Thames

by Peter Ackroyd

  The Second World War cast a more lurid light on the role and nature of the Thames. Once more the principal highway was employed by an invader to mark his route into the centre of London. It became a river of fire, and a river of blood; it became the river of the inferno, darker and more dangerous than the Styx or Acheron. Throughout its history it has been a most tempting target; along its banks, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, were car works and oil installations, factories and electricity-generating stations. It comprised the world of the City and the world of Westminster, power and finance combined in one great arc of the river. From the beginning of the war there was a strict “blackout” on the Thames and its shores, but magnetic mines were still dropped by German bombers in its waters.

  On 7 September 1940, firebombs were launched against the network of the port itself; all the docks and warehouses, except at Tilbury, were consumed in flame. Ships and barges were on fire, drifting dangerously in the tides against jetties and quays. The resources of London’s firefighters were not enough to quench the inferno, and the fire burned so brightly that it could be distinctly seen from 12 miles away. The line of fire had another effect—it acted as a beacon for further waves of bombers that arrived on the succeeding night.

  At 8:30 p.m. on 8 September, the raiders came in formation over the burning river. It no longer seemed to be the Thames but rather a flow of molten lava from some unknown source. The German bombers targeted any docks or warehouses that had not been destroyed by the previous night’s attack, and fire once more encroached upon the river. The water was covered with a thin film of burning oil, and billows of acrid smoke belched out from every part of the shore. The rum was also alight upon the water, the warehouses of wool had become furnaces, and the paraffin wax blazed up. The Pool was a lake of brilliance, and areas like Lambeth and Rotherhithe were bathed in a radiance that was like the light of day.

  On that same night, and on subsequent nights, the raiders attacked the dockside communities and towns. The East End was largely demolished, the houses fallen in a fog of smoke and of dust. The attacks on the Thames and its inhabitants went on without a pause for fifty-seven nights. On 8 December, for example, the headquarters of the Port of London Authority was directly hit; the oil tankers at Purfleet were all blazing, and the landing stage at Tilbury was burning out of control. A train was hit while travelling across Charing Cross Bridge, and many ships were sunk at their moorings in the river. It was estimated, at the end of hostilities, that approximately 15,000 high-explosive bombs, 350 parachute mines, 550 flying bombs and 240 rockets had fallen upon the Thames and dockland in the course of 1,400 raids. It may have been surmised that to destroy the Thames was, essentially, to destroy England; but the river, and the country, somehow survived.

  By the late 1940s and 1950s, however, the river was slowly closing down for more mundane reasons. It was not being used by its citizens. The holiday-makers of the nineteenth century had gone, together with the steam-packet trippers and the commuters. It had become a silent river, and was described as a “broad, white, empty highway.” The reasons for this lack of interest and of attention were various. There were problems of access, because many of the wharves and stairs had been allowed to fall into delapidation; there was the problem of neglect and consequent drabness; and there was of course the appalling problem of sewage. The South Bank had become “a term of despair and reproach.” The point was that hardly anyone considered this area of the river at all. Very few Londoners knew anything much about the vast port within the midst of the city, and fewer still had any inkling of the nature or extent of the docks. The Thames had become unknown territory. The city had turned its back upon it.

  The collapse of the docks, and the labour and trade associated with them, coincided with the departure of heavy industry from the Thames. There had been works and mills at Lambeth and Nine Elms, Battersea and Wandsworth. There had been factories at Fulham, soap-works at Isleworth and linoleum-makers at Staines. There had been tanneries at Bermondsey, together with the makers of jam, biscuits and chocolates. But that industrial and manufacturing world began to disappear. Vauxhall cars were indeed originally made at Vauxhall, and the aircraft-manufacturers Shorts began their business at Battersea. Ferranti and Siemens were both once based at Greenwich, which has some claim to being the home of electrical engineering. But the companies left or, in contemporary jargon, “relocated.” The metal workers, Morgan Crucible, moved out of Battersea in the 1970s. The cable works, the paper works and the engineering works were gradually vacated in favour of more appealing and accessible sites, leaving just a few traces behind. There is still industrial work upon the Thames, especially in the area between London and the estuary, but it is upon a reduced scale.

  The connection of water and power, however, remains undiminished. The power stations of Fulham and Lots Road are still in operation. The six great cooling towers of Didcot Power Station are well known to railway travellers; they take their water from the Thames, and then return it to the river. The power station at Battersea, with its four great chimneys, became and still is one of the most grandiose spectacles beside the river. It began to supply electrical power in the summer of 1933, and it was celebrated as a “flaming altar of the modern temple of power” before being put out of commission in 1983. It is now about to become a vast complex of hotels, shops, cinemas and apartments. The Thames was once used to cool the atomic reactors at Harwell atomic energy research establishment; its water was taken from the river at Sutton Courtenay, and returned at Culham. At Culham, too, there is located the “Joint European Torus” ( JET) designed to test “magnetic confinement fusion” as an alternative source of energy; the experimental reactors here are known as “Tokamaks,” and the project is described by its founders as the world’s largest nuclear fusion research facility. This small neighbourhood of the Thames—marked by Sutton Courtenay, Culham and Didcot—is thus a centre of power. The ancient mills and weirs of the river have been succeeded by more grandiose and efficient agents of energy. But there is a continuity.

