The chill
light of a winter morning falls on Putney Bridge, riding a tide that rises
beyond the capital city. Having cleared the urban core, the water’s mood
changes dramatically as it swings hard to the south in a great ninety-degree
bend. Could this be a memory of 20,000 years ago, when the glaciers of the last
ice age advanced all the way down here and shunted the Thames to the south?
Coincidence
or otherwise, the bottom of that arc sends it right into what in a single human
lifetime has become the corner of the Greater London conurbation, where on
meeting the water that falls from the English interior, the sovereignty of the
tides finally ends.
 |
| The limit of the tidal Thames, at Teddington Lock. |
But more
than water comes and goes this way. For thousands of years before trains and
motor vehicles the river was the prime means of travel for the people of its
watershed. Far better after all to let the tides take you where you want to go
than drag yourself and your belongings up and down the muddy, potholed,
bandit-ridden land routes.
If
you had the means and status for it, that is. Under English class hierarchy, this
privilege of escape from the
struggles of London was primarily the preserve of those on the highest levels
of the social pyramid. Above all that meant the monarchy, whose palaces and
hunting grounds duly colonised all the best floodplain they could grab off the
common folk. In their wake came their obligatory orbiting constellations of
nobles, clerics, sycophants and concubines, some of whose families still occupy
these prize mansions and riverside villas. Theirs are the upriver domains of
Richmond and Kingston, towns whose roots lie in the legends of English royalty,
but the intervening distance was settled by the middle-class affluents on the next
tiers down as they popped up through the thick foam of the industrial
revolution, into the fresh river air, and followed the old nobility out that
way. Entranced by the splendour of the riverscape, these escapees imagined up
and passed down an Arcadian paradise of swans and ducks and herons, of comfortable
housing whether ruddily historic or ostentatiously gentrified, of lazy
promenades lined with elaborate lamp-posts and hanging flower baskets, along a riverside
of leaves and willows everywhere managed and in places manicured.
Yet
the question, the very English question, remains. Who is it for?
Before
we embark, ongoing events should serve as a reminder that history is alive
around us. Not two days after the previous
section’s article there was a terrorist attack at one of its most prominent
landmarks, London Bridge. The attacker stabbed two people dead in the hall of
the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers before being shot by police on the
bridge, having been subdued by, among others, someone wielding a narwhal horn
from the aforementioned institution. This violence fed into one of the dirtiest
and bitterest general elections in this country’s living memory, in which, as
has typically been the case, the old royal lairs on the path ahead were some of
the most fiercely contested constituencies in the country. Past and future,
local and global: all are present and inseparable.
It
was not a regular election. The outcome has struck a whole new level of shock
and despair into many people and looks likely, to say the least, to irreparably
alter the destiny of Britain and England. But even in this extraordinary
instance, the boroughs of Richmond Park, Twickenham, and Kingston and Surbiton defied
both the national trend and that of London’s division into working-class Labour
Party urban areas versus white and affluent Conservative Party sub-rural
outskirts. This corner alone chose a third option and put in Liberal Democrat
MPs with comfortable majorities: the sole phalanx of Lib-Dem amber on a map that has otherwise scattered it to particles.
Pinned
between core and periphery; shaped by both upstream and downstream worlds but
not entirely of either. Who are the people who live on the riverbend, and what
makes them different?
Start:
Putney Bridge (nearest stations: Putney Bridge, Vauxhall)
End:
Kingston Bridge (nearest station: Kingston)
Length:
20.9km/13 miles
Location:
Greater London – Borough of Wandsworth, Borough of Richmond upon Thames, Royal
Borough of Kingston upon Thames
Topics:
University Boat Race, Barnes, Hammersmith, Chiswick, Mortlake, the National
Archives, Kew Gardens, Syon House/Abbey, Richmond, Isleworth, Twickenham,
Teddington Lock
