Thames

by Peter Ackroyd

  FULHAM: Fullenhanne or Fullenholme, the place of fowls or the place of birds; or, perhaps, the enclosure of a fuller. Others suggest that the name means “foul home” or muddy settlement. Once known for its market gardens, and for being the site of the first gas-works in Britain. It was the home of the Bishop of London until 1973. Samuel Richardson and Rudyard Kipling also lived here. Once considered more genteel than Putney, but the respective status of the two towns has now been reversed. “Fulham dice” was the phrase for false dice.

  BATTERSEA: The name is a puzzle, with etymologists invoking St. Patrick, St. Peter or batter pudding as its origin. It was written Patrice-cey in Domesday, and then became Batrichsey. Batter pudding is too obvious a derivation. It may, however, mean Badric’s or Batta’s island. The town was once well known for its asparagus, and is now most famous for its dogs’ home. There is an anonymous poem on the subject:

  To me, Oh, far dearer,

  And brighter, and clearer,

  The Thames as it ripples at fair Battersea.

  The river is also more tempestuous here; the waves at Battersea Bridge are known for their roughness.

  CHELSEA: It is mentioned in the Domesday Book as Chelched, but then amended into Cercehede. In the eighth century, when a synod was called here by Offa, it had become Ceolshythe. It was also known as Cealchythe, which might mean a landing place for chalk or lime, or a landing place on gravel. There has been a church on the site of Chelsea Old Church since the eighth century. The house of Thomas More was situated here, and a memorial to his family is to be found in the church itself. This stretch of the Thames was known ironically as “the Cocknies’ Sea.” The local young men of the early nineteenth century were known as “kiddies” who “wore their hair in close curls on the side of their heads, done upon leaden rollers; hats turned or looped up on the sides; and to their breeches eight, and sometimes ten, small buttons were seen at their knees, with a profusion of strings, after the famed ‘Sixteen-string Jack.’” So Chelsea has always been a centre of fashion.

  LAMBETH: Loam-hithe or muddy bank; or perhaps Lamhytha, the landing place for lambs. In Domesday called Lanchei. Best known for its palace, home of the Archbishop of Canterbury. In the church here is located the Tradescant Museum of Garden History. The home of various magicians and astrologers, perhaps attracted by the Hebrew connotations of the name as the home of the lamb. Beth-el was in Hebrew the name for a sacred place. But it was always a somewhat rough neighbourhood. Blake moved here in the eighteenth century, among various louche and radical neighbours. It was believed that the swampy air on the south side of the river encouraged enervation and vice, Lambeth being known as one of the “great sinks and common receptacles of all the vice and immorality of London.” It became well known for its potteries and for the prevalence of what were known as “stink industries.” It also became a haven for boat-builders and boat-repairers. In the nineteenth century it was considered to be a “hideous aspect of the foreshore, overladen with dank tenements, rotten wharves and dirty boat houses.” There is a remarkable series of early photographs, showing the whole picturesque and dilapidated riverine settlement that was cleared away for the Albert Embankment and its adjacent roads.

  WESTMINSTER: The Saxons called it Thornege, meaning the Isle of Thorns. The island may have been formed by an arm of the river, called the Long Ditch, but it was more likely to have been surrounded by low marshy ground from which the higher ground emerged. It was once the site of a temple to Apollo. The present abbey in the west began to rise in the eleventh century, but there had been a monastery here from the early seventh century. Sebert, king of East Saxons, erected the abbey church and named it West Mynstre in distinction to the East Minster, or St. Paul’s, which previously had been founded by his uncle Ethelbert. The remains of Sebert are still within the abbey. The Duke of Wellington insisted that the present Parliament face directly upon the river, so that the building could never be surrounded by irate crowds.

  CITY and CENTRAL LONDON: The river is the origin of London. One possible derivation of the city’s name is the Celtic llyn-dun, or the hill fort by the pool. That would of course suggest that the Celts built a settlement here before the Romans. It was the first place upstream from the estuary where a bluff of hard ground was protected by two hills. There are some who claim that the Thames is London—that it is the epitome, the liquid essence, the spirit, of London. When the Illustrated London News was first published, the title page of that paper showed the Thames; the river was the presiding deity. The poet John Masefield described it as “the great street paved with water,” the central highway and principal avenue of the city. It is as closely linked to the city as the blood is to the body, and it can be claimed with some confidence that no other capital in the world has been so dependent upon its river. It was not simply its market and its port and its highway. The Thames gave London the dignity and the grandeur, the aesthetic possibilities, which it would not otherwise possess. That is why most of the city’s great architectural monuments are placed along the river. Yet it is curious that Londoners themselves rarely attend to the Thames. They pass over it hurriedly; they try not to walk beside it, and they rarely venture upon it. It does not lead anywhere. It cannot be used as transport to the cinema or the theatre or the public house. And so it is neglected. It is not deemed to be interesting. In most of London, even in its riverine portions, the Thames can scarcely be seen. It is just glimpsed between buildings. And, for its own part, the river is content to remain aloof. It is not intimate or insinuating. It still seems primaeval, dark, and altogether obscure.

