Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

LONDON’S DOCKS. 191 IVORY STORE quarters. 1 he grain is taken from the vessels by self-filling and self-discharging buckets fitted to cranes on the quays, and delivered into hoppers, it being estimated that 120 lifts per hour can be made by each crane. The hoppers pass along on rails outside the buildings, and deliver grain into weighing machines, which are capable of weighing two tons at a time. From the weighing machines the grain is taken up by a system of band machinery, which delivers it on different floors of the granaries. During a recent year 1,4öS vessels of various classes, carrying wood, grain, coals, and sundry merchandise, of the total net registered tonnage of 1,076,51 <8, used these docks. Seventy-five per cent, of the wood-laden vessels entering the Port of London come into the Surrey Commercial Docks. The Millwall Docks are situated on the Isle of Dogs, to the south of the West India Docks, on the northern side of the Thames. They consist of an area of 233^ acres of land and 35 % acres of water ; the entrance is three and a half miles below London Bridge, is eighty feet wide, with twenty-eight feet of water over the sills at Trinity high water ; they have three pairs of gates, forming a lock 450 feet in length, which can be divided into AT THE DOCKS. rhoto: Cassdl & Co- Ltl- two locks of 250 feet and 200 feet in length respectively. The principal portion of the dock is 350 feet wide, with a depth of water varying from twenty-eight feet in fairway ta twenty-four feet by the quay walls. The total length of the quay is 3,040 yards, and near the south-east corner there is a dry dock- 450 feet long by 65 feet wide, with twenty feet of water over the blocks at high tide. 1 his is emptied partly by discharging the water through a culvert into the Thames, the remainder by pumping. Hydraulic power is the motive force used almost exclusively, <'tnd at the entrance lock there are thirty machines for opening and closing gates and working the sluices and capstans. The lattef have a haulage power varying from one to five tons each. There are distributed about the docks sixty-five cranes, most of them of thirty-five hundredweight capacity, and moving about on rails of a seven feet six inch gauge. Some of these are on masonry foundations, others on timber dolphins situated about forty feet from the quay. The dolphins vary from 200 to 360 feet in length, aud the advantage gained by their use is that goods can be lifted straight from a ship into a barge or vice versa. The principal trade of the docks is grain, of which about 3,000,000