St Saviour's Dock
The St Saviour 's Dock is a small harbor on the south bank of the Thames in London. It is located about 400 m east of Tower Bridge and forms the eastern boundary of the historic Shad Thames area. On the other side of the harbor is Jacob's Iceland.
Location
In this part of the Thames estuary the tidal range is particularly high; in the harbor he is up to 4 m. When storm surges, the water often rises alarmingly just below the windows of the building next to Shad Thames and Mill Street.
At St. Saviour 's Dock also opens the Neckinger into the Thames. The Neckinger is an underground river which rises in Southwark and flows completely underground to the north.
History
A community of monks from Cluny resided from 1802 in Bermondsey Abbey near this site. The community cultivated the area of Bermondsey, cultivated the land and fortified the banks of the Thames. They built the mouth of the Neckinger into a harbor and named it after St. Salvator, the patron saint of their monastery.
John Stow, an English historian and antiquarian of the 16th century, had this to say about the area
" At the southern end, where once a priory or abbey of Sankt Salvator was Bermond 's Eye in Southwark called, founded by Alwin Childe, a citizen of London in 1081 ... "
St. Saviour 's Dock in the literature
Charles Dickens leaves parts of his novel Oliver Twist play in the area of Shad Thames, in a time when this area was known for its poverty and Jacob's Iceland was called. In this novel the booth of Bill Sikes is located at the eastern end of Shad Thames next to the St. Saviour 's Dock. Here Sikes falls of roof and dies in the mud, probably directly in St. Saviour 's Dock.
Dickens gives us a vivid description of how a disgusting place in time, in the plays of the novel, must have looked like:
" ... Quirky wooden galleries, which are usually attached to the back of half a dozen houses, with holes through which you can see on the mud below; window, broken and patched, with protruding wooden sticks on which the lines are dried can, which is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so cramped that the air is too tainted even for the dirt and the dirt seems it; wooden chambers, which stretch outward beyond the mud and threatening to fall into it - as it is already happened a few times; dreckbeschmierte walls and decaying foundations, every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot and waste: all the graces the banks of Jacob's Iceland. "
St. Saviour 's Dock is also displayed in the computer game The Getaway.
51.502194444444 - 0.071Koordinaten: 51 ° 30 ' 8 " N, 0 ° 4' 16 " W
- Harbour in London
- Transport (London Borough of Southwark )
- Building in the London Borough of Southwark