Tobacco Dock

Tobacco Dock is a Grade I listed warehouse in the Docklands area of the East End of London, United Kingdom. It was constructed in approximately 1811 and served primarily as a store for imported tobacco.

It is a brick building with many brick vaults and some fine ironwork. It was adjacent to a particular set of docks named London Docks, which have now mostly been filled in. Tobacco Dock is owned by Messila House, a Kuwaiti investment company.

At its north entrance stands a 7 ft tall bronze sculpture of a boy standing in front of a tiger. In the late 1800s, wild animal trader Charles Jamrach owned the world's largest exotic pet store, located on Ratcliffe Highway, near to Tobacco Dock. The statue commemorates an incident where a Bengal tiger escaped from Jamrach's shop into the street and picked up and carried off a small boy, who had approached and tried to pet the animal having never seen such a big cat before. The boy escaped unhurt after Jamrach gave chase and prised open the animal's jaw with his bare hands.

The Queen's Tobacco-pipe once was the common name of the furnace in the north-east corner of the tobacco warehouses in the London Docks. It got its name for the burning of all sorts of contraband, especially tobacco and cigars.

In 1990 the structure was converted into a shopping centre at a development cost of £47 million and it was intended to create the "Covent Garden of the East End"; the scheme was unsuccessful, though, and it went into administration. Tobacco Dock is not in a major retail area and has only moderately good public transport access. Since the mid-1990s the building has been almost entirely unoccupied, with the only tenant being a sandwich shop, and a plan to convert it into a factory outlet did not come to fruition.

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