It was the bridge that acted as the principal highway for royal pageants and processions, and so became the setting for tilts and jousts. “And so the Kinge passed throwe London Bridge,” as the Chronicles put it, “with his trumpetts blowinge before him”:
To london Brygge thanne rood oure kynge
The processions there they mette hym right…
To london Brigge when he com right
Vp on the gate ther stode on hy
A gyaunt that was full grym of might.
And at the Drawe brigge that is faste by
Two toures there were vp pight.
It was the bridge that witnessed the slaughter of invading rebel armies. It was the point of entry for visiting princes. It was the avenue for funeral processions. It was the bridge of pilgrims, who began their holy journey to Canterbury with a Mass at the chapel of St. Thomas on the bridge. It was the sanctuary for beggars and ruffians. It was a meeting place for apprentices. It was the haunt of citizens. It also became a necropolis, where the heads of traitors were placed. For, as Hall said in his account of the deposition of Jack Cade’s head, “where men striue against the streame, their bote neuer cometh to his pretensed port.” It was the vantage point for remarkable visitations, as on 21 March 1661 when “several Miraculous Sight seen in the Air Westward by divers persons of credit standing on London Bridge between 7 and 8 of the clock at night.” The clouds parted to reveal “two great armies marching forth” which, after a sharp dispute, vanished; then there appeared a cathedral, and then a tree, then various strange beasts.
The bridge embodied all the variety and heterogeneity of the city itself, with its rich and its poor, its mighty and its humble, its sorrowful and its joyous. The German traveller, Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, walked across it in 1710 without in fact realising that he had done so; he believed that he was simply walking down another London street. Yet Joseph Addison’s patriotic knight, in 1714, declared “that the Thames was the noblest river in Europe; that London Bridge was a greater piece of work than any of the Seven Wonders of the World.”
But of course this did not stop it from becoming an object of concern for those who used it every day. By the middle of the seventeenth century there were complaints about the excess of citizens who thronged upon the bridge, with the “irregular passing and repassing of coaches, carts and cars, and the standing of costers and mongers, and other loose people there.” To avoid the press of people there were three vacancies opposite each other, between the houses, where people could step out of the thoroughfare and look down at the river. In 1685 the street across the bridge was widened, and the houses pulled down so that they might be reconstructed “in a new and regular manner.”
Nevertheless by the eighteenth century the congestion of traffic and people on the bridge had once more become acute. It was still the only crossing of the river in the neighbourhood of the city and, as such, was notoriously over-used. As Thomas Pennant wrote, in Some Account of London (1790),
I well remember the street on London Bridge, narrow, darksome and dangerous to passengers from the multitude of carriages; frequent arches of strong timber crossed the street, from the tops of the houses, to keep them together, and from falling into the river. Nothing but use could preserve the rest of the inmates, who soon grew deaf to the noise of the falling waters, the clamour of the watermen, or the frequent shrieks of the drowning wretches.
Another commentator noticed that “as there was no regular foot-way over the bridge, it was therefore the most usual and safest custom to follow a carriage which might be passing across it.” By the middle of the eighteenth century, too, the fashionable residents had moved out; it had become insupportable, with its attraction to all the itinerant traders and vagrants of the city. The southern bank of the river had long had a reputation for noisomeness and excess, and that atmosphere was being communicated across the Thames.
So in 1760 the entire superstructure of shops and houses was pulled down; the bridge assumed a bare and denuded state, except for the presence of little “shelters” where pedestrians might escape from the throng of traffic and of people. In an age that demanded speed of communication, and unimpeded access to the city, it was the only solution. It is perhaps worth recording that three people were employed to direct approaching traffic to keep to the left; this is the first instance of the traffic directions that later played so large a part in London transportation. That traffic was counted on a July day in 1811. It amounted to 89,640 pedestrians and 2,924 carts, 1,240 coaches and 485 gigs, 769 wagons and 764 horses. By the time of its renovation in 1760 another great bridge had already been opened at Westminster, and preparations were being made for the building of a third bridge at Blackfriars. From the success of these bridges sprang all the other bridges over the Thames, culminating in the erection of Tower Bridge in 1894.
The faltering status of Old London Bridge was confirmed, in 1820, when an Act was passed to permit the demolition of the old bridge and the erection of a new structure. One anonymous contemporary apostrophised the fading bridge: “Alas, pass but another twenty years, and even thou stately old London Bridge! Even thou shalt live only in memory, and the draughts which are made now of thine image.” Work began a few yards upstream from the old bridge in 1824, with the laying of the foundation stone by George IV. It was formally opened six years later, with five arches rather than the twenty arches of its predecessor.
In the nineteenth century this newly built bridge was the most frequented of all points of departure for the ocean-going or seafaring vessels. In his London (1872) Blanchard Jerrold remarks on the spectacle of that bridge as the vessel came upstream from the sea:
It is curious to see the eager faces that crowd to the sides of a steamer from the ocean, when London Bridge is fairly outlined against the horizon, and the dome of St. Paul’s rises behind. This is the view of London that is familiar to all civilised peoples. “Le Pont de Londres!” the Frenchman explains, carrying his vivacious eyes rapidly over its proportions.
