When Drapers’ smugg’d Prentices,
With Exchange Girls mostly jolly,
After shop was shut up,
Could sail to the Folly.
A German tourist of the same century recorded that “innumerable harlots are to be found there and those who resort to them can take them over to Cupid’s Gardens.” Cupid’s Gardens had become the popular name for Cuper’s Gardens, on the opposite bank. So “the Folly” fell into decay, and the barge was eventually dismantled and chopped into firewood.
There was one perennial complaint about the river gardens that reflected an aspect of the river itself. The population of these places was considered to be too heterogeneous, an unstable combination of the “high” and “low” in society that could on occasion cause fights and even riots. In Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778) it is said of Vauxhall that “there’s always a riot—and there the folks run about—and there’s such squealing and squalling.” We have already had cause to observe the libertarianism, or democracy, of the river. This also serves to characterise the entertainments held beside it where the rougher elements of London were in a state of comparative equality with the nobility who patronised the assemblies. “There is,” one observer wrote, “his Grace of Grafton down to children out of the Foundling Hospital, from my lady Townshend to the kitten…”
There are gardens, as well as pleasure gardens, that seem to emerge naturally along the banks of the Thames. Many of them are sufficiently well known, including the gardens of the Hospital in Chelsea and the Chelsea Physic Garden close by. Battersea Park, on the southern bank, stretches beside the river. Opposite the gardens of Syon House, which clothe the world in green, lie Kew Gardens, once part of Richmond Gardens, praised for their “wild” or “natural” aspect. A German observer, Count Kielsmanegge, reported that “you pass through fields clothed with grass, through cornfields and a wild ground interspersed with broom and furze, which afford excellent shelter for hares and pheasants.” Erasmus Darwin, in The Botanic Garden (1789–91), commemorates the world of Kew:
So sits enthroned, in vegetable pride,
Imperial Kew, by Thames’s glittering side;
Obedient sails from realms unfurrowed bring
For her the unnamed progeny of Spring.
This was a reflection of the wealth of rare botanical specimens that were brought to Kew from Britain’s colonial possessions. In a similar spirit the Museum of Garden History is still to be found beside the Thames, at Lambeth.
Along the river, between London and Teddington, there were once vast estates of market gardens growing fruit and vegetables for London; raspberries and strawberries, for example, were once an Isleworth speciality. More curiously there was in the eighteenth century a great vineyard on the south bank of the river, not far from the present Waterloo Bridge, which according to Samuel Ireland in his Picturesque Views of the River Thames (1801) was “the richest and most diversified vineyard the world can boast” producing liquor “from humble port to imperial tokay.”
Throughout its existence the river has been the source of fertility. It supports a rich alluvial soil that is never barren except, of course, where it has been forcibly displaced. The countryside of the Thames is lush and green for all seasons. The rich pastures of North Wiltshire led to the claim that they were favoured by God’s presence. In the seventeenth century Thomas Fuller “heard it reported from credible persons that such was the fruitfulness of the [Thames] land, that in spring time, let it be bit bare to the roots, a wand [sapling] laid along therein overnight will be covered with new grown grass by the next morning.” Such is the force that, in the words of Dylan Thomas, through the green fuse drives the flower.
Some of the river’s green eyots (sometimes spelled as aits or aights) possess names that derive from the Saxon people. “Nettle Eyot” and Dumsea Bushes or Domesday Bushes, near Chertsey, are two of these ancient nomenclatures. Dog Ait at Shepperton is similarly old. Even the smallest islands in the river have names—Headpile Ait, Cherry Tree Ait, Flagg Ait and Teynter Ait are little patches of land on the river near Taplow. They have also been called holts or hams. The subject of names is always most difficult. Some eyots have become public parks, while others remain private. They have been centres of entertainment and places of retreat; they have been used by courting couples, and by hermits. They are somewhere out of this world.
The riverside gardens of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries played a part in London’s destiny. The most famous of them must be that in Chelsea belonging to Sir Thomas More. It was here, just by the water, that he closed the wicket gate, parting from his family for ever, before sailing downriver to meet his interrogators at Lambeth. While there, he was asked to walk down into the riverside garden for further reflection on his refusal to obey the king’s commands.
