London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  But there was also less serious business upon the Thames. There were halfpenny steamers, penny steamers and twopenny steamers going to Greenwich or Gravesend, Ramsgate and Margate. There was a Dover boat and a Boulogne boat, an Ostend boat and a Rhine boat; there were coasters to Ipswich, Yarmouth and Hull, and steamboats to Southampton, Plymouth and Land’s End. There were slower boats which made the journey to Kew, Richmond and Hampton Court complete with musical bands.

  Then beyond the shoreline itself lay a whole host of commercial properties dependent upon the river and its tides-ship yards, sailors’ lodgings and public houses, marine stores, the hovels of porters, apple stalls and oyster shops waiting for custom. The whole panoply of street life attended the river, then, with a group of sailors getting out of hansom cabs to descend upon a public house, a breakdown of a wagon in the streets attracting a crowd of spectators, the endless chaff of speech resounding against the walls and bridge. “Go it!” “I can come it slap.” “She can be very choice!”

  By 1930 the port and docks of London gave employment to a hundred thousand people and carried thirty-five million tons of cargo within their seven hundred acres; there were in addition almost two thousand riverside wharves. In this period, too, heavy industries such as gas production and food processing clustered around the river as if in homage to its ancient mercantile past; other industries such as timber and chemicals made use of the Regent’s Canal and the River Lea as avenues to and from the Thames.

  In the following decade the business of the river was amplified by “rapid handling” methods which lifted cargo by fork-lift trucks and fast-moving cranes, but by the 1960s the equally rapid changes in the industrial process left the docks almost literally high and dry. The new phenomenon of containeri-sation, whereby goods were transported in vast boxes from ship to truck, precluded the system of warehousing; the vessels were too large for the original early nineteenth-century docks to handle.

  The docks are silent now, and, within memory, the great buildings of the early nineteenth century have become a wasteland. The East India Dock closed in 1967, while the London Dock and St. Katherine’s Dock followed just two years later. The West India Dock survived until 1980, but by then the active and busy life of the region seemed to have gone for ever. The economy of the East End was severely depleted, and unemployment among the population reached very high levels. Yet out of this dereliction, ten years later, rose the shining edifices and refurbished warehouses known as Docklands, confirming that pattern of deliquescence and renewal which is at the heart of London’s life. As Mrs. Cook said of the Thames in Highways and Byways of London (1902), “nothing destroys antiquity like energy; nothing blots out the old like the new.”

  In place of a derelict St. Katherine’s Wharf a new hotel and a world trade centre were constructed, the latter at least an appropriate edifice beside the ancient river which had for two thousand years carried the trade of the world. The restoration of other dock areas continued in a similar manner, although the greatest scheme of all was the regeneration of what became known as the East Thames Corridor between Tower Bridge and Sheerness. There will be no diminution in the mysterious ability of the commercial Thames to attract money and enterprise in the twenty-first century. The building of great offices upon the Isle of Dogs can be compared only with the original development of the West India Dock upon the same site; in both cases, that of 1806 and that of 1986, the enormous scale of the enterprise was noted. In typical London fashion both giant works were funded by the private money of speculators and businesses, with discreet public help in the nature of tax-incentives, and on both occasions new forms of transport had to be provided. The Docklands Light Railway, in its size and character, is the late twentieth-century equivalent of the Commercial Road. On the western quay of the Brunswick Dock, built in the late eighteenth century, stood a great mast-house of some 120 feet which for many years dominated and symbolised the area as one of marine commerce and London’s maritime power; now, only a little distant, the Canary Wharf Tower fulfils a similar function in the celebration of power and commerce. The Thames runs, softly or powerfully according to the tidal currents, and its dark magniloquent song is not over.

  CHAPTER 58

  Dark Thames

  From early times it was a river of the dead, to which the bodies of the local population were consigned. The number of human skulls found in Chelsea has given it the name of “our Celtic Golgotha.” As Joseph Conrad said, of another stretch of the Thames, “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.” The derivation of its very name, pre-Celtic in origin, is tamasa, “dark river.” How can so many influences and associations be denied when, in modern times, lonely and unhappy people are often to be seen staring down into its turbulent depths? The German poet Heinrich Heine in 1827 described “the black mood which once came over me as toward evening I stood on Waterloo Bridge, and looked down on the water of the Thames … At the same time the most sorrowful tales came into my memory.”

  The river has embraced many such tales, as the old “dead houses” along its banks might testify. Here were brought the bodies of those who in the words of the ubiquitous posters were “found drowned.” Three or four suicides, or accidents, every week were laid upon a shelf, or within a wooden “shell,” to await the attentions of beadle and coroner. Heine went on to declare that “I was so sick in spirit that the hot drops sprang forcibly out of my eyes. They fell down into the Thames and swam forth into the mighty sea, which has already swallowed up such floods of human tears without giving them a thought.” It might be said that the river had swallowed them already. The toll-keepers upon the bridges were well known for their willingness to discuss the suicides-how many they were, how difficult to stop them, how difficult, indeed, to find them once they jumped. The river can in that sense become a true emblem of London’s oppression. It can carry away all of life’s hopes and ambitions, or deliver them up quite changed.

