Gun Wharves

Gun Wharves is a warehouse complex built in the late 1920s, constructed of stock brick with compostone dressing in the giant arcaded and pilastered warehouse tradition. The building occupies numbers 124-130 Wapping High Street in East London.

The street elevation consists of 15 bays and features a deep crowning entablature with moulded cornice and parapet. Above warehouses A and B, a panel rises from the parapet displaying 'Gun Wharves' in a late twentieth-century script. Warehouses C and D (124-126 Wapping High Street) have a deep granite plinth and granite faced reveals to the ground floor openings and waggon entrances. Some windows feature brick mullions, and there are three loading bays across this section. Warehouses A and B (128-130) are more ornate, with bays treated as a giant arcade with a deep plat band beneath the first floor and a flush band level with the capitals of the pilasters. These also have three loading bays, with paired iron frames featuring windows with mullions and lintels. The elevation includes H-section girder hoists and housings for roof-mounted cranes.

The riverside elevation presents a flat façade of 13 bays overall, treated as one long giant arcade rising through 6 storeys with channelled rustication to the ground floor piers. The pilasters, coupled in some cases, have fluted necking. A deep entablature with moulded cornice is surmounted by name plaques. Three wall-mounted, lattice, jibbed cranes with operating cabins and hydraulic power are mounted on this elevation.

The site, originally known as Wheatsheaf Wharf, had warehouse buildings from at least the 1870s. In the 1890s it was called Sharpe's Wharf, and in the early twentieth century it functioned as a paper wharf. A company called Litchfield and Soundry redeveloped the site in the late 1920s as Gun Wharves. In the 1980s, when the London Docks were largely filled in and redeveloped, the complex was converted to residential use. This conversion involved replacement of windows and insertion of balconies within the former loading bays.

Gun Wharves is significant as a handsome Thames riverside warehouse of the late 1920s, distinguished by its giant arcade marking divisions between loading and window bays. The building's footprint traces the curve of Wapping High Street, closing the vista along it. Together with adjacent Warehouses E, F, G and King Henry's Wharves, it forms an ensemble of group value, representing one of the few remaining 'cavernous' streets in Docklands.