The Lifeblood of London

Where lies the soul of a city? Peter Ackroyd, the indefatigable chronicler of London, has always found it in the inherited store of legends, horrors, triumphs and prejudices that reverberate through the ages in the lives of its people. In his new book Thames: Sacred River, he explores the rich urban DNA along London’s river, which he regards as nothing less than the city’s “presiding deity.”

Anyone who has read Ackroyd’s bestselling London: The Biography (2000) — or almost any of the 40 volumes of fiction, biography, history and literary criticism he has written since the 1970s — will know that London is his consuming passion, that his reading of history is distinctively nonlinear, and that his use of a word like sacred in his book’s title is likely to carry metaphysical rather than religious meaning. Even so, the early chapters of Thames meander in some murky backwaters in search of the spiritual. He summons water nymphs and ancient river gods like Egypt’s Isis or the Hindu god Shiva, speculates on Neolithic burial rites and toys with the idea that “human consciousness is changed by the experience of living above clay, rather than above chalk.” The book never quite recovers from these tributary explorations, but like the Thames, Ackroyd flows on. Once he’s on the terra firma of London’s recorded history — the troves of which he is a voracious plunderer — he is in full flood.

The fancy word for his approach is psychogeography, a philosophical attempt to reimagine the life of cities that was dreamed up by France’s Situationists in the 1950s and dusted off in recent years by Ackroyd and other writers for whom chronology and factual detail take a back seat to analogy and intuition. Thus in Thames, Ackroyd flits effortlessly between themes like baptism or the symbolism of swans and gossipy tales of old London. A contemplation, for example, on the melancholy induced by looking into the waters from a bridge segues into a roll call of famous suicides and murders on the river, sealed with the observation that “The Thames has always harboured an affection for severed heads.” Ackroyd attributes the moody riverside settings of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House or Great Expectations to the novelist’s misery at being sent as a 12-year-old to work in a ramshackle, filthy blacking factory abutting the Thames while his father was locked up in a debtors’ prison. Fact and fiction are inseparable in the city of both authors: Dickens may have seen the Thames as “essentially a river of tears and darkness,” writes Ackroyd, but “you could aways be sure he knew in which direction the tide was moving.”

Those tides were vital to London becoming the center of global trade, with the twice-daily rise and fall of the Thames providing an easy passage for trading ships to the heart of the city. By the 16th century an estimated 2,000 vessels and 3,000 watermen were on the river at any one time, and by 1800 it was so choked that ships might wait two weeks, at the mercy of “river pirates” and “scuffle hunters,” for a vacant berth. London’s answer was to build the great docks at Wapping and the Isle of Dogs, as well as gigantic warehouses to store the city’s burgeoning trading wealth. Work on the docks spawned whole new riverside communities in areas such as Silvertown, which flourished for 150 years before fading with the advent in the ’70s of container ships too big even for the Thames. But Ackroyd is no damp-eyed nostalgist. In the redevelopment of the Docklands area, where a towering new financial district has grown up and where the old warehouses are now swanky lofts, he sees continuity and a return to the “ancient exuberance and energy” of the Thames.

Curiously, as Ackroyd points out, Londoners today barely notice the Thames and, when they do, they instinctively experience it as more of a barrier and a frontier than a highway: “They pass over it hurriedly; they try not to walk beside it, and they rarely venture upon it.” Aware or not, Londoners are heirs to a centuries-old, north-south crossflow of envy and disdain. In 1840 the journalist Charles Mackay disparaged south Londoners by writing that “the progress of civilisation does nothing for them … a thousand years effect nothing more than to change the wigwam into a hovel.”

Ackroyd’s particular genius here lies in showing how the lines connecting us to the past still carry a charge. His exhaustive reclaiming of the Thames inks in colorful new detail on his vast gene-map of the city of his birth. The coordinates he gives may not lead you to God or give you an exact address for London’s soul. But for a place to start the journey, look for the spot marked “Ackroyd.”