There were great gardens leading down to the banks at York Place, Cardinal Wolsey’s London residence, but the only verdant memorials of Wolsey’s ascendancy are now the gardens of Hampton Court. There was a large and ornate garden attached to the Bridge House of London Bridge, and there had been royal gardens in the Tower of London since the middle of the thirteenth century. There was an orchard within the walls of the Tower, too, complete with vines and fruit trees. The gardens of Bridewell have long since departed, as have the gardens laid out by Lord Protector Somerset. The gardens at Richmond Palace were said to be “moost faire and pleasaunt” with “ryall knottse aleyed and herbid…with many vynys, sedis and straunge frute right goodly besett.” There were also many ecclesiastical gardens, like those belonging to the Bishop of Winchester in Southwark. The space between the Thames and the Strand was in fact entirely taken up by the gardens of the bishops, with the Bishop of Exeter’s Inn, the Bishop of Bath’s Inn and the Bishop of Norwich’s Inn. The view from the river was, literally, of back gardens. There still exist of course the great gardens of Fulham Palace and Lambeth. All of these were designed to be seen from the river, as a token of state and of status. But they were primarily areas of privilege, delightful spaces for private discourse and for self-communing. Their gardens seats and arbours were part of a general moral design “whereby they might the more fullie view and haue delight of the whole beautie of the garden” with its fountains and knot beds and paved alley-ways. They were devoted to “recreation” in an intellectual and civic sense. That is why their position by the river was so essential to their success.
The gardens of Ham House have been restored in accordance to their seventeenth-century design, and the villa of Marble Hill stands in its garden setting. The parks of Bushy and of Richmond reach towards the Thames. Along this part of the river, roughly between Richmond and Hampton, there are in fact many celebrated English gardens designed by Alexander Pope, Charles Bridgeman, William Kent and of course “Capability” Brown. The luxuriousness and fecundity of the riverine setting ensure their survival. The flowing or serpentine line, adumbrated by William Hogarth in his Analysis of Beauty (1753), has always been an intrinsic aspect of the English aesthetic. It is known as the “line of beauty,” curved or curling, like the sinuous grace of the river itself. The landscape of the gardens by the river was, from the eighteenth century, subdued by the “peculiar curve, alike averse to crooked and to straight” that is a reflection of the movement of the Thames. At Syon House and at Strawberry Hill, in Richmond and Isleworth and Twickenham, emerged the “undulating line.” It is the line of the river.
CHAPTER 33
Filthy River
The Thames has variously been described as a grey, dirty, smutty, sooty, smoky river. These are not nineteenth-century epithets. It has always been thus. In the period of the Roman invasion and occupation it was first employed as the city’s public sewer; wooden pipes under the large complex of Roman buildings at Cannon Street prove that effluent was already pouring into the waters. In 1357 Edward III proclaimed that “dung and other filth had accumulated in divers places upon the banks of the river with…fumes and other abominable stenches arising therefrom.” A publi
c lavatory on London Bridge showered its contents directly onto the river below, and latrines were built over all the tributaries that issued into the Thames. The Black Friars and the White Friars complained that they were being poisoned by the stench of the river running beneath their walls; the “putrid exhalations” of the water “had caused the death of manie Brethren.” Even the prisoners of the Fleet delivered a petition lamenting the fact that they were being slowly killed by the surrounding waters. A monk recorded his journey on the river, from London to Chertsey, in May 1471—“a smel ther was as grete as deth, but for no berien [burial] was it mad.”
