Ioana Marinca

You can see the Isle of Dogs on a map. It stands out as a U, a loop encompassing an island that snags it off from the rest of London. That U-bend, that looping off, is both what makes it unique but also its downfall. During World War 2, German bombers used its distinctive topography as an easy identifying point to bomb London’s docks, despite a city-wide blackout.

The shape also cuts it off from the surrounding area. It can be inward-looking, a pressured petri dish of all the ills of London squeezed into one small area: it’s overdeveloped, underfunded, a place that is home both to locals who were born here (“Islanders”) and incomers from around the country and around the world. The extreme wealth of a privately owned financial district sits next to extreme poverty, the local sits next to the international, the individual next to the communal.

I moved to the Isle of Dogs years ago and soon became attached to the U made by the Thames around it. I was an outsider with an office job in a glass tower, a cog in the economic and demographic wheels that have made the Island what it is, ever since the docks were first built here over two hundred years ago.

That proximity to the fundamental economics of the United Kingdom have given the Island a sensitivity to political and social change in the nation. This was evident in the 18th century when the first dock was built by Robert Milligan, an act that both developed the local area and also accelerated the slave trade to the Caribbean, including to Milligan’s own plantations and the 526 people enslaved there. It was evident in the 1980s when the last working dock was shut and the government shifted focus towards financial services, causing some working class families to move away from the Island. And it was evident in 2020 when the statue of the docks’ enslaver founder was removed from West India Quay in the wake of George Floyd's murder and the Black Lives Matter protests.

Isle of Dogs is a project that looks at the people, geography, and economics of this very visible, but much neglected corner of London. It documents a moment in time and paints a portrait of the Island through the multitude of views and lives lived here. Isle of Dogs was self published as a broadsheet newspaper of portraits and short interviews under Duck Sale Press.