The Isle of Dogs may have got its name from a Deptford joke

The name did not stay on the river. By 1593, John Norden’s map records an Isle of Dogs Farm on Stepney Marsh. Later maps show Isle of Dogs spreading to a large part of the marsh. By the eighteenth century, it covered much of the southern peninsula; eventually it became the name we use today.

Over time, the name Isle of Dogs spread across Stepney Marsh

The name outlived the islands. On this shifting stretch of the Thames, the eyots eventually vanished.

Why dogs?

The strongest clue brings us back to Deptford. There is evidence that Deptford dockworkers used the Stepney Marsh eyots and built and repaired barks there. In 1525, more than half of Henry VIII’s listed fleet could be classed as barks. Wright suggests the workers made a play on words: the small islands where barks were built became the grandiose Isle of Dogs.

Both meanings of bark were available in Tudor English, and evidence of similar occupational wordplay appears among London workers in later centuries. There is no record of a sixteenth-century dockworker explaining the joke, so it cannot be proved directly.

But Wright argues that this explanation has something the others lack: supporting evidence. “Deptford dockworkers are implicated, as there is evidence that they utilised the Stepney Marsh eyots at the relevant point in time,” she told deptford⚓org. “They built and repaired barks on the Isle of Dogs, and the pun on dog and bark was as apparent then as it is now. Witty wordplay has long been a skill of London workers.”

We still do not know why the eyots were called the Isle of Dogs. But the trail so far ends in Deptford.