Thames

by Peter Ackroyd

  The Wandle discharges itself into the Thames by Battersea, and has one of the strongest currents among all the tributaries of the river. It is the stream from which Wandsworth derives its name. This is the “blue transparent Vandalis” of Pope’s poem, the poet no doubt considering the English name and location to be in need of some Latinate uplift. In fact the name derives from the Saxon Wendleswurth or “Wendel’s settlement.” It also has another poem to its credit, although not one that would be allowed into Pope’s polite company:

  Sweet little witch of the Wandle!

  Come to my bosom and fondle;

  I love thee sincerely,

  I’ll cherish thee dearly,

  Sweet little witch of the Wandle.

  The name of the Ravensbourne has an exotic origin. It is said that Caesar, while camping with his army near Blackheath, noticed that a raven frequently alighted a short distance away. He conjectured that it came to this place to drink and, after further observation, a small clear spring was found in that place. The spring became known as the Raven’s Well, and the tributary emerged as the Ravensbourne. There is a poem, of doubtful merit, devoted to its progress from “a crystal rillet” to a “flood.” The “flood” itself, being of so deep a nature, later gave its name to Deptford or Deep-Ford. But it does have a certain historical importance. Its waters refreshed the rebellious followers of Wat Tyler and, at a later date, the rebels under Jack Cade. Perkin Warbeck, the pretender to the English throne, met his adherents by the banks of the Ravensbourne; it was here also that in 1497 the Cornish rebels under the command of Lord Audley were hewn to pieces by the captains of Henry VII. No other tributary of the Thames has such a history of insurrection and bloodshed.

  The Lea river has been memorialised by Spenser as “the wanton Lea that oft doth lose his way,” and indeed its course is of a wandering nature. It rises near Luton, in Bedfordshire, and then makes its way to Hertford and to Ware; it then passes close by Amwell, where the New River once also flowed, and touches upon Hoddesdon, Cheshunt, Waltham Abbey, Enfield, Edmonton, Tottenham, Stratford, Walthamstow and Bow until eventually it finds its surcease at Bow Creek close to Blackwall. It was once celebrated as a fishing stream, and the fisherman, or “Piscator,” of Isaac Walton’s The Compleat Angler frequents the river Lea and stays at the inns close to its banks. But the Lea is now pre-eminently the river of London’s eastern suburbs, and of the industrial parks that have taken the place of the “stink industries” upon its banks. Leyton is “the town upon the Lea.” Yet the river has a significant history. The invading Danes sailed up the Lea from Blackwall, and erected a fort at Ware. The bridge over the Lea, at Stratford or Stratford-le-Bow, enjoyed the distinction of being the oldest stone bridge in England, pre-dating London Bridge by a hundred years. Waltham Abbey is the last resting place of the last Saxon king of England, buried under the simple inscription of “Harold infelix.”

  The tributary of the Cherwell rises in the ironstone hills of Hellidon, and then flows through Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire for 40 miles before reaching the Thames. It is sometimes considered to be a minor stream but in fact it augments the volume of the Thames by approximately a third, as the river moves towards Iffley.

  The river Effra is named from the Celtic word yfrid, or torrent, and in its pristine state it rose near the area now known as Crystal Palace. It flows through Norwood Cemetery, Dulwich, Herne Hill, Brixton and Kennington before entering the Thames at Vauxhall Bridge. There is a curious token of its past significance to be found in the remains of a wooden structure, tentatively dated to the middle Bronze Age, located on the south bank where the Effra joins the river. The remains of the wooden posts can still be seen at low tide, but of the Effra itself there is little sign. It has become what is known as a “subterranean river,” long since buried by housing and other developments; parts of the river have been used as sewers since the seventeenth century, and it has been largely diverted into a storm relief sewer. It can only be entered through the sewers of Effra Road in Brixton. Its powers have departed.

  The greatest of all the forgotten tributaries, however, must be the Fleet, which still flows into the Thames beneath Blackfriars Bridge; if you travel by boat beneath that bridge, you will see a circular opening through which its waters pour. It is the only visible sign of a buried power. Its name is most likely to derive from the Anglo-Saxon term for a tidal estuary, as in North-fleet. But it is possible that it comes from the fleetness, or swiftness, of its waters that gathered first among the wells and springs to the north of the city. They came together in the vicinity of Clerkenwell, and the then substantial river ran down Turnmill Street (the etymology of which is clear enough) before widening at Holborn (literally “old bourne” or old brook) where a bridge across it was erected. It then entered the valley down to the Thames, the contours of which are still apparent in the canyon of Farringdon Street that descends from Fleet Street to Bridewell.

