Fortezze su ‘mari artificiali’: i docklands di Londra Sistemi di fortificazione a protezione dei bacini

The transport of goods by sea has, since its origins, had to contend with three significant challenges: adverse navigation conditions, deterioration, and, finally, theft, which varied in frequency and severity depending on the situation. Human genius has tried, over the centuries, to eliminate, or at least mitigate, these three critical issues with solutions that have correlated and that have taken into account various aspects alongside the condition of conduction and unloading/loading of goods.The West India Docks in London provide a unique case study in addressing the problem of cargo protection. The particular conformation of the port of London and its extension starting from the eighteenth century, together with a peculiar preciousness of the cargoes in transit, made it necessary to build fortified systems within the circle of urban walls to protect the ports, equipped with all the typical apparatus of real defensive walls. The social structure and the very strong disparity of living conditions in proto-industrial London led to the need to build defensive structures to protect operational systems continuously undermined by attacks that were added to those already faced by sea, for which para-war defense apparatuses were provided.The research presented here, originally developed on the occasion of the participation of the Genovese research group in the 2019 edition of the London Architecture Festival, investigates the actual consistency of the defensive system in question and analyzes its similarities with the Genoese port structure.