  The river, however, has become a much quieter place. It has been calculated that if the number of vessels presently on the Thames were multiplied ten times, it would still be no busier than it was a century ago. There were, in the 1880s, six thousand steamers and five thousand sailing vessels using the river. Now the loudest sound can sometimes be that of the gulls. To travel down the estuary is to pass across waters that often seem deserted. In the nineteenth century the “brawling loudness” of the river was compared to its tranquil past; that tranquillity, on large stretches of the river, has returned.

  There have instead been new forms of regeneration. Between July 1981 and March 1998 an organisation, known as the London Docklands Development Corporation, was dedicated to reclaim and reform the 81/2 square miles of riverine space previously covered by the London Docks. The area included Southwark, Tower Hamlets and Newham. Where there had once been a wasteland of scrub and weed, guarded by the crumbling walls of the old docks or by fences of barbed wire, there arose new buildings and new homes. The area of the docks had once been physically removed from the rest of London, and had remained to most citizens an unknown territory. Now one of the first tasks of the new planners was to connect the river and the rest of the city with new forms of public transport. New roads, and new underground lines, were put into service; public transport was encouraged, and cross-river services were introduced. The Isle of Dogs, deemed unlucky in legend, was reclassified as an “Enterprise Zone” to attract investors and new business. It was as if the river were being charged once again with the life and energy of the city itself.

  The development has proceeded in a sometimes haphazard manner, governed more by the imperatives of profit than of communal interest. But that is the story of the city. It is also the story of the Thames throughout its history. The first development was of homes and gardens in the area of Beckton and Surrey Docks, but it quickly became apparent that the area of the river itself should be of prime import
ance. The warehouses, for example, could be converted into the then fashionable “loft” apartments, with significant access to the Thames. The “views” of the river became interesting once again. In the beginning the demand could barely keep pace with the supply and in the narrow refurbished streets between the warehouses, where once porters and barrow boys trod, there were more estate agents than local shops. The interests of the native inhabitants, in particular, were often ignored. There was much agitation among them for more open involvement in the various schemes of development, and, naturally enough, there were also demands that their immediate concerns, such as employment and housing, be met. A long process of accommodation and rehabilitation began, which has not yet ended.

  The emergence of the new financial district in the area now known generically as “Canary Wharf” has transformed the social and economic life of the immediate riverine neighbourhood. It coincided with the “deregulation” of the markets of the City, so that it became an emblem of change itself. It facilitated the development of a new railway network known as the “Docklands Light Railway,” an extension of the Jubilee Underground line and the development of new Docklands highways. In the process both banks of the Thames were rejuvenated. There are now large blocks of apartments where there were once derelict wharves. The old canals of the docks have been replaced with marinas. Shopping areas, apartments, public houses and walkways are now, for example, situated where once St. Katharine’s Dock lay huddled beneath the Tower; having been closed in 1968, it had remained in a broken and dilapidated state before its restoration as a new centre of urban life. In one sense the neighbourhood of the river is recovering its ancient exuberance and energy, and is reverting to its existence before the residents and houses were displaced by the building of the docks in the nineteenth century.

  A photographic panorama of the Thames and its banks was produced for the Port of London Authority in 1937. To compare those black-and-white photographs with the setting of the modern river is to see a new world emerged from the old, not necessarily more interesting or more elegant but incomparably brighter and cleaner; some of the landmarks and the buildings are the same, but the smoke and the grime have gone. The picturesque barges and tugs are no longer to be seen, but the water seems fresher and clearer. There are more trees and open spaces. The patina of grey, the murk of riverside life, has been lifted. Many of the new buildings are disappointing and out-of-scale; many are simply functional. But they are simply the first stage in what will now be a continuing process. The spirit of the river has never departed. It has simply taken on a different manifestation.

  New forms of architecture have in any case been slowly emerging that take their aesthetic from the Thames itself. The buildings of the river have always in part reflected the nature of the river, if only because they are hewn from the varying local materials of each region. There is limestone around Oxford, chalk and flint around the Berkshire Downs. But the more recent architecture of the Thames has chosen to pay homage to its presence in more direct ways. There are apartment blocks that are in fact refurbished warehouses, but there are also buildings that have been designed to resemble warehouses of the early nineteenth century. It might be called pastiche, but it might also represent a genuine emergence of the genius loci in a new guise. There are some buildings that in their profiles recall the shapes of ships riding the waves. Where the free trade wharves once stood at Ratcliff, there are now great complexes that look like ocean liners. The architect of the pumping station at the Isle of Dogs, John Outram, has said that his building was designed to “imitate a river and a landscape, from which the storm-water flowed.” The architect of Chelsea Harbour, Ray Moxley, derived his inspiration from the “ships, towers, domes” commemorated in Wordsworth’s poem “Composed upon Westminster Bridge.”

