London: The Biography

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.”