  The river banks mark that point where the stone of the city and the water meet in perpetual embrace, with the scattered debris of ships and urban waste mingling together; here are found sheets of metal, planks of rotten wood, bottles, cans, ash, bits of rope, pieces of board of no identifiable purpose or origin. The river also affects the fabric of the city with what Dickens described in Our Mutual Friend as “the spoiling influences of water-discoloured copper, rotten wood, honeycombed stone, green dank deposit.”

  There were small communities beside it which became a picture of urban dereliction. The area of Deptford was described in the nineteenth century as quite “the worst part of the great City’s story.” It is a record of that city’s decay when its commercial life has departed, with “the muddy, melancholy banks … the desolation of empty silent yards.” This, in the words of Blanchard Jerrold, was the “dead shore”; yet not so dead that there were not inhabitants of the area, living off the detritus which the Thames offered. These were the people of the river. They lived, too, in Shadwell (“the well of shadows”). Here, in the early twentieth century, “the houses of the people are square and black and low. The walls of storages are sheer and blind upon the narrow streets.” The darkness of the river against the darkness of the surrounding buildings renders it “invisible.” On the other bank, close to Rotherhithe, can be found Jacob’s Island which was also black with the “dust of colliers and the smoke of close-built low-roofed houses”; where once the bright water reflected and illuminated the brightness of the buildings along its banks, in the nineteenth century darkness called to darkness. Jacob’s Island, too, was “the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many locations that are hidden in London, wholly unknown, even by name, to the great mass of its inhabitants.”

  It is those elements of anonymity, and of secrecy, which the river accommodates within itself. Conrad compared the buildings that lined the shores to “the matted growths of bushes and creepers veiling the silent depths of an unexplored wilderness, they hide the depths of London’s infinitely varied, vi
gorous seething life … Dark and impenetrable at night, like the face of a forest, in the London waterside.” Sometimes it becomes almost too black and sad to bear examination. The author of London Nights, Stephen Graham, describes his pilgrimages within the “long, strange passages under the Thames in East London” where “one is descending, one is going back, one is bearing all London.” Just as Heine spoke of his instinctive and intuitive sorrow at the sight of the dark river, so in Stephen Graham’s book the Thames itself and all its submerged secrets “told of an enigma which would never be solved; the enigma of London’s sorrow, her burden, her slavery.” The river has brought London money and power, but at the cost of the city’s being enslaved to those insidious principles. One late twentieth-century writer, Iain Sinclair, has described the Thames in his novel Downriver as “breathless, cyclic, unstoppable. It offers immersion, blindness: a poultice of dark clay to seal our eyes for ever from the fear and agony of life … passions reduced to silt.”

  No wonder the watermen of the Thames, from the thirteenth century to the nineteenth, were known for their insulting and foul language. The violent and blasphemous abuse they used was known as water-language, to which anyone could be subject. Monarchs were often reviled in this manner when they took to the water and H.V. Morton, in In Search of London (1951), notes that “remarks which on land would have been treasonable were regarded as a joke upon the Thames.” It has even been suggested that Handel’s Water-Music was composed in order to “drown the torrent of abuse that would have greeted the new king, George I, during his first river-progress” (1714). It may be that the antiquity of the Thames has given its watermen licence to speak without fear; in that sense the river can be considered the essence of that radical and egalitarian temper so often associated with London.

  But that sense of darkness, continually moving upon the face of the water, also acts as a toughening and coarsening presence for all those who work there. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of “the muddy tide of the Thames, reflecting nothing, and hiding a million of unclean secrets within its breast-a sort of guilty conscience as it were, unwholesome with the rivulets of sin that constantly flow into it.”

  When Samuel Johnson gave the injunction to Boswell “to explore Wapping” as one way of understanding “the wonderful extent and variety of London” he could not have guessed the curious construction that might have been applied to his words in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the early decades of the twentieth century Wapping was as much blasted by decay as Shadwell or Jacob’s Island. Where the banks of the Seine are open and approachable, there are stretches of the Thames which actively deter visitors. The area of Wapping was itself hard to find, with its high street running beneath the great walls of the old warehouses, while the adjacent streets seemed to wish to conceal themselves behind gasworks and tenements. It had always been a lawless area, beyond the jurisdiction of the city, but its dereliction at the beginning of the century was also an echo of the shame and waste of the short-time labouring system at the docks; crowds of men seeking work would gather outside the gates, while only a few were ever selected by the foremen. The rest slunk back to that life of poverty, drink and oblivion so well documented by Charles Booth as well as Sidney and Beatrice Webb. “Indeed it is a sight to sadden the most callous,” according to Henry Mayhew, “to see thousands of men struggling for one day’s hire … To look in the faces of that hungry crowd is to see a sight that must be ever remembered … For weeks many have gone there, and gone through the same struggle-the same cries; and have gone away, after all, without the work they had screamed for.” So the Thames, the begetter of commerce, is also the most visible harbour for the misery which commercial principles can impose.

