The Isle of Dogs has been a name since 1520 and a boundary only since 1987 - and it still covers three districts that trade nothing alike.

Isle of Dogs

One name, three districts, and a boundary that took from 1520 to 1987 to arrive.

The earliest documentary record of the name is that 1520 entry, noting a hose supplied to a ship in dock here. Where the name itself comes from is disputed - the competing explanations include royal kennels, a corruption of Isle of Ducks, Dutch land-reclamation engineers and a yeoman farmer's surname, and the scholar Laura Wright argued in 2015 that it first applied to a small mud eyot used as a mooring point for dockyard vessels from across the river before extending to the whole peninsula. Whatever its origin, the name was in everyday use for centuries with no boundary attached to it at all.

That changed only in 1987, when Tower Hamlets London Borough Council created the Isle of Dogs Neighbourhood. Its own definition of that boundary names three distinct districts inside it: Canary Wharf, Millwall and Cubitt Town. Before the DLR opened that same year, the only way on or off the peninsula by public transport was by bus, and 21,000 people lived here in 1901, most of them dependent on the river trade that has since gone.

None of that history sits on any one street corner, which is exactly the point: 'Isle of Dogs' is a name a customer reaches for before they know which of the three districts they actually mean, and a business that answers by naming its real district gets found by searches the peninsula name alone cannot resolve.