The barges and express boats and “citizen boats” sailed through the arches, dipping their sails and masts as they travelled under the bridge; the parapet was crowded with people, looking out at the scenes of farewell and of general leave-taking, watching the drooping pennants and the gleaming masts and the black-pitched hulls. Behind these crowds were the two lines of heavy traffic, going to and fro across the bridge. Beside the bridge were inns for travellers, porters, cab-men, and all the bustling crowds of a major destination; there were stables, and yards, and alleys, and passages filled with loiterers and officials and customs men.
For Coleridge the experience of standing upon the bridge was that of a “sort of beggarly day-dreaming, during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness, and a little mawkish sensibility.” But there was an air of challenge for those travelling to new places and to new destinies.
The bridge completed in 1830 was, 130 years later, deemed to be sinking. It was sold to an American company, McCulloch Properties Inc., for the sum of $2,460,000. The bridge was then removed, piece by piece, and reconstructed in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. The cornerstone was laid in 1963, and the reconstituted bridge was opened seven years later. The new London Bridge—that across the Thames—was formally opened in the spring of 1973, and has taken its place in the litany of the bridges that have spanned this small stretch of earth and water. For a future generation the bridge now extant will be known as Old London Bridge, and will in turn pass away just like the bridge in the nursery rhyme.
There are other ways across the river. There are more subterranean channels beneath the Thames than beneath any other river in the world. As early as 1798 there had been a scheme to create a subfluminal tunnel between Tilbury and Gravesend, but it was abandoned. The dangers were too pressing; the risks enormous. So it turned out that the Thames Tunnel, dug beneath the river between Wapping and Rotherhithe, was the first underwater tunnel in the world. There had been plans for such a tunnel from the
beginning of the nineteenth century, but the first attempts had failed. The river had broken through. In 1823 Marc Brunel was asked by Parliament to advance a new scheme, eventually finished by his son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, some twenty years later. But the experiment succeeded only at a cost—the waters of the river invaded no fewer than five times. Deaths, however, were caused more by the insanitary conditions of the work than by drowning.
Marc Brunel’s diary is filled with foreboding. On 26 May 1838, he recorded that “Heywood (a miner) died this morning. Two more on the sick list. Page is evidently sinking very fast…the air excessively offensive. It affects the eyes. I feel much debility after having been some time below…All complain of pain in the eyes.” They were afflicted by blindness, temporary or permanent, that became known as the “tunnel disease.” It may have been caused by the long-soaked sediment and detritus of the river, which had lain undisturbed for many thousands of years.
The metaphor of “sinking” here is also very suggestive, as if the workers were still in some sense caught up in the currents and forces of the river. They were below the river, where Brunel himself considered them to be “sacrificed” to the work of defying the natural world. At the time of one calamity a parson at Rotherhithe deemed it to be “a just judgement on the presumptuous aspirations of mortal men.” The building of bridges had once been marked by ceremonies of veneration and propitiation. How much more dubious and dangerous to dig beneath a river, closer to the infernal regions from which it came? In the course of the work it became one of the wonders of London, and attracted eminent visitors intent upon seeing the progress made in burrowing beneath the Thames.
It was a foot-tunnel in its first years, notable for its gloom and dankness. It was 1,200 feet (365 m) long, and was more like a cavern than a tunnel. The American novelist, Nathaniel Hawthorne, left an account of it in Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches (1863) as “an arched corridor, that extends into everlasting midnight. Gloomily lighted with jets of gas at regular intervals—plastered at the sides, and stone beneath the feet. It would have made an admirable prison.” The air of hopelessness and weariness, associated with the image of the prison, seems to have haunted the site. The Times reported, upon the tunnel’s opening in 1843, that “the very walls were in a cold sweat.”
There were stalls and little shops along both sides of it, most of them kept by old women, but there were few customers. Hawthorne himself saw only half a dozen pedestrians in its whole length. It may be that most people felt some reluctance and uncertainty, even some primal fear, about walking beneath a great river. In 1870 it was converted into a tunnel for the underground system of the East London Railway Company. It survives still, a subterranean monument to the engineering skills of the nineteenth century. The river has never revisited the site.
In 1869 the Tower subway was dug beneath the river to connect Tower Hill in the north with Tooley Street in the south. It was lined with cast iron rather than with brick, and was designed for omnibuses travelling beneath the Thames. It was not a success. If the omnibus stopped for some reason in the middle of the tunnel, the sound of paddle steamers overhead could distinctly be heard by the passengers. It was then turned into a tunnel for pedestrians, before being entirely replaced by Tower Bridge. It is now what is known as a “ghost tunnel” used to house cables and pipelines. From the cast iron tube the constant noise of the water can still be heard. It has a reputation for being one of the loneliest spots in London. There is a curious fact that might in any case repel any putative visitor. The movement of the tides affects the shape of the tunnel, and under the pressure of high water it becomes slightly bulbous or egg-shaped.
