Thames

by Peter Ackroyd

  CHAPTER 26

  Steam and Speed

  The steamship made its first appearance on the river in 1801, when it was used principally for towing larger sailing vessels. The first steam-boat “packet” or small ship was heralded in the London newspapers on 23 January 1815, with the announcement that “the public are informed that the new London steam-boat packet Margery, under Captain Cortis, will start at precisely 10 o’clock on Monday morning the 23rd inst from Wapping Old Stairs near London Bridge.” Its destination was Gravesend, from whence it would return the following morning at the same hour. The Watermen’s Company, understandably concerned with the livelihoods of its members, began proceedings against Captain Cortis. But no force on earth could have withstood the change. By 1830 there were some fifty-seven steam-packets on the Thames. Their arrival heralded the appearance of the “day-tripper,” who became a ubiquitous visitant on the waters. The penny steamboat became known as “the omnibus of the river.”

  Southend was one of the most popular ports of call, and indeed it became known as “London on Sea.” There were musical boats, with resident bands, who made their way upriver to Richmond or Kew or Hampton Court; the trippers on these vessels, known sarcastically as ’Arries and ’Arriets, were the especial objects of the wrath of the fishermen and the middle-class artists who believed that the higher reaches of the Thames were their own particular domain. Jetties were erected with the sole purpose of servicing the new vessels. By the 1830s and 1840s there were all the makings of a “boom.” There were some seventeen steamers running daily from London to Gravesend, at a charge of 1 shilling for each passenger. The cost of the journey to Greenwich was 5 pence, and from London Bridge to Westminster it was a penny. In 1846 there set sail the “halfpenny steamers” from Hungerford Pier by Charing Cross to the City. But the new style of passenger could also go further; there were steamboats for travellers to Plymouth, Southampton and Land’s End; there was a boat to Dover and a boat to Boulogne; there was a Rhine boat and an Ostend boat. The traffic was very large. One steamboat company estimated that it carried some quarter of a million passengers on the Thames each year.

  The Margate and Gravesend boats left from St. Katharine’s Wharf and from London Bridge; there were many complaints about the fact that the boats of rival companies raced each other downriver, with the consequent swell washing away the banks as well as swamping passing wherries. The water of the Thames became rougher. There was open warfare between the watermen and the steamboats, with accusations of deliberate ramming and obstruction. There were also boiler explosions, fires and accidents; but the progress of the steamship was unassailable.

  In one of his early essays under the pseudonym of “Boz,” “The River”(1835), the young Charles Dickens depicts the confused scene at the “steam-wharf” as the passengers clamber aboard the “Gravesend packet” or the “Margate packet” they sit down on the wrong boat, or cannot find comfortable seats, or mislay their luggage. “The regular passengers, who have season tickets, go below to breakfast; people who have purchased morning papers, compose themselves to read them; and people who have not been down the river before, think that both the shipping and the water, look a great deal better at a distance.” At Blackwall the wicker hand-baskets are opened to furnish heavy sandwiches, with bottles of brandy and water. One man brings out a portable harp, and plays dance music. Dickens even records some dilatory conversation between passengers on the topic of the moment:

  “Wonderful thing steam, sir.”

  “Ah! it is indeed, sir.”

  “Great power, sir.”

  “Immense—immense.”

  “Great deal done by steam, sir.”

  “Ah! You may say that, sir.”

  “Still in its infancy, they say, sir.”

  Steam was the future. Steam was progress. In the battle for the Thames, steam would win.

  But another form of steam-power had arrived, which threw all the plans for boat traffic into disorder. In 1834 an ambitious project, known as the Great Western Railway Scheme, was initiated to lay tracks for the new trains between London and Reading and Bristol. The Thames Commissioners, fearful for the future of river traffic, declared that “all those who reside on the banks of this river, whether attracted there by its beauty, its salubrity or its utility, would lend their aid to prevent the sanction of Parliament being given to so useless a scheme as that of the Great Western Railway.” Yet all the forces of the nineteenth century, in its preoccupation with energy and with speed, in its demands for progress and innovation, in its sense of excitement and its appetite for reform, were moving ahead. The railway line was completed between London and Reading in 1840, and there was a branch line between London and Oxford four years later; lines to Windsor and Henley-on-Thames followed.

