The river is a confluence, a meeting place of the many – people, objects, beliefs, occupations, and, of course, a place where time flows backwards as well as forwards. The river is not bound in time – it is an aspect of time, and in its sedimentary deposits, and its private as well as its human history, the river connects the present with the past.
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Tidal forces
Review by Jeanette Winterson
Published: September 29 2007 00:50 | Last updated: September 29 2007 00:50
Thames: Sacred River
By Peter Ackroyd
Chatto and Windus £25, 608 pages
FT bookshop price: £20
I
have lived on the Thames twice – once in London, in a warehouse on Shad
Thames, before that place had any of its glamorous or gastronomic
associations. There were no restaurants and no apartments, only the
river, from which, at various times, I hauled Roman tesserae and
Elizabethan clay pipes. My second river-run was in Oxfordshire, on the
Windrush, a tributary abundant with delicious but scary foreign
crayfish, chucked in and left to multiply, so the story goes, by a
careless chef, somewhere near Bray.
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The Thames is as well-stocked with stories as it is with surprising finds, like the head of Bacchus at London Bridge, or unexpected discoveries, such as an entire primeval forest under the East India Docks. The Thames, as Peter Ackroyd tells us, is ”liquid history”, and his splendid new book is both a forensic investigation of this world-famous stretch of water, and a tribute to its teeming life. The river is literal and mythic, a lifeline for writers and painters, as well as merchants and empire builders.
The Thames is 215 miles long, runs along the borders of nine English counties, has 20 tributaries, 134 bridges and an average tide speed of between one and three knots. It is, Ackroyd avers, a sacred river, rising in a field known as Trewsbury Mead, which has long been venerated as a boundary between visible and invisible realms.
The Thames has long been a place where the mysterious and the mundane meet. It is a working river, a practical river, but also a place of sanctuary, of hermitages, of pilgrim crossings, pagan and Christian baptisms, shrines to different gods, a receiver of offerings in thanksgiving or propitiation, and a reliquary of the dead.
The river is a confluence, a meeting place of the many – people, objects, beliefs, occupations, and, of course, a place where time flows backwards as well as forwards. The river is not bound in time – it is an aspect of time, and in its sedimentary deposits, and its private as well as its human history, the river connects the present with the past.
Peter Ackroyd’s detailing of the life of the Thames is wonderful. He is comprehensive – everything from mammoths to the Dome is here – but he is also playful and eccentric, so that reading this book is like being in a boat on the river itself, which never travels in a straight line, but moves, as he says, “quixotically”.
Those living respectably in Chiswick might be dismayed to find that agreeable spot was once known as Slut’s Hole, while Maidenhead was described as “the hymen of London” thanks to the number of unmarried couples who found solace there.
The freedom and licence of the river expressed itself in the many fairs, fetes and pageants that took place – from the seedy saturnalia of the Horn Fair, which began at Cuckold’s Point on the Rotherhithe stretch of the river, to the pomp of the Lord Mayor’s Pageant, which lasted from 1422 until it was relocated to dry land in 1857, no doubt because the Victorians preferred their ceremonies of high office to have no whiff of the underworld about them. The river has always been home to smugglers and thieves, the fugitive and the desperate, as well as those plying their trade or fishing quietly from its banks.
The Thames was a great reservoir of fish, including lobsters and sea trout, until the middle of the 19th century, when pollution became so bad that for the next 100 years it was reported that there were no fish at all from Gravesend to Kew, a run of about 50 miles. But thanks to better technology and significant changes in our understanding of the interconnected health of ecosystems, the Thames is returning to life.
What will never return are the frost fairs, when the Thames froze over and became the site of cook shops and sledge races, bear-baiting and meat roasts. Virginia Woolf describes one in her novel Orlando. The year 1814 was the last of the great freezes; not through early climate change but because new embankments increased the water flow, while the removal of the piers at Old London Bridge speeded the river’s motion.
Peter Ackroyd’s writing is such a pleasure that Thames: Sacred River can be read all at once, with increasing delight, and afterwards dipped into, like stretches of the great waterway it charts and celebrates.
Jeanette Winterson is author of ‘The Stone Gods’ (Hamish Hamilton)
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
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