The Limehouse Cut is a largely straight, broad canal in the East End of London which links the lower reaches of the Lee Navigation to the River Thames.

Thus, in 1588 (wrote G. B. G. Bull): A fleet of 44 barges, bearing such names as Maltsack, Ramshead, Greyhound, Pheasant, Primrose, Hind and Cock, with a total capacity of 1100 quarters were engaged in transporting wheat and malt from the Hertfordshire markets of Ware and Hoddesdon to Queenhythe in London.

[2] The goods came from even further afield: by 1663 the road from Huntingdon and Cambridge was worn out "by reason of the great Trade of Barley and Mault, that cometh to Ware, and so is conveyed by water to the City of London".

Although the newly constructed Limehouse Cut could save vessels time navigating down Bow Creek and around the Isle of Dogs, its performance was suboptimal.

[17] At an 1850 inquiry by William Cubitt it was explained that because the Cut was unnavigable for four or five days at neap tides, barges had no way out to the Thames except via Bow Creek (which was toll free).

"Limehouse Cut had always occasioned a great deal of trouble", added Beardmore, "on account of the water falling short, and of the slipping of the moving sands and gravel, which lay where the London clay was denuded".

[43] There was litigation; the Trust ran into cashflow problems; and the eventual compromise was that the Companies got the whole of the River Lee's water—apart from that required for navigation—for comparatively small amounts.

[54] At about this time the Lee trustees, who were afterwards alleged to be too cosy[55] with the Regent's Canal Company, agreed to sell it the southern portion[56] of the Limehouse Cut.

[66] Beardmore replaced the old timber Limehouse Lock with an "economical structure"[58] which was wider and had arched sheets overhead to stop bulging, after the Dutch fashion.

[47] In 1888 Joe Child (one of Beardmore's successors) wrote:The pointings and chambers of these locks were so filled up with mud, rubbish, old pans and kettles thrown in that when the gates were closed for the purpose of drawing the water at Limehouse or Bow the leakage was so great that we could not keep a head of water in the Cut so that before again drawing it was necessary to clear out the locks which has been done but the gates at Bromley still leak very much ..and will require a short stoppage for repair.

It had been rebuilt in 1865, after the closing of the link to the Regents Canal Dock, and the design had included massive timber ties over the top of it to prevent bulging of the walls.

[73] Access to the lock from the cut and from the Thames was awkward, and the gates were operated by winches and chains as the site was too narrow to accommodate balance beams.

[74] John Cary's New and Accurate Plan of London of 1795 shows that, by that date, a portion of the canal, near its outlet at Limehouse, had been expanded to form a large basin, with an island in the middle marked "Timber Yd", accessible by a causeway.

However, on 10 May 1768—the day of the St George's Fields Massacre riots—a mob of 500 men, including hand-sawyers, attacked his sawmill and destroyed the machinery—anticipating the Luddite machine-smashers of later years.

[98] Other notable builds included the Admiralty's fast anti-torpedo boats powered by the noiseless Willans engine,[99] and the yawl Rob Roy (one of the first vessels used in solo adventuring).

[100][101] When it became urgent to send an expedition to the Sudan to rescue General Gordon the firm built and delivered, in less than a month, 100 boats to a special design for ascending the cataracts of the Nile.

The authorities then rented the disused Silver factory - sandwiched between the Limehouse Cut and Dod Street - and made plans to convert it into a hospital.

Socialists like John Burns,[133] Amie Hicks,[134] Henry Hyndman[135] Eleanor Marx,[136] William Morris[137] and George Bernard Shaw,[138] among others, were speakers there.

The Dod Street trick, devised to counter this, was thus described by Bernard Shaw:[139]Find a dozen... who are willing to get arrested at the rate of one a week by speaking in defiance of the police.

In a month or two, the repeated arrests, the crowds which they attract, the scenes which they provoke, the sentences passed by the magistrates... and the consequent newspaper descriptions, rouse sufficient public feeling to force the Home Secretary to give way whenever the police are clearly in the wrong, which is what happened.

It symbolically has the law blacking Morris' boots in Dod Street — his foot rests on comrades who did get jail time or "smarting" fines — while on his banner is an ironical reference to his high-flown poem The Earthly Paradise.

[152] Its stock of timber — easily imported by water — was described in the East London Observer as "something enormous", yet swiftly turned into good furniture "at the lowest possible prices".

[155] At Herrmann's in 1884, while planning his London bombing campaign, worked Irish-American dynamitard Harry Burton;[156] he lodged round the corner in Pelling Street.

According to Charles Dickens Jr., the first rule of the establishment was this: Any outcast boy or girl, up to the age of sixteen, without parents, guardians or friends, and who has no home but the streets, will be admitted at once, at any hour of the day or the night free, and be provided with a bath, warm clothes, food and a bed.

Any policeman on the beat "who finds some poor outcast shrinking from the flash of his lantern", wrote Dickens, knew to send the child to Dod Street.

Run by a man called Walter Austin and his mistress Frances Napton ("the Lady Superintendent"), the charity put on stunts (see illustration), sent out heart-rending appeals, collected large donations, but kept no proper accounts.

[160] East End refuse collectors — called "dustmen", because households produced much coal ash — took the product to two yards[161] on the Limehouse Cut, where it was hand-sorted into separate hills by gangs of old men, women and boys.

It included St Anne Street, where a man starved his wife in "peculiarly horrible" circumstances (1872);[167] and Merchant's Row, where a labourer kicked his mother to death (1897).

Originally (1869) a ships chandler's, with the best surviving example of a sail loft in Docklands, it was then extended to the east and formed the workshop and offices of Caird & Rayner.

Access on foot along the Limehouse Cut was difficult in the area below the Blackwall Tunnel approach road, but was made easier as a result of an innovative scheme to create a floating towpath.