London: The Biography

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.