The origins of the docks that covered much of Rotherhithe lie in the ship-building and -supplying that became its principal function when England began to have a navy in the 1600s. Andie Byrnes has plotted the course of that early emergence of docks from the maritime industry in her post about the first dock in Rotherhithe: the Howland Great Wet Dock. It functioned 1699-1807 and formed the first incarnation of what we know today as Greenland Dock. Here is Andie’s post on this history from 2008.

Rotherhithe 1746
http://russiadock.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/rotherhithe-heritage-2-howland-great.html