If the capital is moving east, then the Thames Estuary is moving west. An unnerving thought for a city that generally views this journey's end as a place of damp and mystery, a repository of detritus and industrial skeletons.
But back in the news as the potential home for an airport and already hosting the biggest wind farm in the world, the estuary has been reclaimed from last year's Dickensian fog-fest.
So this new exhibition finds itself swamped in topicality, although it has aspirations towards a more tangential evocation of a place that feels unseasonal whatever the season.
Themes of desolation and abandonment run through the Estuary exhibition, the focal point of celebrations for the 10th anniversary of the Museum of London Docklands on West India Quay.
As exhibition curator Francis Marshall said: "It remains a largely overlooked landscape. Yet historically it has provided inspiration for many artists and writers, among them Turner, Constable, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad and TS Eliot."
However, Mr Marshall has eschewed the classics in favour of a collage of contemporary art - photography, film, sound as well as traditional paintings in this compelling grouping of 12 artworks.
With a nominal 30-year span, it is possible to chart the wilderness years of the '80s, when the wreckage of the docks was complete, to its slow rebirth as a place of cultural and industrial significance.
Mr Marshall said: "During the '80s and '90s the signs of industrial decay and neglect along the banks of the Lower Thames prompted responses from artists working in various media."
These include the panoramic paintings of Jock McFadyen as well as the film of The Bow Gamelan Ensemble who in 1985 turned concrete barges at Rainham into a percussive obstacle course, hammering out their sounds as the tide rose around them.
Gayle Chong Kwan's Instagram images The Golden Tide capture trash and curios washed up on shore, from cocaine wrappers to Christmas trees.
She said: "I was interested in the ebb and flow, what is abandoned and what is thrown away. These are photographs that document the flotsam and jetsam from London Bridge to Margate.
"I usually use sheet film but we have nostalgia in Instagram photos which are made to look analogue. So there is the ebb and flow of the objects themselves and also in the medium."
Horizon (Five Pounds A Belgian) by John Smith is the most hypnotic piece. Smith has recorded sky and sea, half and half on a broad screen and with every crashing wave a new scene arrives. The changing colour of the sky, the myriad forms of the sea are remarkable.
Two commissioned pieces are photogravures Medway by Christiane Baumgartner and Nickolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen's film Portrait Of A River.
Until October 27, free, Museum of London Docklands
© Pictures: Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen's Portrait Of A River, 2013
Children's Scooter by Gayle Chong Kwang