  In the forlorn graveyard of St. George’s in the East, one of the unhappy and ill-favoured places of London over many generations, lay “the sailors’ women, inured to immorality from childhood, rotten with disease.” Wapping was also a place of death at Execution Dock, where those accused of crimes upon the “high seas” were summarily despatched into eternity. In the police station at Wapping was kept what has been described as “one of the saddest books in the world”; it is a journal of the narratives of attempted suicides, with the events and circumstances which led each towards the river. The author of Unknown London, Walter George Bell, wandering through the area in 1910, observed the “reeking drink shops; inexpressible in their squalor and dirt, the natural home for every kind of abomination” with “the inner recesses of the hive” being a “gloomy slum area.” So we may take to heart Samuel Johnson’s injunction to “explore Wapping” in order to understand London.

  CHAPTER 59

  They Are Lost

  There are other rivers of London which lie concealed, encased in tunnels or in pipes, occasionally to be heard but generally running silently and invisibly beneath the surface of the city. To name them in order, west to east-Stamford Brook, the Wandle, Counter’s Creek, the Falcoln, the Westbourne, the Tyburn, the Effra, the Fleet, the Walbrook, Neckinger and the Earl’s Sluice, the Peck and the Ravensbourne.

  It has always been said that enchantment is bought in the burying alive of great waters, yet the purchase may be a perilous one. The “lost rivers” can still create stench and dampness. The Fleet River, at times of storm, can still reach beyond its artificial containment and flood basements along its route; at its source in Hampstead it was the expediter of agues and fevers. The valleys of these rivers, many now converted into roads or train-lines, were subject to fog as well as damp. According to the author of The Lost Rivers of London, Nicholas Barton, rheumatism “was unusually common both sides of Counter’s Creek from Shepherd’s Bush to Chelsea,” while the London “ague” of the seventeenth century has been suggestively associated with streams and rivulets now sunk beneath the earth.

  The lost rivers may provoke allergies also. One recent investigation of patients in London hospitals revealed that “38 out of the 49 allergic patients (i.e. 77.5 per cent) lived within 180 yards of a known watercourse” while among asthmatics “17 out of the 19 [were] living within 180 yards of a watercourse,” in most cases the “buried tributaries of the Thames.” The reasons for this strange correlation are still unknown, although those who understand the various powers of London places may have their own theories. But the enchantment, white or black, does not end there. A study published in 1960, The Geography of London Ghosts by G.W. Lambert, has found that approximately 75 per cent of these disturbances occurred “in houses significantly close to watercourses,” where perhaps the spirit as well as the sound of buried waters may be asserting themselves.

  We may take the fate of the Fleet River as characteristic. As befits an ancient river, it has gone by many names. It was christened the Fleet in its lower reaches, from the Anglo-Saxon term for a tidal inlet; in its upper reaches it was known as the Holebourne, and in its middle section as Turnmill Brook. It has in a sense been the guardian of London, marking the boundary between Westminster and the City from ancient times. It has always been used as part of London’s defences; during the Civil War, for example, great earthworks were built on either bank. Of all the city’s lost rivers, therefore, it is the one which is best documented and most often depicted. It has shared in the defilement of London, as a repository of its discarded and forgotten objects. An anchor was discovered as far north as Kentish Town, which may provide some indication of its width and depth at this far point, but more generally it has been the last resting place for the more local and immediate items of urban existence-keys, daggers, coins, medals, pins, brooches and the detritus of such riverine industries as tanning. It needed continually to be cleansed of its mud and general filth, so the scouring of the river took place every twenty or thirty years. Those who wished to rail against London, and all its squalor, inevitably chose the Fleet River as their example; it epitomised the way in which the city fouled water once sweet and clear. It carried the savour of each street, readily identifiable; it was full of dung and dead things. It was London in esse
nce. “The greatest good that I ever heard it did was to the undertaker,” Ned Ward wrote, “who is bound to acknowledge he has found better fishing in that muddy stream than ever he did in clear water.” The Fleet, like the Thames its father, was a river of death.

  It has always been an unlucky river. Once it moved through the regions of Kentish Town and St. Pancras, melancholy still with the touch of the water; then at Battle Bridge it entered “the pleasure grounds of Giant Despair,” according to William Hone, where “trees stand as if not made to vegetate; clipped hedges seem willing to decline, and weeds struggle weakly upon unlimited borders.” It then moved around Clerkenwell Hill and touched the stones of the Coldbath Prison; passed Saffron Hill, whose fragrant name concealed some of the worst rookeries in London; and entered the path of Turnmill Street, the vicious reputation of which has already been chronicled. Then it flowed down into Chick Lane, later known as West Street, which was for many centuries the haven of felons and murderers; the river here became the dumping ground of bodies slain or robbed when dead drunk. Once more it became the river of death before flowing in front of the noxious Fleet Prison.