The Big Smoke

When you step off the DLR at Westferry, the southern horizon is obscured by the looming mirror walls of Canary Wharf, where once hundreds of ships’ masts would have towered over fortified docks. Traffic now speeds through decimated estates, where there was once a thriving, seething East End dock community. Right here, 50 feet beneath my feet on Limehouse Causeway, was the centre of London’s first Chinatown, formed by an enclave of Cantonese sailors marooned by the Blue Funnel Line, which offered their deckhands no return passage East.

There’s little left of the maze of alleyways, Chinese cafés and grocers that clustered here from the 1880s to the 1930s. Nothing to suggest the exotic hubbub of real docklands, the whiff of opium smoked openly, the excitement of the puck-apu numbers racket or the gambling den at Ah Tack’s Lodging House. Well, next to nothing…
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A tin dragon sculpture at the end of Mandarin Street hints at what used to be. The old dock gates by West India Dock Road are closed, no longer guarding mountains of sugar and spice. On the dock’s doorstep was Charlie Brown’s pub, where the landlord bartered beer in exchange for a veritable museum of Oriental art. Over the road, around Pennyfields, was the Shanghai Chinese community: yet more shops, Ting Kee Refreshments, and a Christian mission to compete with the Confucian temple and local Tong HQ. Amid ’60s blocks, only a streetname remains – Ming (formerly King) Street.

The last remnants of Chinese life

Even at its peak after WW I, the Chinese community numbered less than 4,000 – including precious few women. Moral panic and xenophobic riots were sparked by rumours of a white slave trade, fanned by the lurid fiction of Conan Doyle and Sax ‘Fu Manchu’ Rohmer. Thomas Burke dreamed up brilliant slices of low life in ‘Limehouse Nights’. Even Dorian Gray dropped by here for his opium.

After the vindictive razing of the Chinese ‘slums’ in 1934, it takes local expertise to locate any remaining trace of Eastern or even dockland heritage. I meet up with Blue Badge guide Martin Harvey, who leads me to Amoy Place, once the epicentre of those ‘kind of Limehouse Chinese Laundry Blues’. He points out a ships’ chandler’s and mastmaker’s, the Merchant Navy Officers’ Club and Dock Constables’ houses, all recycled as flats.

On Commercial Road is the striking deco British & Foreign Sailors’ Hostel (or ‘Sailors’ Palace’), one window ablaze with the telltale pictograms of the Chinese Association of Tower Hamlets. Opposite, the Star of the East pub has original gaslights outside and a dingy welcome within. It appears to be a hulking Victorian Gothic take on a Chinese temple, but the reference is as lost as its neighbour, the Chinatown restaurant, is a sad recent closure.

At the end of Canton Street lies the Chinese Sunday School & Chun Yee Society, an old people’s drop-in centre in the basement. At last, here are people with actual memories of Chinatown, before the community relocated (almost) en masse to Soho in the ’50s.

Finally, we walk through old wharves and new, oxymoronic ‘gated communities’ to riverside Narrow Street. Once this was Fu Manchu's lair – ‘the river was his highway, his line of communication along which he moved his mysterious forces’ – but now it’s Gordon Ramsay’s.