In 1481 there were complaints about the wharves where “at every Ebbe of the water there remain the Intrails of bestes and other filth and Carion of grete substaunce and quantitee.” The words for such river filth varied, according to its nature—carrion, draff, dung, entrails, garbage, issue and rubbish. The effects were sometimes local and well defined, as in a complaint made in 1422 of the “filth that cometh doun the Trinite lane and Cordewanerstrete by Garlekhith and goth doun in the lane by twix John Hatherle shop and Ric Whitman shop of whiche dong moche goth in to Thamise.” We may imagine an ill-smelling stream of excrement and urine, debouching directly into the Thames beyond the shops of Mr. Hatherly and Mr. Whitman. There were Dunghill Lanes at Puddle Dock, Whitefriars and Queenhithe, while Dunghill Stairs was located to the front of Three Cranes Wharf. Great mounds of excrement were from thence cast into the water. In the fifteenth century, too, a “house of easement” or “long house” containing two rows of sixty-four seats (for men and for women) was erected at the end of Friar Lane where the waste matter was washed away by the tides of the river.
In 1535 an Act was passed by Parliament to prohibit the casting of excrement and other rubbish in the Thames since “till now of late divers evil disposed persons have habitually cast in dung and filth.” This is the same century in which Spenser had in “Prothalamion” extolled the “sweet Themmes,” demonstrating that the myth of the river was still more powerful than any quotidian reality. In the seventeenth century John Taylor composed a litany of the same rubbish still to be found in the river, including “dead Hogges, Dogges, Cats, and well flayd Carryon Horses” as well as “Stable dunge, Beasts guts and Garbage.” Pudding Lane was not named after any savoury dish, but after the “puddings” of excrement that were dispatched from it to the dung boats moored on the Thames. In the same century an Italian traveller, Orazio Busino, remarked that the river was “so hard, turbid, and foul, that its smell may be perceived in the linen which is washed with it.”
The Thames was able to imitate or to embody the various conditions of the city, therefore, and these included the darker and more squalid aspects of eighteenth-century London. The river by Wapping, for example, was a squalid and malodorous place, dangerous for the unwary, where, according to Henry Fielding in The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755), could be heard the “sweet sounds of seamen, watermen, fish-women, oyster-women, and of all the vociferous inhabitants of both shores.” It was a lawless area, beyond the jurisdiction of the City, but it was also the site of Execution Dock where those accused of crimes upon the “high seas” were given their final bills. It was a place of brothels and “low” taverns, of tenements and stinking alleys, of vagrants and impoverished sailors and out-of-work labourers. The river for them could be a curse.
There were other accounts of the eighteenth century that reflected the less salubrious aspects of the river. The eighteenth-century traveller, Thomas Pennant, left a diary of a journey from Temple Stairs to Gravesend in the spring of 1787. He notes that Greenland Dock, on the south bank near the Isle of Dogs, is the place where “blubber is boiled at a fit distance from the capital.” Of Woolwich he records “the sight of the multitude of convicts in chains labouring in removing earth; eight are employed in drawing each cart.”
In 1771 Tobias Smollett complained, in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, that
if I would drink water, I must swallow that which comes from the river Thames, impregnated with all the filth of London and Westminster. Human excrement is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is composed of all the drugs, minerals and poisons, used in mechanics and manufacture, enriched with the putrefying carcases of beasts and men; and mixed with all the scourings of all the wash-tubs, kennels, and common sewers, within the bills of mortality.
The “bills of mortality” were published weekly in the parishes of the city, detailing the causes of each death, primarily as a warning for the onset of plague; but that mortality was in some part due to the pervasive deadliness of the Thames water. In an area of the foreshore on the edge of Limehouse there was a common sewer known in the eighteenth century, and no doubt for many centuries before that, as “the Black Ditch.”
But by the middle of the nineteenth century the situation had become far worse. The sewers of all London were flowing into the Thames, breeding epidemic disease among the urban population. Numerous small gas manufactories were set up along the banks, since they needed water to produce the gas itself, and their waste residues entered the Thames. The byproducts included spent lime, ammonia, cyanide and carbolic acid, which were not conducive to the health of any marine life.
