happens in the long
run to man's handiwork, for it accelerates the speed of change till
change is fast enough for you to watch a town grow and die. You see
that Dockland is unstable, is in flux, alters in colours and form. I
doubt whether the people below are sensitive to this ironic display on
their roofs.

My eyes more frequently go to one place in that high country. In that
distant line of warehouses is a break, and there occasionally I see the
masts and spars of a tall ship, and I remember that beyond my dark
horizon of warehouses is the path down which she has come from the
Indies to Blackwall. I said we were not inland. Cassiopeia is in that
direction, and China over there.

For my outlook is more than the centre of Dockland. I call it the
centre of the world. Our high road is part of the main thoroughfare
from Kensington to Valparaiso. Every wanderer must come this way at
least once in his life. We are the hub whence all roads go to the
circumference. A ship does not go down but we hear the cry of
distress, and the house of a neighbour rocks on the flood and is lost,
casting its people adrift on the blind tides.

Think of some of our street names--Malabar Street, Amoy Place, Nankin
Street, Pekin Street, Canton Street. And John Company has left its
marks. You pick up hints of the sea here as you pick old shells out of
dunes. We have, still nourishing in a garden, John Company's Chapel of
St. Matthias, a fragment of a time that was, where now the vigorous
commercial life of the Company shows no evidence whatever of its
previous urgent importance. Founded in the time of the Commonwealth as
a symbol for the Company's men who, when in rare moments they looked up
from the engrossing business of their dominant hours, desired a
reminder of the ineffable things beyond ships and cargoes, the Chapel
has survived all the changes which destroyed their ships and scattered
the engrossing business of their working hours into dry matter for
antiquaries. So little do men really change. They always leave their
temples, whether they lived in Poplar or Nineveh. Only the names of
their gods change. The Chapel at Poplar it was then, when this
shipping parish had no docks, and the nearest church was over the
fields to Stepney. Our vessels then lay in the river. We got our
first dock, that of the West India Merchants, at the beginning of last
century. A little later the East India Dock was built by John Company.