East of the City of London, lie formerly derelict London Docklands, where the Trade of the British Empire flowed to and from, in the days of break bulk cargo.
These have mostly been replaced by the Container Ports at Tilbury and at Felixstowe, situated further down the Thames river estuary, with access to deep water channels for the huge container ships.
The container port in Vancouver features in William Gibson's novel Spook Country
However, these former Docklands areas are being re-developed, and since 1990, they have housed the cyberspace telecommunications hubs, where most of the United Kingdom's and much of Europe's transatlantic Internet bandwidth flows via the London Internet Exchange - LINX and similar ventures.
Telehouse (now called Telehouse North)
Coriander Avenue,
London E14 2AA
Telehouse was designed and built in the late 1980's to house backup and disaster recovery mainframe computers for the financial district of the City of London some, 5 miles away to the west. It is linked to other data centres based in the new Dockland Canary Wharf development.
As the Internet took off in the UK, it ended up housing lots of Internet Service Providers and Web Hosting companies' routers and co-location server equipment as well, and its pioneering concept of a "computer hotel" and "co-location data centre", spread around the world.
This led to a second such Telehouse building (Telehouse East) being built next door.
GPS grid coordinates:
Latitude: (WGS84) N51:30:43 ( 51.512078 )
Longitude: (WGS84) W0:00:07 ( -0.002035 )
The fast cut music video for MTV friendly rock band Republica's world wide hit song "Ready to go" (1996), which has been used in several tv adverts movie soundtracks, sporting events etc. features the derelict industrial landscape of Docklands, with several shots of the lead singer Saffron with the original Telehouse building in the background.
See this Republika "Ready to Go" video on YouTube (needs Flash and Javascript)
