The smells of damp wood, sea air, tobacco and maybe just a soupçon of human sweat will waft through a gallery for an exhibition telling the hidden stories of what was once the world’s busiest port.
Details have been announced for a show that draws on the enormous, largely unknown archive of the Port of London authority (PLA).
Staged at the Museum of London Docklands, it will tell 200 years of stories that will range from seafaring phrases that have filtered into everyday English language use to the historical dependence of London’s docks on the sugar trade and slavery.
The curator, Claire Dobbin, also wants visitors to experience the smells workers would have inhaled day in, day out – as she herself has been doing.
“My office smells very much like the docks because I’ve got all the samples here,” she said. “I’ve learned that you become accustomed to the smell of a room in about seven seconds. You adjust quite quickly. I don’t notice it until I go out and come back in and think, ‘oh, it smells like a warehouse in here.’”
The scents section at the show will evoke the docks themselves – wood, sea air, sweat – as well as a tea warehouse and the home of a dock worker: “The smell of a coat drying by the fire, the smell of tobacco,” said Dobbin. “Younger people don’t remember when so much of London smelled of tobacco.”
The show is a partnership with the PLA, which has a remarkable archive on shelves about 1km long. It includes photos, objects, reels of film and oral testimonies. There are also about 50,000 plans and engineering drawings and 5,000 paintings and prints.
“Sizewise it is quite vast,” said Dobbin. “The problem has been where to start and then … at some point you need to stop. I think we have done more than scratch the surface and we have found lots of exciting stories to tell.”
Objects going on display include sandals seized in the 1870s, which have hollowed out soles to smuggle opium, and a 1950s diver’s helmet and air pump used by someone clearing riverbeds.
One section will describe how seafaring and dockland words and phrases have filtered in to common usage. Examples include sling your hook, tie up loose ends, fathom something out, like the cut of someone’s jib and crack on – the crack being the cracking sound from when a sail is released for a boat to go faster.
The museum has for a number of years addressed the history of the transatlantic slave trade. Last year it removed the statue of Robert Milligan, a prominent British slave trader, which had “stood uncomfortably” outside the museum for a long time.
In the port of London show it will exhibit a document commemorating the unveiling of the statue to serve “as a reminder of the full truth behind the economic prosperity that made the building of West India Docks possible”.
London remains the UK’s busiest port and the exhibition will tell its story from the end of the 18th century to the creation of the London Gateway “mega port” at Thurrock in the Thames Estuary.
Dobbin said it had been a thrill to go through the archive. “It has been a lot of fun and a real privilege to have access to such a meticulous and eclectic collection.”
One aim of the exhibition was to give “a behind-the-scenes view of things which, actually, many people don’t know much about.”
It will also include examples of the countless samples which were taken of goods coming in to London. One is a pot of dehydrated meat from the 1940s: “We haven’t opened it,” said Dobbin.
Another is a pot of ambergris, which was highly prized and used in perfumes. Dobbin explained: “It is essentially whale poop.”
Port City is at the Museum of London Docklands, 22 October-8 May.