  SOUTHWARK: Or the south work. A defensive wall was built beside the bank here. Some believe that the “work” was a fortress built by the Romans. At the top of Battle Bridge Lane, going down to Tooley Street, there is a narrow alley still known as “English Grounds.” It was so called on a London map of 1848. On that old map there was also a small hatched area described as “Irish Grounds.” Could this be a memorial of the nineteenth-century pitched fights between Irish and English labourers? There is no point in looking for a more ancient battle on this site; the name of the bridge comes from the fact that it was part of a hostel belonging to the monks of Battle Abbey in Sussex.

  WAPPING: The settlement of Waeppa’s people. This early tribe or band inhabited the ground now supporting the Hawksmoor church of St. George’s in the East. Once known as Wapping on the Wose, or Wapping in the mud. Samuel Johnson urged Boswell to “explore Wapping” in order thoroughly to understand the London world. It still acts as an example. Once a place of fat fields and pastures, it became a riverside neighbourhood in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, described as a “continual street, with alleys of small tenements or cottages, built by sailors’ victuallers.” It was a place of pubs and brothels, in other words. It became an adjunct to the London Docks in the nineteenth century, then a slum and wasteland in the twentieth; now in the twenty-first century an arena for luxury apartments, estate agents and the headquarters of Times International.

  BERMONDSEY: The eye or island of Beormund. The word eye is now reserved for the London Eye by the Thames, but it was originally used for a number of small islands upon the marshland or floodplain of the Thames. Bermondsey itself began existence as a causeway across the marsh, leading to a mid-Saxon minster. In the fourteenth century a Cluniac abbey arose in the same place, and became the centre of the commercial as well as the spiritual life of the area. By the eighteenth century, like many settlements beside the river, Bermondsey attracted the more noxious trades such as tanning and glue manufacture. Its various and disagreeable smells became famous. They were not necessarily unwelcomed, however; the smell of tanning was believed to be efficacious against the plague. There are still streets named Tanner Street, Morocco Street and Leathermarket Street. The phrase “mad as a hatter” originates here from the ailments that afflicted the hatters of Bermondsey, when they breathed in the fumes of a highly toxic mercury solution in the course of their work. It also has the honou
r (if such it is) of containing Jacob’s Island immortalised as Bill Sikes’s lair in Oliver Twist with “every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot and garbage.” Sikes’s house was in Eckett Street, long since demolished.

  SHADWELL: It does not mean “well of shadows,” or “shady wells.” The name derives from Ceadeles’s well, Ceadeles being a pre-Christian water deity. Shad Thames by Bermondsey is supposed to be a corruption of the Street of St. John at the Thames, the Knights of St. John owning mills in the neighbourhood, but there may be a connection with Ceadeles.

  LIMEHOUSE: The place of lime oasts or lime kilns. There have been lime-workers here from the fourteenth century to the disappearance of the last kilns in 1935. There was a porcelain factory in Limehouse in the eighteenth century and the area was also known for its ship-building. In the nineteenth century it was known as Chinatown, and acquired a reputation for its opium dens and what were known as “dopers.” It never was as dangerous or as heinous as its reputation suggested, although writers as diverse as Oscar Wilde and Sax Rohmer introduced a great deal of romantic intrigue within the neighbourhood. It is no wonder that most Londoners shunned the area. It is now filled with expensive riverside apartments.

  ROTHERHITHE: Or Redriff; Redriff Road survives. The name is popularly supposed to refer to a red reef, and it is said that just below the entrance to Millwall Dock there is a patch of light red gravel which runs across the river bottom. But it may derive from redhra, the Saxon for sailor, and hythe for haven. In that case it has been connected with sailors and shipping for more than a thousand years. Alternatively it may mean a landing place for cattle. From here the Pilgrim Fathers set sail for Plymouth and the New World. In the eighteenth century it was a village inhabited by seafaring men and tradesmen in the various nautical businesses. Lemuel Gulliver lived here. In the nineteenth century it became the home for various docks, many with a Baltic or Scandinavian connection. Grain and timber were the principal cargoes, although “Sicily sulphur”—sulphur from Palermo—was also an important commodity. The remains of a manor house, built by Edward III, can be seen beside the river-bank just west of the church. Galleywall Road here, once spelled Galley Wall, was popularly believed to mark the edge of the great ditch that Canute built to allow his galleys to circumvent the Thames.

  DEPTFORD: Deep ford. There was once a Roman bridge here, but it decayed. Deptford Bridge is now on the site. A Saxon settlement has been found. It may have been known as Meretun, meaning the dwelling place in the marsh, and in AD 871 Ethelred defeated the Danes at this place. It is perhaps most famous as the location of Christopher Marlowe’s death. Peter the Great lived for several months at Sayes Court, owned by John Evelyn. His favourite pastime was to be driven in a wheelbarrow, drunk, through Evelyn’s neat hedges. There is still a Czar Street, but the house has long since disappeared. He was especially interested in the Royal Naval Dockyard, established by Henry VII in 1513. Raleigh, Frobisher and Drake all sailed from here.

