The Tube Station Sunk Into London's Docks

A DLR station in East London was deliberately built with its foundations driven into the bed of a Victorian dock, its platforms suspended over open water. South Quay station sits at the intersection of three centuries of London history: the slave-trade wealth that built the docks, a forgotten Victorian railway buried beneath them, an IRA bomb that destroyed the original station, and the extraordinary engineering decision to sink its replacement directly into the dock channel. This is the story of how one plot of water and rail was built, abandoned, and rebuilt at least three times in under two hundred years.