  In the medieval period it was in extensive use, most particularly by colliers coming from the north-east of England. One of the streets leading off Farringdon Street is still known as Sea-Coal Lane. In his survey of London John Stow writes that “in times past the course of the water running at London under Old-bourne Bridge into the Thames had been of such breadth and depth that ten or twelve ships at once, with merchandise, were wont to come to the aforesaid bridge of the Fleet, and some of them to Old-bourne Bridge.” More unhappily it had also been a common depository for the refuse and sewage of Londoners ever since the city was built around it, and it was periodically cleansed. In 1502, for example, there was a grand cleaning “so that fish and fewel were rowed to the Fleet Bridge” but by the end of the sixteenth century it had become in parts an open sewer, obstructed by refuse of all descriptions, and had acquired a reputation as a noisome or even dangerous place. The inmates of the Fleet Prison, largely a gaol for debtors, petitioned against the disease and mortality that the vapours of the tributary seemed to harbour. In 1732 it was bricked in from Holborn Bridge to Fleet Street, and a market placed on the site. Thirty-three years later it was covered from Fleet Street to its outlet in the Thames.

  It has the distinction, however, of being celebrated both by Ben Jonson and by Alexander Pope in what might be loosely described as an anti-pastoral tradition. In the poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Thames invokes images of purity and of clarity, but the Fleet was deemed to be its dark shadow. Ben Jonson, in a poem entitled “The Voyage Itself” (1610), invokes “the filth, stench, noise” of the tributary as an essential and elemental part of the city’s life. Where the confluence of two rivers was once the occasion for celebration to the gods, the only deities dancing upon these waters are “Gorgonian scolds and harpies”:

  …here several ghosts did flit

  About the shore, of farts but late departed,

  White, black, blue, green, and in more forms out-started.

  It is a torrent of “steams” and “grease,” of “laxative lettuce” and of “merdurinous load,” a wholly rank and miasmal river which has taken on the more unhappy characteristics “of Styx, of Acheron, / Cocytus, Phlegethon.” The epic qualities of the river are here reversed. By the early eighteenth century the Fleet had become a symbol or epitome of London itself. As a poem in the Tatler of 1710 put it:

  Filth of all hues and odours seem to tell

  What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell.

  In the Dunciad (1728) Pope widens and intensifies Jonson’s excremental vision with his own description of the impure locale:

  To where Fleet-ditch with disemboguing streams

  Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames,

  The King of dykes! than whom no sluice of mud

  With deeper sable blots the silver flood.

  It is the metaphorical space for “filth” and “love of dirt,” the excremental centre of London’s polluted life. In Pope’s cloacal vision all of the cheap versifiers and pamphleteers dive into “the quaking mud” of the tribu
tary as if they were entering their natural element. The silver Thames has its retinue of nymphs and goddesses, but the Fleet has its “Mud-nymphs,” “Nigrina black, and Merdamente brown,” who “suck in” their votaries with their foul embrace. These are the real “nut-brown maids” who have migrated from the woods to the sewers, and taken on the hue and savour of their ordurous surroundings. The national myth of the silver Thames rose above these local inconveniences, so that all the mire and filth were projected upon the river or “ditch” of the Fleet. It was another service that the tributaries paid to their superior.

  PART IV

  Beginnings

  Cookham, where the historic and the prehistoric are found in close association

  CHAPTER 8

  In the Beginning

  The history of the Thames is as deep and as dark as that of any sea. It was first merely a ripple in the moving surface of the earth. The stone matrix of the river was first created some 170 million years ago when the great oceans of the Jurassic period carried the seeds of the limestone and the clay that later became the substrata of the Thames; in this period pleiosaurs, and fish with beaks and teeth, swam above the bed which would eventually become the Thames.

  The Cretaceous, the next period of the earth’s history after the Jurassic, means “of the nature of chalk” over the next 77 million years the fossils of the oceans laid down the chalk beds of southern England. They are the bases of the riverine landscape. In this period too the great continent of Pangaea (“All the World”) began to break apart, creating the land-masses of America and Europe. A vast floodplain lay where southern England now exists. Above London swam elasmosaurs and mosasaurs, the giants of the deep, until they were destroyed in a global cataclysm marked by what is known as the “K-T Boundary.”

  The river first emerges as an observable entity some 30 million years ago, midway through the Cenozoic era in which we still live. The British Isles were connected to the European mainland by a bridge of land, where now the North Sea runs, and the Thames was then a tributary of a much larger river that flowed across Europe. The longest stretch of it is now called the Rhine.

  From the evidence of fossil remains it is possible in part to reconstruct the landscape of the earliest Thames; there were palm-trees and laurels, vines and citrus trees, as well as oaks and beeches. There were water-lilies on the surface of the river, as well as long weeds that drifted through the warm water. There was also a new form of plant; grass began to grow. In certain respects it would have been a recognisable, tropical scene. Termites and ants, beetles and spiders, flourished in the humid atmosphere; there were also turtles, and crocodiles, in the Thames as well as lizards that resembled modern iguanas. In the river, too, swam eels and ancestors of the perch and other bony fishes.

  The Thames then ran on a much higher course than in its present incarnation. It stretched from Wales and the Bristol Channel across England until it reached the Vale of Aylesbury; it flowed through St. Albans and Chelmsford before passing through Romford and issuing into a great lake somewhere south of Harwich. When the railway line from Romford to Upminster was being built, in the 1890s, the ancient and forgotten channel of the old river was discovered, like the fossil of a once living creature. This lake close to Harwich, and close to the northern end of the land-mass linking Europe and the British Isles, eventually spilled over the watershed that divided the present North Sea from the English Channel.

