Warehouse fronts and iron footbridges line Wapping High Street, and Doctor Who filmed street scenes at Pier Head in 1976.
What Wapping looks like
The High Street runs as one lane between warehouse fronts for most of its length, with narrow gaps down to the river on one side. , on the corner with Dundee Street, is six storeys of stock brick with white brick banding. Lattice iron bridges still cross the road there at second and fifth floor level.
At Pier Head, two matching terraces from 1811 stand three storeys over a basement in yellow stock brick, with round arched windows along the ground floor. A walled garden separates them, plane trees inside the railings.
is further along the High Street, a six storey tea warehouse from 1870. Pointed arches top its top floor windows. It is now converted to flats. , a large brick warehouse of about 1811 by The Highway, stands largely empty today and is occasionally used for filming and events.
Watermen's stairs cut through the warehouse fronts down to the Thames foreshore, walled in on both sides by the same brick. , beside the Town of Ramsgate, is one of them. It is a flagged passage running down to the tideline.
Shot in Wapping
Doctor Who filmed street scenes for The Talons of Weng-Chiang at and at Wapping Old Stairs on 16 December 1976, where an elderly woman directs the police to a body in the river. The film To Sir, with Love used Wapping station and Wapping Wall in 1967 for Mark Thackeray's daily commute. The warehouse in that shot has since gained a floor. The Long Good Friday built a pub set on the High Street facing Scandrett Street for its car bomb scene, and used the warehouse opposite Dundee Street for the scene where a guard is found nailed to the floor. Friends shot the exterior of on Scandrett Street as the wedding church in The One with Ross's Wedding.
Doctor Who, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, 1977
Wapping Pier Head
Three of the serial's street scenes were shot at 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 terraces behind them are yellow stock brick from 1811, three storeys over a basement, with round arched windows at ground level.
Wapping Pier Head's two 1811 terraces are almost the same age as Schermerhorn Row on South Street, built 1810 to 1812 in the same Georgian brick with sash windows over ground floor arches. Both were counting houses and warehouses built right at the water's edge for a port city. Schermerhorn Row's soft hand molded brick reads warmer than Wapping's yellow stock brick, and modern towers behind the Pier Head terraces need to stay out of frame. Try searching 1811 Georgian brick terraces now.
Butler's Wharf and the other Shad Thames buildings still carry their nineteenth century iron bridges and gantries linking the warehouses across the lane, the same device as the bridges over Wapping High Street at Dundee Street. Both are working port streets narrowed by warehouses on both sides rather than open dock frontage. Tower Bridge is visible from several points around Shad Thames and would need to be kept out of frame. Shad Thames's lane is closed to traffic, where Wapping High Street is not. Try searching iron bridges linking warehouses now.
Speicherstadt in Hamburg, Germany
Speicherstadt's rows of brick warehouses are crossed by iron bridges the same way St John's Wharves Warehouses are linked across Wapping High Street. Its own bridges cross canals rather than a road, and the brick runs darker red under Gothic arches. The whole district was built between 1883 and 1927. A shot standing in for Speicherstadt needs to avoid open water in frame, and keep Wapping's lighter stock brick and round arches clear of anything meant to double as the sharper Gothic brickwork of the German warehouses. Try searching brick warehouses crossed by bridges now.
