A riverside pub honouring the docker – the tough, hard-working dockworker whose muscle and sweat unloaded the cargo of the world along these very quays
Dockers Inn carries a 4.4 across more than three hundred and forty reviews and flies one of the most honest and hard-working names in this whole survey – the docker, the labourer of the docks. The Prat’s naming desk, ever devoted to the celebration of honest work, raised a glass to the men of the quays.
Towards the docks, the riverside
Dockers Inn sits towards the docks on the riverside, in the old dockland east of Bermondsey. Proper Docklands territory, no disclaimer needed.
The men of the quays
The docker – the dockworker, the stevedore – was the muscle of the whole great port of London. It was the dockers who unloaded the ships, hauling the cargo of the entire world off the vessels and onto the quays: the tea and the timber, the spices and the sugar, the wool and the wine, everything that flowed through the greatest port on earth. It was brutally hard physical work, and often brutally insecure – the dockers gathering at the gates each morning in the old days, hoping to be picked for a day’s labour. They were tough, proud, hard-working men, and the whole wealth of the port rested on their backs.
The honest labour honoured
The Prat’s naming desk salutes the name in the great tradition of the honest working pub. Like the Shipwrights, the Miller and the Tanner across this survey, Dockers Inn celebrates the ordinary working man – the labourer whose sweat and muscle did the real work of the world. There is no grandeur in the name, and that is exactly its dignity: it honours not a king or an admiral but the docker, the man who did the hauling. In a survey rich with royalty and heroes, the Prat has a special and consistent affection for the pubs that raise a glass to the ordinary working man.
The dockers’ own local
What the Prat likes best is that the name claims the pub for the workers themselves. A “Dockers Inn” is, by its name, the dockers’ own local – the pub where the men of the quays came to drink after a hard day’s hauling, to rest their aching backs, to spend their hard-earned wages among their own. It honours the docker not from above but from alongside, as the workers’ own place. The whole community and solidarity of the working docks is folded into the name. The 4.4 across three hundred reviews is a solid score for so honest a local.
Verdict
A 4.4 across three hundred and forty-plus reviews is a solid score, and Dockers Inn earns it on an honest, hard-working name. It honours the docker – the tough dockworker whose muscle unloaded the cargo of the world along these quays – in the great tradition of the pub that raises a glass to the ordinary working man.
Go for the honest welcome and the working history of the name, and raise a pint to the dockers who worked these quays. The whole wealth of the greatest port on earth rested on their backs – and a pub that claims itself as their own local honours them exactly as they deserve.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
The layer of resignation here is the point. Not rage. Resignation that’s been earned through experience.