London: The Biography

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, vigorous 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.”