The ramshackle waterfront buildings of R. Moss & Sons, Crane Wharf, 11-13 Crane Street, East Greenwich, immediately east of the 'Yacht' public house (formerly the Yacht Hotel), with the bow of a sailing barge to the right. 'MOSS'S WHARF' appears on the riverfront wall of the central house, which has two upper floors of disintegrating Regency pattern iron railings: a sign reading '[P]HONE GREENWICH' is partly visible below, and on the left flank wall is the legend 'OLD ROPE & IRON BOUGHT FOR EXPORT'. A man, woman and a girl are visible on the ground-floor wharf level of the building with a pile of coiled 'junk' rope or hawser. Ladders descend from there to behind the side of a lighter on the river foreshore, stretching across the full width of the image. At far right the letters 'MA...' on a riverfront signboard appear over just the sternpost of an otherwise unseen barge.

There is a wider and earlier version of the print that carries the view further right, in more lightly etched form, as far as the eastern bay of the Trafalgar Tavern and including all of the 'Yacht' frontage (before its later mid-20th century rebuild). In that wider view the full sign reads 'MANN CROSSMAN'S' (the brewers to whom the 'Yacht' was a tied house from before 1900) with the full starboard-broadside length of the single-masted (leeboard) barge also included below it. That version is a first state from the same plate, which measured 150 x 250mm before Sutherland cut off the less finished right-hand half and made at least one further cut that left the final version almost square. Both the long and reduced versions are very early etched images by him when still a local art student at Goldsmiths' College, New Cross. Only 50 published pulls from the first state were intended (from numbered ones known) but perhaps not that many made, before the plate was reduced (perhaps twice), a number of further trial pulls made, and an edition of only 18 published in the final state. Sutherland's fellow Goldsmith's student, Paul Drury, later recalled that he used the back of one of the discarded sections of the plate for his etching 'Head of a man (in a fur hat)' and that Sutherland used another for his drypoint 'Littlehampton'.

This print is inscribed by the artist 'Greenwich' below the image, lower left, and signed 'Graham Sutherland', lower right. Various other coding numbers and letters appear on the border and the reverse. One on the back - ' ii of 11' - is perhaps an edition code, and another is the price: £175. Given that the final edition was reportedly 18, 'ii of 11' may indicate this is one of 11 intermediate trial pulls. The title and dating are on the mount only in Harley Preston's handwriting, who presumably originally catalogued it for the NMM. Rebuilt local-authority owned premises on the site of Moss's Wharf are now the Trafalgar Rowing Centre. PAH3315, an etching by Noel Spencer, shows the waterfront to the east of this view in 1935.