Science & Engineering

The museums, the machines and the men and women who worked it out: laboratories kept as they were, beam engines under steam, the tunnel, the barrier, the roofs, and the plaques on the houses where the ideas came.

Tell us what we can do better, or what you’re trying to discover.

Great Eastern slipway

The timber baulks on the Millwall foreshore where Brunel's Great Eastern, the largest ship in the world for forty years, stuck fast at her launch in 1857.

Engineering landmarksFree

Photo by Matt Brown, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Brunel's last ship was six times the size of anything afloat, built sideways to the river because there was no room to launch her bow first, and on 3 November 1857 she refused to move; it took three months of hydraulic rams and a chain that killed a workman to get her into the water, and the strain is said to have finished Brunel, who died in 1859 before her first voyage. The great timber slipway she was built on is still there at the end of Napier Avenue, uncovered in the 1980s and kept as a monument, with a plaque and the river at the bottom of it.

Where
Napier Avenue, Millwall, E14 3PU
Nearest station
Mudchute · 8 min walk

NearbyScience & Engineering

NearbyOther Categories

See more nearby listings

Submit a correction for this listing.

Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.

Which area are you in?