  There are also buildings along the Thames that have been lent a pharaonic or Egyptian appearance, in honour of the fact that in legend the Thames has also been known as Isis. The great skyscraper of Canary Wharf, Cabot House in Canada Square, has been constructed according to its architect Cesar Pelli as “a square prism with pyramidal top in the traditional form of the obelisk.” This powerful talisman has now become one of the river’s landmarks. There are other Egyptian designs and motifs in the newly built areas of Docklands, but there was already a “neo-Egyptian” office block by the Thames, Adelaide House, erected in 1926. There is a continuity. The pharaonic connotations may have induced a sense of immensity. The gas-holders at Greenwich were the biggest in the world; now the great dome in the same area, known as the “Millennium Dome,” is covered by the largest roof in the world and is also the largest fabric structure. The docks of the Thames were by far the largest in the world, now Battersea Power Station is one of the largest brick structures. There are other examples.

  The rhythm of the buildings sited on the South Bank, including the National Theatre opened in 1976, has been described as “flowing” the architect of the theatre, Denys Lasdun, said that he wanted to create the feeling that “the audience—like the tides of the river—flow into the auditoriums. Then the tide ebbs and they come out into the creeks of the small spaces that are made by all these terraces.” And of course “terraces” are the most ancient feature of the Thames. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that the two living architects who have the most powerful presence in London, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, have their offices immediately beside the river. In fact Foster has now been raised to the peerage with the title of Lord Foster of Thames Bank, and Rogers has been similarly ennobled as Lord Rogers of Riverside. The architects state their identity in terms of the Thames.

  The siting of the Olympic Games of 2012 in Stratford, and the rest of the East End of London, will materially help the development and refurbishment of the river as a principal urban resource. There have already been signs of new industries, and new forms of industry, converging upon its banks. In particular the high-technology electronics companies have arrived in the Thames Valley, and there are many industrial “parks” placed beside the river.

  There are other schemes. The “Thames Gateway Development” has been asked to secure the future refurbishment of the north bank of the river as far as the Thames Barrier itself. The “East Thames Corridor” will continue the city along the estuary, as far as Tilbury in Essex and the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. The planning agencies have already been concerned with Dartford and Gravesend, with the Medway towns and with Thamesmead, as possible sites for growth. There are plans for new river-crossings, for an extension of the Docklands Light Railway and for a new bridge or tunnel between Silvertown and the Greenwich Peninsula.

  London will then once more become a river city. The shift eastwards is against all historical trends. But then the reversion to the river itself was considered by many to be unhistorical. It had become, in the eyes of urban planners, redundant to the needs of the city. It had no future as a means of transport. But if the new city is to follow the line of the Thames, then new forms of river transport will inevitably emerge over the next century. The river will once more become the highway of the nation.

  PART IX

  The Natural River

  Laleham ferry

  CHAPTER 27

  “Hey Ho, the Wind and the Rain”

  The Thames makes its own weather. It is of course marked by the prevalence of dampness, the humidity and dankness associated with the presence of large volumes of water. The air then becomes a dimension of the river, savoured in the upper reaches of the Thames and in the London streets that border it. The phrase for it, in the nineteenth century, was “river-damp.” It is only one stage away from the plentiful mists that have always been a feature of the riverscape. There is a quality of soft and shrouding mist that seems unique to the climate of the Thames.

  Along the upper reaches of the river the appearance of the mist was a harbinger of that day’s weather; if the mist hovered around the summit of the hills it was a token of rain, but if it remained at their base it was a sign of dryness.
In the Vale of the White Horse the mist was described as the smoke of the “White Osse’s bacca” or tobacco. The mists of the valley were also believed to be responsible for the prevalence of thunderstorms in the summer months. The famous “dew ponds” on the downs, refreshed each night by the influence of the summer fogs, were reputed never to run dry. A naturalist of the immediate neighbourhood, in The Naturalist on the Thames (1902), recorded that summer fogs were very common on the high downs and “are so wet that a man riding up the hills at 4 a.m. may find his clothes wringing wet, and every tree dripping water.” It was as if the river had taken momentary hold upon the land itself. In the dryest or hottest summer the vapours exhaled by the river floated above the fields and meadows, enveloping and nourishing everything. The weather then was sultry, or humid. The damp mists emanating from the Thames in late autumn and winter were, however, considered dangerous to visitors of the late nineteenth century; they were conducive to “chills” or to “agues” that in exceptional cases might prove fatal. In the late months these mists could become numbingly cold and a true risk to unwary travellers.