ABSTRACT
When ships were built mostly from wood, the Thames was the leading shipbuilding area in Britain. In the nineteenth century, however, shipbuilding on the London river declined very rapidly and by 1915 there was no ship construction on any serious scale on the Thames. In the period from 1832-46, the London shipbuilding yards were an important centre of technical innovation and development and helped to establish the UK iron shipbuilding trade. After the Crimean War, shipbuilding volumes fell back, but from 1859 trade recovered and there was a feverish boom in 1863-66, encouraged by the newly liberalised arrangements for forming limited liability companies. The discrepancy between the firm's commercial and naval work was the more acute because the naval contracts were for the largest ships that could be built, so that Thames Ironworks was effectively building either Dreadnoughts or barges.