All the excrement and pollution of the largest city in the world flowed within the Thames. The sewage of three million people bubbled in the tide, and the river had become no more than a vast open sewer. Drapes soaked in chlorine were hung against the windows of Parliament. But they were not enough. In the words of a contemporary report the Chancellor of the Exchequer left a committee room in disorder “with a mass of papers in one hand and with his pocket handkerchief clutched in the other, and applied closely to his nose, with body half bent, hastened in dismay from the pestilential odour.” In the words of that Chancellor, Benjamin Disraeli, the river had become “a Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror.” When Victoria and Albert embarked upon a pleasure cruise upon the river, the smell drove them back to the banks within minutes. Yet even the foreshores were caked with shit. As far upriver as Teddington Lock, the sewage was reported to be 6 inches (150 mm) thick and “as black as ink.”
The water itself was turgid and dark, with a viscous quality created by the mountains of sludge poured into its depths. Its distinctive smell, readily invoked in any account of the “great stink” of 1858, was that of hydrogen sulphide created by the removal of all the oxygen from the water; this in turn caused the water to become black with deposits of iron sulphide. And this was the water with which the citizens made their tea. A contemporary publication, The Oarsman’s Guide, described the Thames as “the sludgy compromise between the animal, the vegetable and the mineral kingdoms” and described the nineteenth-century riverscape thus: “Feeble rays from a clouded sun glimmer through the murky atmosphere, and play with tarnished glister over the dingy flood.” For mid-Victorians it was the fatal harbinger of “the terrors of a new and warmer world.” The unnatural warmth of the river, created by the chemical reactions within its depths, suggested a calamitous destiny.
In 1858 Punch magazine described it as “one vast gutter” in which the leavings of the city were dumped, which included in that century a host of materials from the lime of Vauxhall to the bone deposits of Lambeth and the slaughter-houses of Whitechapel. It has always been in danger of “silting up,” when the alluvial mud gathers in large enough quantities to obstruct the flow of water. There is also the risk of “retention,” or the extent to which the river holds on to its contents. If you were to drop a plank or oil drum into the river at London Bridge, it would take from three to eleven weeks to travel the 40 miles into the embrace of the open sea. This was once also the situation of the sewage trapped within the banks of the Thames.
The blackness of the Thames was once taken to be an image of unnaturalness and sterility. Henry James, in English Hours (1905), describes how a “damp-looking, dirty blackness is the universal tone. The river is almost black, and is covered with black barges; above the bla
ck house-tops, from among the far-stretching docks and basins, rises a dusky wilderness of masts.” Black water seems somehow to be the opposite of true water. It is disturbing. It is hard. It is rancid. It is restless. It is the image of London, as if London had drowned in its depths and its sightless eyes were looking up from the water. It is sour, with the sourness of metal and industry somewhere within it. It could not quench your thirst. It will smell of dank and forgotten things.
There were four great epidemics of cholera in the nineteenth century—those of 1832, 1849, 1854 and 1865—in which many thousands of people died from the state of the polluted water extracted from the various city pumps. By the end of 1849, for example, some fourteen thousand Londoners had expired from the infection. Dr. John Snow became celebrated as the man who first demonstrated that cholera was an intestinal disease propagated by infected water; he proved his point in the epidemic of 1854 by the incidence of death within a 250-yard (230-metre) radius of the drinking pump at the corner of Broad Street in Soho. That pump led directly back to the Thames. It is believed that in 1861 Prince Albert died from typhoid spread by the foul waters beneath Windsor Castle. In “The Adventure of the Dying Detective,” set in 1890, Sherlock Holmes is deemed to have contracted a deadly contagion, simply by walking down an alley in Rotherhithe close to the water; his eyes are feverish, and his lips are caked with sores.
At a later date the effluent from the power stations located along the river had a further effect upon the condition and healthiness of the Thames. The water, its temperature artificially raised, lost oxygen. It was no better by the middle of the twentieth century. Most people preferred to use the pedestrian tunnel rather than confront the smell caused by the churning of the Woolwich ferry. In the late 1950s the surface of the Thames was observed to heave and bubble with the discharge of methane gas beneath its surface, and the poison ate holes in the propellers of the river boats. The gilded buttons on the officers’ uniforms would turn black within two or three hours.
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