  GREENWICH: From the Saxon Grenewic or Grenevic, the green port, wic referring to a place where dry soil meets the river. Or perhaps the name means the village on the green, or even a dairy farm. It has attracted settlers from the Mesolithic period forwards. There was a royal palace here from the time of Edward I, which in the fifteenth century was known as L’Pleazaunce or Placentia. Both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I were born here. Hawksmoor built the church of St. Alphege, named after the Archbishop of Canterbury, Ealpheg, who on the site was beaten to death with ox-bones by the invading Danes in 1012. The setting for the Royal Observatory, and the Royal Hospital which is now the home of the University of Greenwich. It is considered by some to represent the most beautiful view upon the river. Defoe believed that the water of the Thames at this point “is very sweet and fresh, especially at the tide of ebb.” This may no longer be true. Greenwich gin is still manufactured here. Just to the east of the town is Horseshoe Breach, a breach in the river-bank that has never been reclaimed, and Dead Dog Bay. Greenwich has become a World Heritage Site.

  THE ISLE OF DOGS: It is a peninsula, rather than an island. Once known as Stebunheath [Stepney] Marsh. The origin of the name is unclear. Was it a place where dead dogs were washed on the foreshore? Were the dog-kennels of Edward III situated here? In the eleventh century it was a woody marsh, upon which the Bishop of London kept five hundred hogs. So perhaps it was once the Isle of Hogs? It might also be a corruption of Isle of Ducks, or even Isle of Dykes. There is the story that a waterman murdered a man here, whose dog then swam back and forth across the river until he was noticed and followed. The corpse was discovered and, when the dog began to snarl at the waterman, so was the murderer. Hence the Isle of the Dog. There is yet another legend of a lost hunting party, whose phantom dogs wailed in the night. There was once a primaeval forest here, the remains of which have been uncovered 8 feet (2.4 m) beneath the surface of the water; in the nineteenth century it was described as “a mass of decayed trees, leaves and branches, accompanying huge trunks, rotted through, yet perfect in every fibre; the bark was uninjured, and the whole evidently torn up by the roots.” The West India Docks were built in the early nineteenth century. Until the 1980s it was inhabited by a tightly knit and of course peninsular community. A stone chapel dedicated to St. Mary was found here. Now the home of “Docklands” marked by the huge erection of Canary Wharf.

  WOOLWICH: Wool farm; or a settlement where wool was traded. The river here was once considered treacherous, with unpredictable deeps and shallows. Harrison described the river at this point as of a “vast bigness.” It is indeed over a mile in width and, on the flood, the water is salt. The whole riverine area was once known as Bugsby’s Marshes. Now Woolwich Reach is preceded by Bugsby’s Reach, containing Bugsby’s Hole. The Hole was a place of execution in the eighteenth century, but now is essentially a small beach where rusty and dilapidated boats are to be found. No one knows the identity of Bugsby. Some say that he was a pirate, others that he was a market gardener or a devil. Woolwich was once the home of the military Arsenal. It is now the site of the Thames Barrier.

  ERITH: Place where gravel was shipped; or perhaps a landing place of gravel. Seven or eight Saxon skeletons were found on the top of a hill beside the river. Once known as Lesnes or Lessness. The ruins of Lessness Abbey are still to be seen. The area was always low, flat and marshy with a reputation for being unhealthy.

  GREENHITHE: Or Gretenrcse, meaning green landing place. Once the site of very productive chalk pits.

  DAGENHAM: Daecca’s ham or settlement. Nearby Barking is named after Berica’s people. The home of the once famous Dagenham Breach when, in 1707, 5,000 acres (2,023 ha) of marshland were submerged by the river. The inundated area was not drained and embanked until 1721. The home of the Ford Motor Company. A large lake to the north of the factory marks the remains of the breach.

  GRAYS THURROCK: The manor of Thurrock belonged to Richard de Grays. Thurrock may derive from Thoar’s Oak. Or it may come from the Saxon term thorrocke, describing the bottom part of a boat where the bilge water collects. It may simply mean a dung-heap in a field. The latter seems the most likely. This is where the Black Shelf Sand begins. This area of the river is known as St. Clement’s Reach, because the church of St. Clement in West Thurrock was built for the Canterbury pilgrims and fishermen who congregated along this stretch. The church was once in an isolated and desolate spot, surrounded by marshland, but it is now dominated by modern factories and refineries. The river at this place is also known as Fiddlers’ Reach, as a result of the legend that three fiddlers were drowned here and that their musical improvisations still cause the water to be restless and choppy; alternatively it is believed that seamen once used to call an irregular swell of the water “fiddling.” An early nineteenth-century guide described Grays Thurrock as consisting “principally of one irregular street situated on a small creek navigable for vessels of small burden.” It is now a sizeable town. The area is still occupied by waste-tips and waste-heaps, th
us reverting to the meaning of its old name. The Queen Elizabeth the Second Bridge, a cable-stayed bridge, leads the M25 across the Thames Estuary.