Ed Glinert, author of Penguin’s East End Chronicles, the most important 21st century history of the area,  t on Zoom of the very heart of the old East End of London.

Our story starts in mediaeval times when the U–shaped peninsula was uninhabited and prone to constant flooding. It remained a lonely place. Samuel Pepys, journeying to a wedding dressed “in a new coloured silk suit and coat trimmed with gold buttons and gold broad lace round my hands, very rich and fine” on the 31st of July 1665 was forced to stay here for a few hours when his horse-drawn ferry became stuck in the ebb tide. He captured the predicament in his diary: “So we were fain to stay there, in the unlucky Isle of Doggs, in a chill place, the night cold and wind fresh . . . to our great discontent”.

Where does the strange name come from? It had been Stebunhethe (Stepney) Marsh until it acquired a nickname: the Isle of Dogs. Nobody knows how this strange name came about. It may have been a corruption of “Isle of Ducks” or “Isle of Dykes”. It may have referred to real dogs – Henry VIII’s royal hounds – which were kept here.

Nothing much took place here until the dramatic construction of West India Dock at the northern end of the peninsula at the end of the 18th century tore apart the remaining rural features of the Isle. An army of navvies, bricklayers, carpenters, surveyors, engineers and architects descended on the area, wiping out the hedgerows and lanes to excavate huge basins for the docks. Forbiddingly high brick walls were formed from the extracted earth and placed around the site to protect it, implying a mystery within which tantalised visitors and locals for the next hundred and fifty years. It was now the hub of London industry: Planet Vulcan, a burning smithy of iron and steel powering shipbuilding and engineering.

More docks arrived until more than half the landmass was actually water, huge caverns where tens of thousands of men loaded and unloaded thousands of ships for more than a hundred fifty years, and much of this geographical system survives even though the docks died decades ago.

The modern-day Isle of Dogs couldn’t be more of a contrast. Much of the worst 1960s housing has been replaced by expensive town houses, the industrial mess has been cleared away, and the most conspicuous sight are Britain’s tallest estate of skyscrapers at Canary Wharf, home to Mammon and the media, a commercial empire of granite and glass, the shining city of the dream.