For a hundred and forty years nothing left this quay without being written down. The ledgers survived because they were too heavy to move, and this exhibition is built from them.
What is in the room
- Eleven customs ledgers, four of them open at a single page.
- The lead seals used on bonded cargo, and the press that made them.
- Rope samples kept as evidence in a dispute of 1894, still tagged.
- A wall of loading notes written by one clerk over nineteen years.
Why it is worth an hour
The interest is not in any single object. It is in what a town looks like when somebody counts it every day: the salt, the timber, the barrels of oil, the two pianos that arrived in 1903 and were argued about for a month.
Entries are written in the hand of people who never expected to be read. That is most of the pleasure of the room.
Nothing in the exhibition is behind glass except the ledgers, and those are turned to a new page on the first Wednesday of each month.
Before you come
The room is dim, because paper of this age cannot take light. Large-print labels are at the door and there are seats along the north wall.
