by Lara Maiklem
The opposite bank seemed even more rural and I wondered if I should have taken that route. The houses had gone and there were green open spaces, parks and woodland. According to the map on my phone I should have been able to see the flat scrubby expanse of flood meadows at Ham Lands quite soon, a 178-acre nature reserve that lies in a bend in the river on the south side between Richmond and Kingston, somewhere safe for the river to go if it swells and breaks its banks.
People living along the river at the tidal head are used to the river flooding on high spring tides. There are no river walls or embankments to protect them from these natural forces and the river overflows quite regularly. The houses along the river path at Strand-on-the-Green in Chiswick are well prepared with garden walls and Perspex or glass barriers in front of the windows. Sandbags are at the ready and the wooden planks that slide in to block the doors are on standby. Over the centuries, the doorways of the oldest houses have physically moved up and away from the creeping water. The number of steps up to them has increased and each step has stolen a foot from the height of the door. Some are now little more than three-foot hobbit doors at the top of a flight of steps – incontrovertible proof that water levels are rising. At London Bridge, the tides rise by about three feet every hundred years, as the ice caps melt, London sinks and various other geographical and environmental conditions come into play. The tides today are higher than they have been at any time in history.
The tide had been falling as I’d walked. The closer I got to Teddington, the more the riverbed was exposed. Some boats were already stranded awkwardly, leaning on their keels, and I started to think about getting down onto the foreshore. I reached Eel Pie Island, the most famous of the inhabited eyots, named for the eel pies once sold there. Eel Pie Island splits the river in two. The channel nearest me was almost dry, apart from a few small pools that had been left behind in shallow dips. Ducks circled them, quacking angrily at the human interlopers who were poking around and marvelling at the novelty of being able to walk where the Thames should be. I decided to join them and cast around for a suitable place to descend I didn’t fancy scrambling through the scrub and weeds into mud of unknown depth and consistency, so the wide slipway that led directly to the foreshore from the road was a godsend.
The riverbed was firm, not muddy at all, just a fine layer of silt the consistency of thin custard. There was an even layer of gravel mixed with small, round pea-mussel shells that popped and crunched beneath my boots. It was clean and natural with none of the rubble and urban waste that litters the foreshore in the city. I looked down at the unfamiliar riverbed, my eyes darting between the freshwater mussel shells, which were everywhere. They were just like the ones I used to search for as a child, convinced that one day I’d find a pearl. I never did, but from latent habit I bent down and picked one up to admire the creamy opalescence inside. Just a few yards away, crows flapped down to turn stones, looking for shrimps and other tiny creatures stranded by this rare occurrence. All around me were the carefully constructed cases of what looked like caddis fly larvae; perhaps the crows were eating those too.
I looked hard along the bank and under the footbridge, but all I found was rubbish – an empty duffel bag, two scooters, an old lighter, a shirt, a wellington boot, headphones, a submerged shopping trolley, a car exhaust, a traffic cone, a mobile phone and 14p in change. Near some steps, a bit further along, it was more promising: a few clay pipe stems, to prove you can indeed find them the entire length of the Tideway, and a fair amount of broken glass. I recognised the thick dark brown glass of beer bottles from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century and the aqua-coloured shards of old soda water and lemonade bottles. Perhaps they’d fallen out of creaking wicker picnic baskets or slipped from tired happy hands at the end of the day when this part of the Thames was a mecca for day trippers and boating parties. People swarmed here from the railway stations, while steamers brought crowds of noisy cockneys upriver from the East End.
Among the shards of glass I found a green marble, which was in fact the stopper from a Codd bottle. The Codd bottle is one of those brilliant Victorian inventions that you wish would be brought back into general use, although they still have the sense to use them in India and Japan. In 1872 the wonderfully named Hiram Codd patented his solution to the problem of sealing fizzy-drink bottles. The marble in his bottle sat on a glass ‘shelf’ within a specially designed pinched neck. Gas from the fizzy drink created pressure that forced the marble onto a rubber ring in the collar of the bottle, thus forming an effective seal. To pour the drink the marble was pushed back into the bottle using a little plunger or by giving it a swift bash on something, which is said to have given rise to the term ‘codswallop’. If the bottles weren’t smashed by children for their marbles, they were returned to the manufacturer where they could be washed and refilled. I’ve been told by those old enough to have bought drinks in Codd bottles that the lure of the imprisoned marble proved too great for many children and a lot of bottles got smashed. I must admit, while I’ve found scores of marbles, I’ve only ever found one complete bottle.
Over the years, I have amassed quite a variety of different stoppers, from river-worn cut-glass decanter stoppers and large earthenware plugs for hot-water bottles, to pressed-glass HP Sauce bottle stoppers and delicate perfume dabbers. The oldest stopper I have is Roman, from the second to third century ad. It is a large plug of unglazed red clay, shaped like a fat mushroom, which is thought to have originated in the Bay of Naples where it was pushed into the neck of an amphora, perhaps containing olive oil, before it was sent to London. What I like most about it is the faint line that runs just below the top, from once resting on a sealing bung of clay or plant stuff.
