Silo D

TQ 48 SW 251/4/10034

ROYAL VICTORIA DOCK (South off) Silo'D'

II

Grain silo. 1920, restored 1995. Reinforced concrete. Simple plan of set back, central head house, with square compartments housing silos to either side and rear linked at high level, and with a horizontal Chase- style elevator on top, and leg to one side. Windows, now blocked overlooking finger dock, with roundels on high level link. Interior not inspected. Bulk grain was lifted from ships and barges into the central cube of silos and the two side towers, both by traditional bucket conveyor and by suction elevator, and thence loaded on to other barges. This was the centre of grain importation into London, and replaced iron silos of 1898 which were damaged in the Silvertown munitions explosion of 1917. Included as a dramatic, unusually architectural and relatively early surviving example of a reinforced concrete grain silo. Silos have become celebrated as statements of pure modernism achieved almost accidentally as a sideline to industrial functionalism, and this is a particularly good example. Sources Elizabeth Williamson and Nikolaus Pevsner, London Docklands, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1997, p.184 Rayner Banham, A Concrete Atlantis, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1986, pp.109- 79

Listing NGR: TQ4095480197