PORT OF LONDON

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20067, 13 October 1939, Page 4

PORT OF LONDON

REPRESENTATIVE IN N.Z.

PAVILION AT EXHIBITION

Rpresentatives of the Port of LoYidon Authority in Australia and New Zealand, Mr. T. R. Toovey, Sydney, has arrived at .Wellington to superintend the authority’s pavilion at the Centennial Exhibition. The special exhibition representative who was to have come from: London is unable to do so because of the war. Mr. Toovey, however, is an authority on Port of London activities; he was formerly assistant manager and has been connected with the authority for 40 years. Mr. Toovey visited Wellington last year to make arrangements for the construction of the pavilion, but has not been back since the work was begun.

The building now stands completed, a striking pavilion at the end of one of the ornamental lakes flanking the main building, and so situated as to be mirrored in the still water.

It is a replica of the old port of London Authority building at the East India Docks, a building which has since gone out of existence, but was so well-known to seafarers at to be well worth commemorating. It will have over its door a replica of the model of a mediaeval galley which was a feature of the original building and which has since been presented to the Poplar municipal authorities., Between now and the opening of the exhibition, the ■ contents of the building will toe installed. They will comprise models and dioramas of the docks and the London river, with its shipping and its locks, which enabled great ocean-going liners to lie in security at the dockside at all stages of the tide. There is a tidal range of some 20ft. in the lower Thames, and ships come up at the flood to dock Which could not possibly float in the river at ebb. The docks arc entered at the flood-tide through a lock gale, which holds the water at.its high-tide level till,' again at the flood, they put to sen again.