This book is rambling and fragmented and sometimes repetitive (like when Ackroyd mentions the 5000-year-old yews at Southwark on one page … and then mentions them again on the next page, without a difference of context or the addition of any new information), but it’s full of interesting facts and historical tidbits and images.
One of my favorites: “The custom of erecting religious houses upon bridges was of great antiquity. There were in fact many chapels and shrines designed both to solace the weary traveller and to pay for the new foundation. There were some places where the bridge actually passed through the chapel, so that the congregation was separated from the pulpit and reading desk by a thoroughfare” (p 130).
Another really excellent one: “The Bridgettine convent at Syon and the Charterhouse at Sheen faced each other on opposite banks, and Henry VI declared that ‘immediately upon the cessation of the service at one convent it should commence at the other, and so should continue until the end of time’” (p 13). After a discussion of smuggling on the Thames: “It was rumoured that, in Essex, gin was in such large supply that the inhabitants cleaned their windows with it” (p 155). On the etymology of the town called Shiplake: “the stretch of water where sheep are washed” (p 416).
There are some great lists or list-like sections, too, which always make me happy: there’s a whole paragraph that lists the fourteen main tributaries of the Thames, followed by a number of smaller rivers and streams: it’s like a litany of water-names, an incantation; elsewhere, Ackroyd talks about the different kinds of criminals and smugglers who worked on the river and it’s a whole string of pleasing phrases, “scuffle hunters” and “long apron men” and more (p 155). Also wonderful is the chapter on weather: the fogs and the rains and the floods and the frost fairs, when the whole river froze and winter markets were set up on the ice. When he’s not listing facts and dates, Ackroyd is good at evoking the sensory images of a place and time, whether the lushness of a tropical Thames landscape, in the time before the last ice age, or the cold and wind of a damp winter in more recent times, or the filth and stench of the polluted river in the nineteenth century and before. (The whole chapter on this, called “Filthy River,” was especially vivid.)
The book is loosely organized by theme: chapters are grouped into sections like “The Working River” and “The Natural River” and “The River of Art” and “The Healing Spring”: this last contains one of my favorite chapters, “The Light of The Thames.” In it, Ackroyd talks about light and color, but can’t help moving to the other senses, too. He writes about the green riverbank with its yellow and blue flowers, and about the colors of the water itself: “the deepest green and the palest silver,” the green and brown upriver, the way that “in the reaches of London it can seem black, or sometimes a dark copper colour” (p 301). Reading this, I grinned, thinking of the Thames but also of the Hudson, how it looks from the windows of one of the 18th-floor conference rooms at work, changing with the sky, crisp blue one day and gray the next. I grinned, too, a few pages later, at a paragraph about the sounds of the industrial river: “the bumping of bales and the hissing of steam, the riveting and scraping of keeps, the shouting of orders through the night […] the boom of fog signals and the muffled roar of motor-cars mixed with the whistle of the trains and the ringing of the bells of the City churches” (p 304). And then there are the smells of the river, or of the river in the past: mud, the smoke of industry, tar, beer being brewed, tobacco, cinnamon, coffee, all the goods coming into and out of a great port.
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