  The “iron horse,” as the train was known, had entered the Vale of the White Horse. It was mounted by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who first jotted down the idea of the railway in 1833; then he organised his plan of campaign, beginning with a complete investigation of the Thames Valley itself. At the age of twenty-seven he set out to understand the terrain thoroughly, and wrote in his diary for September 1833: “started at 6 am…examined the ground in the neighbourhood of Wantage…breakfasted at Streatley…returned to Reading.” He marked out in his mind every stretch of the track that he would eventually build, labouring twenty hours a day to bring his vision to perfection.

  He already had some acquaintance with the Thames, having taken over from his father the completion of the Thames Tunnel; he knew the power of the river, too, after it had broken in upon his constructions and taken the lives of his workers. Is it possible that he had some desire to tame the energy and authority of the Thames, by creating this modern network of lines and stations all around it? His attention to the scheme was immense, almost overwhelming. He testified to parliamentary committees and helped to draft the suitable legislation; he even acted as a fund-raiser with various interested parties. He planned the nature and development of the railway in the most minute detail, with attention to tunnels and cuttings, stations and viaducts, sheds and bridges.

  The Great Western Railway was accompanied by similar projects that impinged directly upon the river. The London and Greenwich Railway opened in 1838; a year later the London and Southampton Railway began its operations, followed in 1841 by the London and Blackwall Railway Company which laid tracks along the north bank of the river from the Minories to Fenchurch Street. In 1848 the first railway crossing was made by the bridge at Richmond, and a second bridge was built at Barnes in the following year. The first city crossing was at Pimlico, opening for railway traffic in 1860. The advance had been immense, with enormous consequences for the commerce and the passenger traffic of the Thames. The Thames Valley itself was changed beyond recognition. The increase of population in riverside towns such as Reading and Abingdon was extensive; instead of being river towns they had become railway towns.

  But there was another change, amounting to a social revolution, best exemplified in Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed—the Great Western Railway. The painting is of course a vision of power, with a steam locomotive rushing over the Thames at Maidenhead Bridge. The bridge itself, constructed by Brunel, was a miracle of engineering. It was the largest span of brick building in Europe. It was believed by many that it could not be finished or, once erected, that it could never last. It was thrown across the river in two spans, the central arches meeting on an eyot in the middle of the Thames. The original contractor, distraught at the problems of the enterprise, had asked to be relieved of his responsibilities; it was feared that once the wooden scaffolding had been removed the arches would collapse. Brunel stayed true to his original vision. Those small red bricks have, in the last 170 years, been subject to a pressure that must approach the extreme limit of sustainability; yet they have survived.

  Turner’s painting is in part a hymn to speed, with Brunel’s bridge at the centre of a great exfoliation of energy; there is a brilliancy about the painting,
an effulgence of colour and of light, that suggests Turner’s deep excitement at the prospect of this relatively new force. Turner the artist is in essence saluting Brunel the visionary. But there is also an attendant loss. The view of the painting is to the east, towards London, associated with the clouds of dirt and disease that were popularly supposed to travel from the city. Anything “out of the east” was suspect in the middle of the nineteenth century. On one side of the canvas, beyond the explosion of colour and of light, there are people boating on the river while a ploughman labours in a neighbouring field. These were the tokens of the immemorial existence, of the ancient life fostered by the river, that the railway seemed about to end. In Turner’s painting a hare flees from the path of the rushing locomotive, an image of the retreat of the natural world from the arts of mechanism.

  But there was one other example of nineteenth-century enterprise, and innovation, that entailed arguably more important consequences for the Thames. The principal figure behind the “improvements,” as they became known, was the civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette whose singular and ambitious vision in the 1860s was to embank and control the river. There had of course been other attempts in the past to control its course, and to protect the shores from the encroaching tides or from the inclemency of flooding weather. It is believed that the walls around Gravesend were built by the Saxons, for example, and that Romney Marsh was created by them.

