Millwall Iron Works

The Millwall Iron Works, London, England, was a 19th-century industrial complex and series of companies, which developed from 1824. Formed from a series of small shipbuilding companies to address the need to build larger and larger ships, the holding company collapsed after the Panic of 1866 which greatly reduced shipbuilding in London. Subsequently, a recovery was made by a series of smaller companies, but by the later 19th century the location was too small for the building of ships on the scale then required. Most of its buildings, being near the apex of the peninsula, survived the Blitz and have been made into apartment blocks in a residential estate, Burrells Wharf.

By the early 8th century, the Land of Promise estate was in Marshwall (now Millwall) on the north side of the River Thames east of London, was owned by St Martin's-in-the-Fields haberdasher Simon Lemon. Mastmaker Robert Todd then bought the estate, leaving it to his partner Thomas Todd and his wife's cousin Elizabeth, wife of mastmaker Charles Ferguson of Poplar. In 1824, industrialisation reached the area with the development of the chemical-processing works of the Imperial Gas Light & Coke Company.

In 1835 Scottish engineers William Fairbairn and David Napier bought the Land of Promise estate from Charles Augustus Ferguson, the start of making Millwall an important centre of iron shipbuilding.

In 1836, Fairbairn laid out an ironworks on a three-acre site to develop small ships, although his main works remained in Manchester. More than 100 ships, mostly under 2,000 tons, were built by Fairbairn at Millwall, including vessels for the Admiralty, the merchant marine Tsar of Russia and King of Denmark.

But the works were not a financial success, resulting in its sale in 1848 to John Scott Russell and partners. John Scott Russell built complete ships in the works, fully fitted out, which they then floated out on to the river as ready to go ships. One of their earliest commissions was the iron steamer Taman, completed in 1848 for the Imperial Russian government to operate from the Black Sea ports.

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