ABSTRACT
At the turn of the nineteenth century, London’s trade was booming but the insufficient infrastructures along the banks of the River Thames could not cater to the increasing merchants’ needs for a secure environment to safely unload and store their cargoes extracted from the colonies. In this context, the West India Docks and its gigantic warehouses emerged as the first major storage improvement since the rebuilding after the Great Fire in response to the urgent call of the West India merchants. This chapter discusses this project and argues that its warehouses were more than just a mere secure place of storage for different produce. They marked the beginning of a new distinctive architectural landscape that not only came to replace a risky, uncontrolled and loss-making model but, via the instrumentalization of their spatial flexibility, provided the desired stability to continue an even greater, violent and diversified extraction urge, ultimately contributing in establishing a new type of economy.
