Wapping

Wapping derives almost certainly from an Old English '-ingas' formation: the people of Waeppa, where Waeppa is a personal name not recorded elsewhere in surviving documents. The '-ingas' suffix created dozens of English place names by attaching a clan leader's name to his followers' settlement, from Hastings ('Haesta's people') to Reading ('Readda's people') to Barking ('Berica's people'). The earliest written record, a court roll of 1220, gives the form 'Wappinge,' showing the suffix already compressed from its original '-ingas' shape. The settlement occupied a Thames foreshore strip east of the City wall, a narrow margin between the river and the fields behind it.

By the 13th and 14th centuries, Wapping was a fishing settlement supplying the City markets with eels, sprats, and river fish. John Stow, writing his Survey of London in 1598, described the street as 'a continual street, or filthy straight passage, with alleys of small tenements, or cottages built, inhabited by sailors' victuallers.' He also recorded the name 'Wapping-in-the-Wose,' where 'wose' meant the ooze or mudflat of the Thames foreshore. Stow disliked the place, but his dislike preserved the detail.

Execution Dock at Wapping was the legal site for hanging pirates and mutineers from at least the 15th century through 1830. Condemned men were hanged at low tide and left in chains until three tides had washed over the body, a requirement that served both as public spectacle and legal completion. Captain William Kidd was executed there on May 23, 1701, and his corpse was displayed at Tilbury Point for two years. The phrase 'dancing the Wapping hornpipe' entered thieves' cant as slang for hanging, and the name became shorthand for maritime execution.

The London Dock opened in 1805, filling the Wapping foreshore with stone quays and warehouses, and the population swelled with dock workers from across Britain and the empire. The docks declined through the 20th century and closed by 1969. News International's printing works moved to Wapping in 1986, and the plant became the site of a year-long strike that fundamentally changed British trade union law. The name Waeppa's people has carried this weight across thirteen centuries without once altering its essential form.