The first purpose-built tunnel for underground trains, or “tube tunnel” as it became known, was constructed in 1890 between King William Street and Stockwell on the south side of the river; it was the first to possess two separate tunnels, one “up” and one “down,” beneath the Thames. This was followed sixteen years later by the boring of a tunnel between Charing Cross and Waterloo. There were eventually some six separate “tube” tunnels beneath the river. The Blackwall road tunnel was opened in 1896, followed by the Rotherhithe tunnel in 1908 and the Dartford tunnel in 1963. In the middle of the twentieth century the Rotherhithe tunnel was described as being one of “gas-filled darkness” causing malaise and headache.
The bare and forbidding foot tunnel between Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs was completed in 1902. Those who have walked that distance beneath the river will know that it is an unnerving and even intimidating experience, with the realisation that the great force of the old river is rushing above one’s head. At high tide the pedestrian walks some 53 feet (16 m) under the water, and at low tide the depth is 33 feet (10 m). It is one quarter of a mile long, and is always a cool and dank place, like the original Thames Tunnel. The fear is that of all subterranean things—that the forces of the natural world will rush in, overwhelming and unstoppable. The tunnels beneath the Thames are haunted places. They are delving deep into previous eras of the earth’s history, reaching further down than the first beds or rivulets that became the Thames. The gods of the Thames cannot reside in such places. The tunnels do not have the animation or restlessness of the river. They are empty, dark, and echoic.
CHAPTER 20
River Law
The river has always been the centre of national law, as well as of national punishment. The Thames has been the focus of power, at Westminster Abbey and at Westminster Palace, at Windsor and at the Tower. At the very end of the sixth century St. Augustine met the Celtic bishops beside the Thames in order to solve some problems of ecclesiastical observance. Cricklade and Down Ampney are possible sites for such collocations. Bede states that one meeting was “at a place which is to this day called Augustine’s Oak…on the borders of the Hwicce and the West Saxon.” The oak was cut down in 1865, and eventually was placed in the churchyard of St. Sampson’s church in Cricklade where it mouldered away.
In 747 Eadbert called a synod at “Clovesho” to determine, among other things, the status of the churches in Kent; Clovesho has been interpreted as Cliffe, lying beside the Thames estuary. Later in the eighth century Offa, sovereign of Mercia, held autumn synods at his palaces and churches in the Thames Valley; there was a synod at Brentford in 781 and another at Chelsea in 787 (the ancient waterfront there has recently been discovered). In 890 Alfred the Great held a parliament, or witenagemot, at Shifford, on the Oxfordshire bank of the Thames. The convocation was commemorated in a later Anglo-Saxon poem:
At sifford seten thaines manie
Fele biscopes and fele woclered
Erles prude cnihtes egloche.
So “many thanes,” “many wise bishops and clerks,” as well as “prudent earls” and “admirable knights,” met at Shifford. The location could only have been chosen because of its situation by the river. There is in the vicinity a Court Close, supposedly harbouring a relic known as “Alfred’s Stone” there is a “Knight Bridge,” a “Kingsway Field,” and a path known as “royal way.” In 1008 a witenagemot was summoned by King Ethelred to the riverside town of Eynsham. In the abbey of the Benedictines here, according to the chronicles, “they reasoned and held discourse of many things concerning the recovery of the worship of the Catholic religion, and also for the amendment and furtherance of the state of the commonwealth.” The river was thus closely associated with spiritual authority.
In 1018 Cnut held an assembly or parliament at Oxford. Here it was agreed that the laws and customs of the Anglo-Saxons would be employed to the south of the Thames, and those of the Danes to the north. It is supposed that Cnut had a palace, or more likely an armed fort, close to the river at the ancient ford of Duxford. On an island in the river near Kingston, Raven’s Ait, a peace was arranged in the early thirteenth century between Henry III and Louis of France. Then in 1305 the Scots made a treaty with the English “at the Manor of Sheane on Thames.” The presence of the river, which generally goes unremarked in historical accounts of the
se episodes, is consistent and continuous. In the fifteenth century no fewer than four parliaments were held by the Thames at Reading.
Of course the most notable instance of the river’s law-giving is connected with the island on the Thames by Runnymede where, in 1215, King John ordained the liberties of the British people—or at least of that section of the populace represented by the noble barons. It is notable that in the Magna Carta document itself there is a demand that weirs upon the river be “utterly put down” so that the beginnings of English democracy were fundamentally associated with the liberties of the river. The name of Runnymede has been variously interpreted as “council meadow” and as “meadow of runes.” Whatever the precise connotations of the word, it is likely that the two parties encamped on the opposite banks of the river at this point before meeting on the island between them.
There were also Mints by the river, where the coin of the realm was produced and distributed. There were Mints at Wallingford, at Oxford and at Cricklade; the most significant of them was beside the Thames in London, just to the east of Tower Hill. It is easy to see the significance of the connection between the coining of money and the flowing of the river, at least in terms of the industrial process, but perhaps there is some more arcane association.
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