Corked and broken bottlenecks have no real value and are overlooked by most people, but they are precious to me. It amazes me that while the rest of the bottle has broken, the neck remains firmly corked, exactly where it was pushed by the last person to pour or drink from it. I have brought home some very old bottlenecks, seventeenth-century free-blown wine bottles and tiny apothecary bottles. The corks survived while they were wet, but once they dried out, they shrank and slipped out. With the magic gone there was no point in keeping them, so I returned them to the river.
Plenty of mudlarks don’t bother collecting the black vulcanite stoppers that roll around at the water’s edge and nestle among the pebbles and stones either. They are often smoothed and eroded into mere suggestions of their original form, but I’ve also found them perfectly preserved, still tightly screwed into beer bottles, faithfully preserving what’s left of its contents. Unscrewing them is like opening a smelly time capsule, with a hissing rush of air followed by the smell of hundred-year-old beer dregs turned foul and rotten.
Many stoppers were branded with the manufacturer’s trademark and name, and it’s these I look out for; long-forgotten breweries and local soft-drink manufacturers with gloriously old-fashioned names like ‘Bath Row Bottling Co.’ and ‘Style and Winch’. Most come from London or Kent or Essex, but at Teddington I found one from much further away. It was thick with mud when I picked it up and what I saw when I wiped it clean with a swipe of my thumb gave me quite a shock. It was a large swastika with the name St Austell Brewery around the edge.
The symbol on the stopper was so powerful and forbidden it intrigued me. I was sure it pre-dated the war, but there had to be a story behind it, so I took to the Internet when I got home. I discovered that the St Austell Brewery in Cornwall, like other companies, including Coca-Cola and Carlsberg, chose the symbol for its original meaning of health and fertility in around 1890, but withdrew their swastika stoppers in the early1920s when Hitler adopted it as the symbol of the Nazi party. Stuck with a pile of old stock and with materials in short supply the brewery ground off the offending image so that they could use them through the war. At the same time, vulcanite stoppers were produced with a dip in the top to reduce the amount of rubber needed, and the words ‘War Grade’ stamped around the edge. I used
to find a lot of them on the foreshore, but I haven’t found one for a while. Perhaps more people are realising their worth.
Happy with my unusual vulcanite stopper and with another Codd bottle marble for my collection safely stashed in my pocket, I decided it was time to leave. The light was fading and the blackbirds in the bushes were beginning to stutter their evening chink-chink call. I still had a way to walk to Teddington Lock where I wanted to see the obelisk that marks the beginning point of the tidal Thames. So I began to head west again. This time the path took me inland through suburban streets and around the lucky houses that have lawns running right down to the river.
This is where my mother was born. She grew up playing and picnicking along the Thames at Twickenham and her early years were spent here with her grandmother Kate. When my grandfather came out of the army after the war, she moved with her parents to a neat suburban house close to the river at Thames Ditton. My grandparents lived there for years and I grew up playing in their immaculately manicured garden, which they filled with red geraniums and tomatoes year after year. My grandmother was a very fast driver and visits to their house invariably involved a terrifying journey in her maroon Triumph Herald to watch the boats on the river and feed the ducks while we ate the tomatoes and soggy white-bread salmon-paste sandwiches. Heaven.
I looked down into the mud along the edge of the river at the bottom of Radnor Gardens and tried to imagine a four-year-old version of my mother stuck in the mud, crying her eyes out. She and her older brother spent a lot of time wandering around on their own and one day they found themselves in Radnor Gardens, a small public park beside the river. In the deep mud at the water’s edge was a beautiful cricket bat, which my uncle sent her to retrieve. Thankfully, two ladies passing by saw what was happening. They pulled her out, cleaned her up with their handkerchiefs and sent them both off home.
I was not far from my great-grandmother’s house. If I hurried, I could take a peek at it and still get to Teddington Lock before dark. When I found it in the middle of a long straight road, I recognised it straight away. I’d seen an old faded photograph of it in a box of other family pictures. It must have been taken around the mid-1920s because my grandmother is standing outside with a friend and she’s a teenager. She doesn’t look like the person I remember, but her eyes are the same. Eyes don’t lie, and they don’t age either. The house was the same too, a large Victorian villa built of yellow London brick with bay windows. I stared at it, thinking of all the people in my life who’d crossed its threshold, looked out of its windows and lived in its rooms. It was a curious feeling of familiar and unfamiliar. Like looking at the riverbed at draw off. I know that Kate and my great-grandfather Albert worked as ‘antique dealers’, and I know that what they did was not always above board. Both had been born in the East End and were determined to pull themselves up in the world, by any means necessary. Albert ran a ring that fixed auction prices and Kate fenced the goods he acquired. My grandmother told me how her parents sold antiques in bulk, furnishing entire rooms in their house at Richmond and then selling everything in one go. She’d often come home from school to find her room empty, everything sold except a mattress on the floor for her to sleep on.