  In the twelfth century there were embankments around Woolwich. In the thirteenth century Plumstead was fortified against the water, with other sea walls being erected at Rainham Marsh, West Ham and Limehouse. In the fourteenth century there were new-built banks at Blackwall as well as fortifications at Stratford and Dagenham. In the sixteenth century Wapping was reclaimed from “a watery waste,” even though sea walls had been previously built there in 1324. In the sixteenth century, too, chalk from the cliffs at Purfleet was used to provide defensive walls at West Thurrock. Canvey Island was enclosed in the seventeenth century by workers from Holland, who were believed to have special expertise in such matters.

  At West Thurrock itself a chapel was erected by the wall, one of many that were set up on the sites of embankment as a form of divine protection; from these chapels, many of them lonely places amid a waste of fields, prayers were despatched to preserve and maintain the works of defence against the sea. The process of reclamation was in fact considered to be a holy one. To rescue fruitful ground from the tides, to plant crops where once the waves rolled, is akin to a form of creation whereby earth is made out of the sea.

  The waters surged forward, canalised and directed; the river had become deeper and swifter, at the same time as its domain was being steadily diminished by the works of man. In the seventeenth century the demand for riverside sites for houses of course meant that parts of the foreshore were reclaimed; in 1757 the shore in front of Temple Gardens was embanked, and in 1772 the Royal Adelphi Terrace became the first public riverside terrace. The high promenade of Somerset House was created four years later.

  Yet the nineteenth century was the true century of change, through the energetic agency of Bazalgette. An Act of Parliament was passed in 1863 to expedite his progress on new embanking for the Thames. He would create a vast and intricate sewage network that would carry filth and detritus out of London, while above the sewers he would be able to create great stone promenades on the banks of the river that would form a new Thames landscape. Work was first begun on the Victoria Embankment, between Westminster and the Temple, during the course of which some 40 acres (16 ha) of foreshore were reclaimed. Bazalgette was only assisting a more general process. In the course of the river’s history, from the time of the Celtic peoples to the present century, the width of the river at Westminster has decreased from 750 yards (686 m) to 250 yards (228.6 m).

  The Victoria Embankment was soon accompanied by the construction of the Albert Embankment and then the Chelsea Embankment. It was one of the largest civil engineering projects of the nineteenth century, including as it did the building of an underground railway system. A memorial to Bazalgette stands on the Victoria Embankment itself, with the legend Flumini Vincula Posuit (“He placed chains upon the river”). It was the old boast of the pharaohs, and of the rulers of the ancient hydraulic states. If it seems hubristic, no deity has so far punished it; that would require an inundation as great as the Flood, an event now apparently deemed to be impossible.

  For some these strips of granite stone can be seen as frontiers or barriers to the Thames in its city reaches, stripping it of what once remained of its human dimension. For others they are a necessary precaution and defence against the wayward nature of the river, reclaiming immensely useful land for the benefit both of traffic and of the pedestrian. On the newly embanked land, too, gardens were planted for the delectation of the citizens so that the prospect of the banks was immensely improved. The embankments had the added advantage of harbouring the sewage tunnels that piped the waste out of the capital. In that respect, too, Bazalgette’s work can be considered to have been beneficial. His enterprise was at the time considered to be one of the new wonders of the world, a welcome improvement upon the unsightly mud-banks, ruined buildings and dilapidated wharves that crowded around the riverside—complete with their unsavoury native population who were generally excoriated as “river-dwellers.”

