Literature

The artist recalled that though the Isle of Dogs in South East London had been devastated by bombing in the Second World War, the riverside docks had subsequently been reinstated and the landscape had become dominated by new high-rise housing developments. A series of vertical forms that punctuate the horizon in the upper part of the composition may derive from these, though the artist has identified the largest, towards the top left-hand corner, as the tower of the church of St Alphage’s, the remains of which stood on London Wall in the City of London to the west and were torn down in 1962. This detail demonstrates that the work is not an empirically accurate depiction of the view, Creffield having distorted the space and arrangement of forms for artistic reasons. Finer vertical and near-vertical lines in the middle ground may derive from boats at the docks.