ON TOUR - The Thames - London's showcase

Jeff Mills tells the tale of a great river, a tourist attraction in its own right.

Glance out of the aircraft window as you fly into London’s Heathrow or City Airport.

Reflect on the River Thames below you and the major part it has played, and indeed continues to play, in the capital’s history.

Complementing it is the London Eye at nearly 500ft not quite so high, but a stupendous view.

You may recall Gloriana, the elegant royal barge. In the Olympic year of 2012 as the world watched the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II she was paddled downstream on the Thames by banks of oarsmen including Olympic gold medalists Sir Mathew Pinsent and Sir Steve Redgrave.

No fewer than 1,000 boats of all shapes and sizes took to the murky waters of London’s river and followed as the “bascules” or road decks of iconic Tower Bridge were raised in salute as the luxury river cruiser Spirt of Chartwell, bearing the Her Majesty and Prince Philip made its way underneath and then moored alongside HMS President, from where the Royal Party watched the seven-mile-long flotilla make its way down the Thames in salute of the monarch’s 60 years on the throne.

A 41-gun salute was fired from the Tower of London to celebrate the Queen’s reign while thousands of people braved the unseasonably wet weather to cheer on the banks of the Thames.

As the final vessel reached Tower Bridge, ‘Symphony’, carrying members of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal College of Music Chamber Choir, the pageant had already achieved a new world record for the largest parade of boats, as Guinness World Records confirmed.

The singers on board may have got soaked to the skin as they performed national favourites such as Land of Hope and Glory, Rule Britannia and the national anthem but that did little to damped the sense of occasion.

But then the River Thames is no stranger to extremes of weather. Way back in the late 17th century and early 18th century, between about 1645 and 1715, much of Europe suffered a number of bitterly cold winters in what became commonly known as the “little ice age”.
 
At this time the River Thames regularly froze over and so-called frost fairs were held on the ice, which was sometimes more than a foot deep. People could pay a penny to be dragged along the frozen river on sledges while entrepreneurs set up barbecues to roast whole hogs and oxen to provide sustenance for the partying crowds.

One year, it is said, King Henry VIII travelled by sleigh all the way from central London to his palace in Greenwich along the frozen river way back during the winter of 1536 and Queen Elizabeth I went walking on the ice during the winter of 1564. This was the period when Tudor and Stuart monarchs were so enthralled by the Thames they built not only the palace at Greenwich but also magnificent riverside palaces further upstream at Hampton Court, Kew, Richmond on Thames and even Whitehall.

The first evidence of a reasonable sized trading port in London was during 50 to 270 BC, at which time the Romans built the original harbour. The construction involved expanding the waterfront using wooden frames filled with earth. Once these were in place a wharf was built in four stages moving downstream from the London Bridge.

London became a very important trading port for the Romans at its height in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. The harbour town grew and expanded quickly. The lavish nature of goods traded in London shaped the extravagant lifestyle of its citizens and the city flourished under Roman colonisation.

At 215 miles in length, the Thames is the longest river entirely in England and the second longest in the United Kingdom. Its source is at Thames Head in Gloucestershire and it flows through the English countryside, towns and villages before flowing through London and into the North Sea at the Thames Estuary.

The wharves of the area now occupied by Canary Wharf and London City Airport among other iconic modern structures, were busy with seagoing vessels right throughout the 16th and 17th centuries as world trade went into overdrive.

Throughout this period the Thames was the major highway between the City of London and Westminster as the Guild of Watermen who ferried Londoners from landing to landing became stronger and allowed no outside interference.

It is said that in 1715 one Thomas Doggett was so grateful to a local waterman for his efforts to ferry him home pulling against the tide, that he set up a rowing race for professional watermen known as ‘Doggett's Coat and Badge’. It still exists today.

By the 18th century, the Thames was one of the busiest waterways in the world, as London became the epicentre of the vast British Empire and progressively over the next century the docks expanded in the Isle of Dogs and beyond.

The Port of London has been key to London’s economy since the founding of the city in the 1st century and was a major contributor to the growth and success of the city.  In the 18th and 19th centuries it was the busiest port in the world, with wharves extending continuously along the Thames for 11 miles with more than 1,500 cranes handling the cargoes of 60,000 ships per year.

It was not all sweetness and light on the Thames, though. The Victorian era may have been a time of imaginative engineering but there is no doubt engineers’ skills were often put to the test. In the so-called ‘Great Stink’ of 1858, pollution in the Thames was so extreme that sittings of Parliament’s House of Commons at Westminster had to be abandoned.

A massive effort to contain the city’s sewage by constructing massive sewers on the north and south river embankments followed, under the supervision of engineer Joseph Bazalgette. Meanwhile, similar huge undertakings took place to provide a safe water supply, with the building of reservoirs and pumping stations on the banks of the river to the west of London.

Moves which may seem strangely familiar to anyone following the news today. There may be a new so-called ‘super-sewer’ but there are plenty of pollution issues still to be addressed.

The development of the railways in the 19th century resulted in a frenzy of bridge building across the Thames, including Blackfriars Railway Bridge and Charing Cross (Hungerford) Railway Bridge in central London, and the spectacular railway bridges by Isambard Kingdom Brunel at Maidenhead Railway Bridge, Gatehampton Railway Bridge and Moulsford Railway Bridge.

The first underwater tunnel in the world was Marc Brunel’s Thames Tunnel built in 1843, which is now used to carry the East London railway line. The Tower Subway was the first railway under the Thames, which was followed by all the deep-level tube lines. The Blackwall Tunnel and Rotherhithe road tunnels were built in East London at the end of the 19th century.

The Thames is, of course, a useful highway to this day. Some ferries still operate on the river, the Woolwich Ferry, for example, carries cars and passengers across the river in the Thames Gateway and links the North Circular and South Circular roads, while upstream there are smaller pedestrian ferries, such as Hampton Ferry and the Shepperton to Weybridge Ferry. 

For walkers the London stretch of the Thames Path is nearly 30 miles long from Richmond to Woolwich. View the river whilst you stroll and give a vote of thanks to the Ramblers Association and others for creating the unique walk.

And there is now significant passenger traffic using the passenger vessels plying their trade up and down the river. Thames Clippers, for example, which has a partnership with Uber, says it carries upwards of 10,000 passengers a day and reached the milestone of a total of 50 million passengers last year.  It operates to 24 piers along the river from Barking Riverside in the east to Putney in the west. In all there are around ten companies operating commuter services.

So next time you want to avoid the traffic jams, head down to the nearest pier.

For more information on passenger boats on the River Thames go to Transport for London https://tfl.gov.uk.

For Thames Clippers/Uber services visit www.thamesclippers.com.

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