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, of course, it seemed that the great riverine developments of the previous century were coming to fruition. The docks had never been more fully employed, and the position of London at the heart of a world empire meant that the Thames was in itself the river of empire, the great market to which the merchants of the world paid their obeisance. Books written in the earlier part of the century, such as the three volumes of Sir John Adcock’s Wonderful London (1920s), F. V. Morley’s River Thames (1926) and H. M. Tomlinson’s London River (1925), and a host of others, were in all essentials celebrations of the Thames’s life and career as the greatest of all the world’s rivers. There were many photographs of the daily life of the docks, and of the great vessels that moored there. There were aerial shots of the vast extent of dockland, and encomia to the gargantuan forces of trade and industry that had helped to create it. The ending of Tomlinson’s study records the progress of a great ship down the estuary where her masts “rose above the buildings and stood against the sky, made her seem as noble and as haughty as a burst of great music. One of ours, that ship. Part of our parish.”

  One of the best accounts of the early-twentieth-century Thames is to be found in H. G. Wells’s novel, Tono Bungay (1909), in which he records a journey downriver from Hammersmith Bridge to Blackfriars and the City. The area of Battersea and Fulham, as seen from the river, was one of “muddy suburb and muddy meadow,” neither city nor country, where the presence of the coal barges is a token of the urban life towards which the river is flowing. From Putney onwards begin the “newer developments,” to which he refers as “the first squalid stretches of mean houses right and left, and then the dingy industrialism of the south side” this was a period when Lambeth, in particular, was the home of riverside workshops and manufactories.

  The enthusiasm of Wells’s narrator increases, however, when he reaches Lambeth Palace and the Houses of Parliament. Just beyond them is what he called the “essential London” with Charing Cross Railway Station as “the heart of the world,” the river itself now flanked by “new hotels,” by “great warehouses and factories, chimneys, shot towers and advertisements on the south.” This is the bustling river of twentieth-century empire—not a clean place, not even a particularly pleasant or wholesome place, but one deeply involved in all the vital movements of the period.

  As he goes further downriver, past Somerset House and the Temple, the narrator feels intimations of the age of the city and of its brooding presence by the Thames. He feels, also, the presence of “original England.” It is a matter of some interest to the social historian, perhaps, that in the early years of the twentieth century the
river and its territory did still retain the presence of its “aged” past. The atmosphere of the place, despite the presence of the new embankments, was charged with some vivid reminders of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century London in a manner no longer possible at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Too much has changed. The city, and its river, now seem contemporary once again. They are no longer obscured by the patina of past times. But the photographs of the riverside districts in 1909 and 1910 can take you effortlessly back to the London of Dickens, and even to the London of Johnson and Fielding. The alleys were the same; the wharves and the wharfside pubs were the same; the ill-fed and ill-clad people were the same.

  Wells’s narrator continues his journey where, just by the bridge at Blackfriars, he sees the first seagulls. Above “a rude tumult of warehouses” there looms the great dome of St. Paul’s, singular and alone in that earlier skyline, where it presides over the movement of steamships and barges. The turn-of-the-century picture of St. Paul’s overlooking the river is now as timeless as that of the wherries and galleons crowding upon the sixteenth-century Thames.

  Then the narrator goes further to comprehend “the last great movement of the London symphony,” a world of “stupendous cranes” and “great warehouses” and “large ships.” It is “the port of the world.” And so it seemed for many decades. Just before the beginning of the Second World War the annual tonnage entering the port of London was some 50 million (over 50.8 million tonnes), well above that of any other port. But even then there were more disquieting signs. In J. H. O. Bunge’s report on the state of the river, Tideless Thames in Future London (1944), there were descriptions of “the dilapidated appearance of the Thames shores” and of “the derelict shabbiness” of the area from Westminster Bridge to Greenwich. The report also mentions St. Paul’s, but in a spirit different from that of H. G. Wells. It is described as “smothered shoulder high in formless brick, dirty and black, sprouting from narrow and dark streets without any pretence at modern or convenient style” it is also obscured by “dismal and inadequate miserly house fronts.” So the Thames of the 1930s contained within itself the seeds of decay and, even, of dissolution. One of the chapter-headings of this account lists the “problems”—“of population, food, fuel, sewage, goods and passenger transport, flooding, fire protection, riparian property, prosperity and amenities.” It seems exhaustive. The tone is pessimistic.