Named after the West India Docks, opened in 1802 for the Caribbean trade.
Merchants trading goods from their West Indian plantations proposed them; one founder, Robert Milligan, traded enslaved Africans and owned Jamaican sugar plantations. The docks were built to handle goods from Caribbean slave plantations; sugar, rum, coffee and timber were the main imports. The surviving warehouses of the North Quay were rebranded West India Quay.