East London manufacturing history

Writing of London in the Nineteenth Century, Jerry White remarks on the large proportion of the population – some 30% - who made things, countering a common belief that London was a place of commerce with local manufacturing restricted to small and niche workshops. This was largely the result of what had gone before. London as a port was fundamental.

Docklands

The Naval dockyard at Woolwich became the principal focus in the reign of Henry VIII and the building of Henri Grace a Dieu. Looking at the records of the Board of Ordnance, which supplied cannon, powder and cannon balls, there grew up substantial stores at Chatham, Tilbury and Sheerness and to a lesser extent Woolwich itself. I write below of the major role that Woolwich would take in the supply of the army. Significant naval stores were also held at Portsmouth and Plymouth. With the later expansion of empire, stores were located overseas at for example Gibraltar.

Alongside naval shipbuilding, commercial shipbuilding yards stretched east from Bermondsey. They provided the essential transport for adventurers and traders. East Indiamen made the long and challenging journey to the far east to bring back exotic cargoes. Nearer to home coal was brought by coastal ships from Newcastle. The yards were busy places and I wrote of them in How Britain Shaped the Manufacturing World.

At the end of the eighteenth century the pressure on the small area of 'legal' docks for commercial shipping was clearly grossly inadequate and expansion became urgent. I wrote of this in my page on Inner London for that was where the docks were.

As London grew, the banks of the Thames filled with manufacturing businesses attracted by the ease of receiving raw materials and dispatching finished goods. The docks would welcome ships arriving with cargoes from just about all over the world; ships too would leave with finished goods destined for lucrative overseas markets. The label ‘Made in London’ carried a cache the world over.

It had been and still was a busy and diversified place with saw-mills, lead-smelting, paint and varnish works, iron and brass foundries, chemicals works and ships stores, boiler makers works, chain and anchor works and sack, bag and canvas factories.

Woolwich

The Weald provided charcoal and iron ore for the production of all things metal, so guns in the environs of the Tower of London and at the Woolwich Arsenal, and cutlery before Sheffield bagged the lead in that trade. As to the manufacture of weapons, the casting of brass cannon had been carried out at Moorfields and before that on the Weald itself. In the first half of the eighteenth century there were built on the Woolwich site a foundry for casting guns, a Laboratory for making gunpowder and a workshop for gun carriages as well as extensive storage. Further development would follow in the end of the Napoleonic wars.

Shoreditch and Bethnal Green

Furniture making was to be found in Mayfair for the well-to-do and in the East End, using semi-skilled labour, for the rest of the market. Furniture skills were gathered together by companies like Gillow and Seddon. Once again, processes would be subdivided into different skill sets; in time mechanisation would make redundant much of the handicraft. The area around Shoreditch and the western end of Bethnal Green became in White’s words ‘something approaching one giant factory’.

A book titled Furnishing the World - The East London Furniture Trade 1830-1980 looks at this in more detail. The starting point was the growing population and house building, all of which drove demand for furniture. This was matched by an east end population which included Jewish immigrants skilled in carpentry and the availability of wood coming in through the growing docklands but also later along the Regents Canal which opened in 1820. The overwhelming majority of the furniture makers were small workshops selling mainly to wholesalers.

Philip Hamlyn Williams - my history of British Manufacturing

Friday, November 21, 2025