Westferry, Tower Hamlets
A Docklands Light Railway station on the eastern edge of Limehouse
The gardens at Westferry Circus have railings and gates by Giuseppe Lund, symbolising the seasons
West Ferry Road (as it was called until the 1920s) was created, together with its eastern counterpart, when local landowners and businessmen established the Poplar and Greenwich Ferry Roads Company to make turnpikes to the Greenwich ferry in 1812. This marked the opening up of the inland part of the Isle of Dogs although it was several decades before the peninsula was fully colonised. The company abandoned its horse-ferry service in 1844 but continued to levy tolls until the Metropolitan Board of Works bought out the owners and removed the toll-gates in 1885.
Westferry Road has been progressively diverted and extended, finally meeting West India Dock Road when the London County Council demolished the Rosher estate in 1960. This junction is the site of Westferry station, opened in 1987 as one of the original fifteen stops on the Docklands Light Railway. The immediate vicinity remains largely unregenerated, with just a handful of unexceptional commercial premises. Before the Second World War the neighbourhood was the centre of the Chinese East End. Westferry Road is the site of the Canary South residential development, which has included the conversion of a fire station to flats and the building of a new station further along the road.
A blue plaque in Westferry Road celebrates the building in 1858 of Brunel’s Great Eastern, the largest steamship of the century.
