Pontoon Dock, Newham

A Docklands Light Railway station located in West Silvertown

The grade II-​​listed ‘D’ Silo at Pontoon Dock

This was the site of a repair facility originally called the Victoria Graving Dock, built in the late 1850s on the south side of the Royal Victoria Dock, as it was later called. Using an innovative system of hydraulic jacks, vessels were raised out of the water on pontoons, which were then drained of their ballast water and shunted into a finger dock for repair or overhaul. There were four of these splayed fingers at each end of the dock but most have now been filled with concrete.

By the end of the 19th century ships had become too big for the equipment to lift and the dock switched to handling grain imports. Massive silos were built on the quayside, into which grain was pumped by suction. Several of the granaries and flour mills were damaged in the Silvertown explosion of 1917 and replaced in the years before the Second World War, notably by Spiller’s Millennium Mills and the CWS Mills.

Most of the dockside buildings were demolished in the early 1990s during preparation for the creation of Silvertown Quays, a shopping, office, housing and leisure devel­opment that has yet to get off the ground.

Postcode area: E16
Station: Docklands Light Railway, City Airport branch (zone 3)