1860, it was taking over 850,000 tons of shipping annually—double that of the London Docks, four times that of St Katharine Docks, and 70 per cent more than the West India Dock and East India Docks combined. Though badly damaged by German bombing in the Second World War, the dock experienced a resurgence in trade following the war. However, from the 1960s onwards, the Royal Victoria experienced steady decline as did all of London's docks, as the shipping industry adopted containerisation, which effectively moved traffic downstream to Tilbury. The dock finally closed to commercial traffic in 1980 along with the other Royal Docks.