Wapping High Street runs between converted warehouses, and the old watermen's stairs off it go down to the Thames foreshore.
What Wapping looks like
Wapping is a narrow strip along the north bank of the Thames and for most of its length it is one street. Houses were built along the river wall, with the water on one side and Wapping Marsh behind. John Stow called it a continual street of small tenements lived in by sailors' victuallers.
The London Docks were built behind that street between 1799 and 1815. Houses came down for the docks and the warehouses, and Wapping's population fell by almost sixty per cent over the century.
Those warehouses are flats. on Wapping High Street was built in 1870 for tea and converted in 1972, the first here to go that way.
At Pier Head two matching terraces from 1811 face each other across the old entrance to Wapping Basin. The gap has been filled and planted. The iron railings and lamp brackets on either side of it are the original ones.
The docks closed to shipping in 1969 and most of the water was filled in. was kept and has flats round three sides of it, built between 1986 and 1988. A canal runs from across the filled dock to Hermitage Basin.
Bombing in 1940 destroyed much of the rest. St Peter's on Wapping Lane was hit that year and the repairs were finished in 1949. There are council blocks on and the streets around it.
The entrance to Brunel's Thames Tunnel is inside , and the curved stairs from the platforms up to the street are part of the original station.
Films shot in Wapping
Doctor Who filmed two Wapping locations for The Talons of Weng-Chiang on 16 December 1976. The second is Wapping Old Stairs, the flagged passage beside the Town of Ramsgate, where the police pull a body out of the river in the first episode. To Sir, with Love used and Wapping Wall for Thackeray's journey to work. The three storey warehouse in that shot has gained a floor since.
Doctor Who, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, 1977
Three of the serial's street scenes were shot at the Pier Head on 16 December 1976. Chang searches the streets for his master's cabinet, and Leela watches him choose his next victim. The Doctor also comes out of the mortuary here. The two terraces were put up in 1811 for the London Dock Company and face each other across what was then the entrance to Wapping Basin. The entrance has been filled and planted since. The end of one terrace became flats in the 1990s. The north east corner had gone in the Second World War and was rebuilt at the same time.
What Wapping can double for
Wapping can stand in for a Georgian port town and a dock warehouse quarter in another port city.