I’d have loved to knock on the door, explained who I was, invited myself in, but there was no time, it was getting dark and they’d probably have thought I was mad anyway. So I walked back to the main road, consumed by thoughts of family, people I never met and those who had gone and who I still missed. Eventually I turned off down a quieter street leading to Teddington Lock, and a thin iron footbridge that took me over the river. I could just about see the full channel of the non-tidal river beyond and once on the south side it was a relatively short walk to the obelisk that has marked the upper reach of the tidal Thames since 1909, the year the Port of London Authority (PLA) came into being and took control of the tidal Thames. As well as marking the start of the PLA’s jurisdiction, it also marks the upper limit of the old Thames Waterman Licence, the lower limit being marked by another obelisk in the Estuary.
The stone at Teddington is at least less underwhelming than its wind-blown sister in the Estuary, which lists slightly landwards and is surrounded by rubbish blown in off the strandline. Someone has made the effort to protect it with iron railings and it is set straight. I always touch the Estuary stone, so I knelt down on the cold flagstones and reached as far as I could through the railings to try to brush my fingers against the base. I’d finally completed the line between the western and eastern ends of the tidal Thames. The box was ticked and I didn’t need to come back this way for a while.
HAMMERSMITH
It is very kind of you, but pray do not trouble … I am a destroyer & not a collector & am always reducing my possessions as near to zero as may be.
Letter to a customer from T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, 14 February 1918
Ten and a half winding miles downstream from Teddington, the river starts to look like the one I am familiar with. Hammersmith is the tipping point, where you really get a sense that the river has grown up and is gaining momentum in preparation for its journey through the city and out to sea. It is wider and faster, more urgent and grimy. Trees and bushes line the muddy path along the south bank, which is much like that at Teddington, but the houses on the north side are squeezed into a dense line along the riverfront and protected from the water by a tall wall. This is a sign of what is to come. Further downriver, past Hammersmith Bridge, modern apartment blocks have appeared, crowding the river and changing its character.
Richmond Lock and Weir control the river at Teddington, but here the tides rise and fall naturally with the sea, lifting the narrowboats, converted barges and floating homes that are moored along the north side at Hope Pier and Dove Pier. Gangplanks lead down to floating jetties from wide gaps in the river wall, which are blocked most of the time with wooden planks. Some of the jetties belong to rowing clubs; almost all of them have notices warning that they are private.
It’s fairly easy to get down to the foreshore on the south side, although it can involve a muddy scramble through tall weeds. There is no wall or barrier here to climb over, just a few gently sloping feet of rough ground, cobbled halfway to prevent the river from eating away the soil of the natural bank. Here and there narrow, slippery concrete steps are cut into the cobbles. They can be overgrown and muddy, green with slimy weed and algae at the bottom where the river climbs up at high tide, but they make access to the foreshore relatively simple. Getting to the foreshore on the north side, however, is far more difficult. I have tried climbing over the railings next to the bridge and wading through the mud and tall reeds where I assume there was once a slipway, but I have to admit it is much easier to invade ‘private property’ – hop over the gaps in the wall, scoot down a gangplank and jump off one of the wooden platforms that are grounded on the foreshore at low tide.
I know the north side of the river at Hammersmith quite well. I was a regular visitor for some time in the late 1990s, when I was working in a soul-destroying job in an anonymous office block wedged beside the flyover. The river was hidden by the city and all I could see from my office window was a tangle of roads and endless concrete and brick, so it took me a while to realise I was as close to the river as I was. I had come to London a few years earlier to get away from peace and quiet. I had had enough of mud in the countryside. I wanted to immerse myself in the city, the seediness and excitement of it all, and I threw myself at it with gusto. The Thames was something I barely saw as I passed over it in the early hours of the morning on my way home from clubs and parties, usually slumped in the dirty back seat of a minicab that reeked of pine air-freshener. But then I began to notice it: a silver ribbon reaching east and west, a line of natural tranquillity through an urban mess, a sudden moment of calm after a crazy night.
Sometimes it pricked my conscience, making me feel sad, remorseful and even guilty. I began to realise how disconnected I was becoming from the world I had grown up in. I was part of two worlds.
I was the farm kid who had dreamed of bigger, more exciting places, but deep down I was missing home and pining for what I’d left behind. At lunchtime at work, I escaped from the office and ate my sandwiches in parks and squares, but so did everyone else. I ended up sitting by regimented beds of tulips, squeezed in next to strangers, wondering what they were eating and listening in to their conversations. At weekends, I searched for green space near where I lived, but all I found were random patches of worn grass with broken slides and swings, graffiti and menacing gangs of kids who scared me away. I tried further afield, but Regent’s Park made me feel as if I was visiting someone’s well-ordered garden and even Hampstead Heath felt too controlled.
Then one day I found myself beside the Thames. I was meeting a friend after work and she had suggested we meet at a pub down by the river. I was early and having spent the day hunched over my desk, I decided to stretch my legs while I waited for her. The tide was high and the water had risen up close to the top of the river wall. I looked out across the thick brown expanse and I felt my muscles relax, my shoulders fall away from my ears. Somehow, for a moment, the moving water had taken the city away. It was just me and the river, nothing else but an overwhelming sense of comfort, of finally coming home. It turned out my playmate had been with me all along.