  It was a great and fast-flowing river, a tropical river, a jungle river, to which the ancestors of the horse and the bison, the rhinoceros and the lemur, came to drink. Then the climate began to grow colder. The jungle habitat gave way to temperate forests, to grass plains and prairies. The Thames flowed through all these changes. They represent inconceivable passages of time, far beyond the time of human origin. It is impossible to contemplate the ancientness of the river, only incidentally an aspect of the human world. It still contains shells, sedges and rushes that belong to prehistory.

  The climate of the world grew ever colder and at the time of the First Northern Glaciation, some 2.8 million years ago, a north polar ice sheet began to creep southward. The earth was now on the threshold of the human. Hominids, or “ape-men” as they were once known, drank from the river and slept in the trees beside its banks before moving onwards. But the spread of the glaciers had a profound and permanent effect upon the Thames. It was pushed southward, closer and closer to its present course.

  The ice eventually halted just north of the Chiltern-Berkshire ridge, and about one quarter of a million years ago the Thames created what is now known as the Thames Valley. The river had also entered the age of humankind. The first dwellers by the Thames came by land from the areas now known as central and western Europe. They are considered to be denizens of the Old Stone Age or Palaeolithic era, but this neutral category covers the longest period of human survival in the history of the world—some three times longer than the entire life of Homo sapiens on the planet, and a hundred times longer than the existence of the British Isles as an island. And, even then, the Thames was an ancient river.

  The first inhabitants survived for half a million years, having arrived at some point between 500,000 BC and 450,000 BC but much is unknown. Of the people themselves, and of their relation to the river, we understand next to nothing. They are what in German are called geschichtlos, “people without history.” But that is not to say that they were without traditions, stories, songs, ingenuity and enterprise. It is inconceivable, for example, that, over thousands of centuries, they did not learn how to build rafts or coracles—if only to reach the small islands in the middle of the river. The fact that no such boats have survived is meaningless; it is mere good fortune that anything at all from those remote times has been found.

  The last major glaciation came to an end approximately twelve thousand years ago, after an ice-bound age of a thousand years. The more temperate climate attracted new settlers, as well as the elk and reindeer for which they hunted. This was the age in which hippos wallowed in Trafalgar Square, and elephants roamed down the Strand. In fact it represents a significant period in the history of the Thames, since from the arrival of Mesolithic settlers in 10,000 BC there has been an unbroken process of occupation and settlement in the Thames Valley.

  The new arrivals first crossed by land, before the floods united the North Sea and the Channel. There were many different groups, and tribes of various identities, but the preponderant element beside the Thames was that of the fair-haired Maglemosians or “marsh people” first discovered in north-western Europe. They survived in small settlements perched on the gravel banks of the river, living predominantly by hunting and fishing. They manufactured fish-hooks, and bark “floats” for their nets. But their signature lay in the manufacture of stone microliths, or small flints used as blades or points for spears. They cut back the birch and the pine to make large clearings, and they domesticated dogs for hunting or defence; the bones of fish and beavers, of pigs and wild-cats, of birds and badgers, have been found in profusion. They had spears and axes made of bone or antler; they were adept in the carving of wood and the stretching of leather. They made their dwellings, for example, by placing animal hide over a wooden cage of birch saplings. The hearth was in the centre of the hut. It is the pattern of the first houses by the Thames.

  And they constructed boats, which benefited from advances in the technology of stone tools. The earliest boats of which archaeologists have knowledge were crafted in the Mesolithic period. They were canoes dug out of single tree-trunks; the trunks would have been cut and burnt to the requisite size and depth. One found in the river at Shepperton was some 18 feet (5.4 m) in length, and might have carried three or four people. The adze marks, where the wood had been shaped and fashioned, are still just discernible. Other boats, found on the river-bed of the Thames at Bourne End, were more than 25 feet (7.6 m) in length with a beam of almost 31/2feet (1.05 m). Seats had been carved out of the solid wood. The people may also have constructed coracles, with an
imal hide stretched over a frame of young willow branches, that were lighter and more manoeuvrable in the shallows. We may assume, then, that the Thames had become a navigable river. It was the beginning of a great change. Once the tribes had realised that the wind could carry them further and faster than their own unaided efforts, they could see further than the limits of their own physical labour. They had begun the slow rise to freedom. We can be sure, also, that the Thames had a powerful symbolic potential. It was an emblem of life and movement. It may be that the whole history of reverence and celebration associated with the river, from the baptisms of the twelfth century to the regattas of the twentieth century, is an atavistic remembrance of these earliest times of occupation.

  That spirit of river worship was more carefully formalised by the time of the next settlers, who arrived in the region of the Thames in approximately 3,500 BC. Their age has become known as that of the Neolithic, and covered almost two thousand years of human history. In this relatively short period, however, human beings left an enduring presence upon the landscape of the Thames Valley. They came to areas that had already been extensively settled before them, and seem to have taken up a pattern of farming and woodland clearance. It was the beginning of the farming life that endured, relatively unchanged, until the middle of the nineteenth century. In fact the Neolithic field-patterns of Maidenhead were not finally erased until the 1960s.