Thus far, the concern has been with the handling of large and/or exceptional ships, with the need to make large investments to keep up both with the growth of these vessels and with the ever-increasing quantities of goods they sought to discharge and to load with ever-faster turnaround. But these were not the only ships to use the port, and we must now turn our attention to the provision of facilities for more humble craft.

In the earliest days of the Dock Estate, docks were built for the “big” ships, and the coastwise trade was left more or less to chance. The first dock to change that was Clarence, opened in 1830 specifically for steamers, which at that date were all in the coastwise or short-sea trades, and it was followed by a handful of other docks designed for coasters, of which Collingwood (opened 1848) was the last. After that, coasters had to survive as their ancestors had, on facilities handed down as outgrown by the trades using larger vessels. The allocation of a dock to the use of coasters thus came to be a matter not of what it was suitable for but rather of whether it was suitable for anything better. This repeatedly emerges in discussions at the Board and in print:

This only meant, however, that accommodation for the coasters would probably, although not necessarily, be unsuitable. Nelson Dock, for example, was handed down to the larger class of “Irish Boat” and proved extremely satisfactory. It had been built for the North Atlantic trade, opened in 1848, but it was sufficiently deep and spacious for the largest coasters of the early 1900s, had reasonably wide quay margins and was connected to the railways. But Nelson was a happy example: many of the other docks reserved for coasters were apparently unsuitable for almost anything. The prime example was the Clarence “system,” consisting of a wet, half-tide and two graving docks, as well as a graving dock basin with a graving grid.