Print of the Howland Great Wet Dock (later the Greenland Dock), the second Thames wet dock - the first being at Blackwall 1659-61 - and the first on the south side of the Thames, opened in 1699.

This print is often attributed to Kip and Leonard Knyff's 'Britannia Illustrata' (1707) but may in fact first have appeared in the 'Supplement du nouveau theatre de la Grande Bretagne (pub. J. Groenwegen and N. Prevost) 1728, which is usually the date given for it. While Kip certainly engraved it, the alternative project for which he did so appears to have been for John Harris's 'History of Kent' of which one volume was published in 1719 with 36 plates (mostly country houses). This was one of three more intended for a second volume which did not appear, of which two only apeared in the 1728 'Supplement' - the original 'Nouveau theatre' (including some Harris plates) having originally been published by Joseph Smith before the plates were passed on again to Groenwegen and Prevost. That said, the BM catalogue attributes it to 'Britannia Illustrata' but still gives the much later 1728 date, while G&P apparently added numbers to the top right of the plates when they published them: none is visible here so the exact relation - if any - to 'Britannia Illustrata', still needs to be checked. Obviously if it does appear in that it must date to earlier than the usual 1728 attribution, and the actual engraving has to be before 1722 since Kip died in that year. [PvdM 2/12]