Britain’s River

AS RIVERS GO, ENGLAND’S Thames can’t compete with the epic length of the Nile or the muddy grandeur of the Mississippi. At only 215 miles, it isn’t even the longest river in Britain. But as Jonathan Schneer argues in this muddled book, the Thames remains special for its role in British history: “[W]ho would deny that the Thames is more an avenue of history than any other waterway,” he asks, “that it is a national river in a way that other rivers are not.”

Aside from being unfair to the Mississippi, this is an awfully large conceit to float on such a little river. The Thames has undoubtedly been a waterway of strategic and commercial importance–for London, especially–but Schneer somehow manages to overstate its importance. Schneer’s claims are grandiose, but he issues them with hesitation. He frequently runs aground in a fog of vacillation: “The Thames may or may not be Britain’s river,” he concedes. And then follows with “usually a river is just a river.” By the end, he is in despair and throws up his hands: “Perhaps the Thames is more bound up with regional than national identities.” The man cannot make up his mind.

There is a good book to be written about the Thames in English history and culture; this one just isn’t it. From an eccentric, history-haunted visionary like Peter Ackroyd we would get a mystical, slightly daft, gloriously overwrought exercise in historical sociology, complete with interviews with Dickens and Turner, and the odd Druid. You won’t find anything as kooky–or fun–in Schneer’s Thames. Lurching uneasily between strained lyricism and academic cultural studies waffle–he makes noises about the Thames’s relationship to the “ongoing construction of England”–Schneer ponders “some of the river’s shifting meanings and their connections with the national story over many millennia.”

Schneer, however, doesn’t have much confidence in this tack, for we also read that while “understandings of the Thames have sometimes contributed to definitions of the nation as a whole, they have not done so always, and they have rarely done crucially.” Er, okay. For this reader, national construction is an irritating distraction. The river doesn’t always run through it.

Schneer’s story flags most when the Thames is simply there as (he admits) “a backdrop” to famous events. The Magna Carta was hammered out in the fields of Runnymede alongside the Thames, but Schneer’s rehash contributes nothing to our understanding of this seminal event, or the life of the river itself. So consumed is he with the Thames’s “interconnectedness with so much history” that, at times, the river disappears from sight altogether.

When Schneer hews closely to the particulars of the river, his account picks up a bit. As he notes, the Thames provided a stage for a good bit of royal spectacle over the centuries, perhaps none more spectacular than Charles II’s “Aqua Triumphalis” in 1662, which marked the House of Stuart’s return to the English throne. After a decade of Cromwellian austerity, the capital reveled in good times. Crowds thronged to the riverbanks to see the gaudy procession, which the diarist John Evelyn vividly described as “the most magnificent triumph ever floated on the Thames, considering the innumerable number of boates & Vessels, dressd and adornd with all imaginable Pomp: but above all, the Thrones, Arches, Pageants & other representations, stately barges of the Lord Mayor & Companies, with various Inventions, musique, & Peales of Ordnance both from vessels and shore.”

But the river wasn’t merely a royal playground. A couple of times a century, the Thames would freeze over, and enterprising souls would set up rollicking “frost fairs,” where noisy vendors hawked goods, food, and drink. Interestingly, Schneer notes that “frost fairs have disappeared not because of global warming” but because London Bridge, whose mass of pilings blocked the flow of ice, was pulled down in 1831.

In the Victorian era, the Thames had something of a schizophrenic identity. To the west of London, towards Oxford and beyond, it flowed through the countryside; perch and trout swam in the currents. This was the Thames that would inspire William Morris. But downstream, the river oozed with filth.

London’s unchecked growth and bustling port took the toll on the health of Old Father Thames. The so-called Great Stink in the summer of 1858 was a defining moment. As temperatures soared, vile odors wafted into the Houses of Parliament. Benjamin Disraeli recoiled from the “Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors,” while a leading paper thundered that “gentility of speech is at an end. It stinks: and whoso once inhales the stink can never forget it, and may count himself lucky if he lives to remember it.”

Enter the engineer Joseph Bazalgette, whom Disraeli tapped to fix the problem. In one of those Victorian feats of ingenuity, Bazalgette dramatically altered both London and the Thames. By 1864, thousands of laborers had laid some 300 million bricks, creating a vast 82-mile sewer system that carried some 150 million gallons of sewage a day out to sea. Bazalgette battled the Thames’s treacherous currents, reclaiming over 30 acres of land and significantly narrowing the river in the process.

Schneer doesn’t do nearly enough with the lurid side of 19th-century Thames life, so pungently described by Bella Bathurst in her recent book The Wreckers: the world of rat catchers, body snatchers, and “mud larks,” who one Victorian journalist marvelously described as “aquatic itinerants . . . a class of low and miserable beings who are accustomed to Grub in the River at low water for Old Ropes, Metals and Coals.” This is the dark, seedy Thames of Dickens–read the sublime opening pages of Our Mutual Friend for a taste–who barely rates a mention in Schneer’s account.

Nowadays, the Thames is, perhaps, a less interesting place. It is certainly less dangerous (and surely smells better). After a devastating tidal surge roared up the Thames estuary and flooded much of southeast England in 1953, politicians and planners mooted schemes for a barrage across the river. After two decades of wrangling, and eight years of construction, the Thames Barrier was unveiled in 1982 at Woolwich, east of London’s central core. It is a beautiful, functional, and justly applauded structure that would do Bazalgette proud. Its conical piers, fashioned from gleaming stainless steel, are reminiscent of the soaring curves of Sydney’s opera house.

London’s vast port, which bustled with some of the largest docks in the world, hummed along until the 1960s, withstanding near destruction by the Luftwaffe during World War II, but not shifts in the global economy in the decades after. London’s Docklands were transformed into a rather sterile office district–which clearly displeases Schneer, who wrings his hands over plucky East Enders displaced by hordes of yuppie brokers, and the new barons of Fleet Street who took up residence in the Canary Wharf tower.

Less colorful, yes, but one more evolution in a teeming city that is endlessly changing.

Matthew Price is a critic and journalist in Brooklyn.