THAMES (2019-22)

A critical walking history up the River Thames.

Prelude: Dark River

Erith to the Thames Barrier
Erith and Plumstead Marshes, Woolwich, Charlton

The journey opens in the bleak marshy Thames off the edge of London. Here there is sewage, rubbish and residual industry, a former military town, a terrible maritime disaster, and the present high-tech answer to the Thames's inhabitants' oldest problem of all.

 

Part One: The Metropole

Twice a day the tidal lower Thames flows back and forth through London. It is because of the river that the English capital city exists.

 

1) Tides of Time
The Thames Barrier to Tower Bridge
Greenwich Peninisula, Isle of Dogs, Greenwich, Deptford, Rotherhithe, Bermondsey

The river's winding course round three peninsulas which have transformed and transformed again with the rise, fall and undeath of English modernity.

2) The Great English Power Struggle
Tower Bridge to Putney
City of London, Southwark, Bankside, Lambeth, City of Westminster, Vauxhall, Wandsworth, Putney

The tides wash over the story of English democracy and expose the much darker saga of power conflicts underneath, from the vested interests of the City of London to the violent and oppressive rise of Parliament.

3) Arcadia
Putney to Kingston upon Thames
Barnes, Hammersmith, Mortlake, Chiswick, Kew, Brentford, Isleworth, Richmond, Twickenham, Teddington

At the margins of London, where the Thames swings south, the escapees of the city's leisured classes built an imaginary dreamscape of meadows, gardens and boats at play. But who is it for?

December 2019: The Conservative Party, now controlled by hardline English nationalists under Boris Johnson, comes to power in a dramatic General Election victory.

Part Two: The Privilege Forts
Historic bastions of power and prosperity line the Thames valley through some of England's wealthiest provinces.

A) Hubris (The Nationalists)

4) Into the Valley of Imagination

Kingston upon Thames to Chertsey
Kingston, Surbiton, Thames Ditton, Hampton Court, Molesey, Sunbury, Walton, Shepperton/Weybridge

Troubled entry into the leafy strongholds of the English conservative reverie as it casts the shadow of authoritarian nationalism over this land once again.

5) Cross Purposes
Chertsey to Staines
Chertsey, Laleham, Staines

The monastery, the bridges, and the two towns they built - one for going to, and the other for going through.

6) Curse of the Magna Carta
Staines to Windsor
Runnymede, Old Windsor, Datchet, Windsor

The nationalist siege of Windsor Castle and the legend of Magna Carta - but not as they know it. Come. Take the low road through the underworld and face the Runnymede Horror.

7) The Eaten
Windsor to Maidenhead
Eton, Boveney, Bray, Maidenhead

A study in English carnivory, from the paradox of Eton College and the public schools to the hollowing out of Maidenhead. There might be vampires and cannibals in the middle.

8) River Shamans
Maidenhead to Marlow
Cookham, Marlow

On a quintessentially English provincial corner of the river, glimpses of those who sought to bridge it to other worlds above and beyond.

9) Death in the Willows
Marlow to Henley-on-Thames
Bisham, Hurley, Medmenham, Remenham, Henley-on-Thames

Where the wind blows through the willows, where rowers and esoteric upper-class cultists repurpose Toad Halls and the ruins of mills and monasteries, the paradise of the Thames's high pastoral fantasy collides with the hell of its history of killer plagues. With the coming of COVID-19, Death stalks this land.



 

2020-21: Comprehensive failure of English response to the COVID-19 pandemic results in over 125,000 deaths, widespread suffering, and grievous cultural and economic damage.


B) Nemesis (The Plague)

10) Blood-Red Junction
Henley-on-Thames to Reading
Henley Meadows, Shiplake, Sonning, Reading

After a year's interruption we come at last to Reading. In the shadows of its abbey ruins and industrial-age relics, this is the town at the crossroads, built red in bricks and blood.

11) Middle Margins
Reading to Pangbourne
West Reading outskirts, Purley, Pangbourne

At the centre of the central Thames, a margin of transitions.

12) The Gap in the Chalk
Pangbourne to Goring
Whitchurch, Hartslock Wood, Gatehampton, Goring-on-Thames

The passage through these chalk hills, carved by the river, is a geological threshold. A traverse up the river of time, with a delve into the deeper story of the land itself.

13) The Castle Vanishes
Goring to Wallingford
Streatley, Moulsford, Wallingford

Wallingford Castle was massive. It held the centre for five hundred years, undefeated in the English's worst civil wars. So where did it go?

14) Settling Point
Wallingford to Dorchester
Wallingford Castle Meadows, Benson, Shillingford, Dorchester-on-Thames

A tiny village harbours a secret: six thousand years of continuous habitation going right back to the earliest Neolithic settlers. In its earthworks, cropmarks and hillforts, generations of immigration and settlement are written in this landscape.

15) 'Thames or Isis'
Dorchester to Abingdon
Little Wittenham, Clifton Hampden, Sutton Courtenay, Culham, Abingdon

Here in the land of the Oxfordese tribes the river is known by two names. Is it because they are special?

16) Nightmares of the Spires
Abingdon to Oxford
Abingdon outskirts, Nuneham Courtenay, Radley, Sandford-on-Thames, Oxford suburbs, Oxford

At last the top of the middle Thames, where the pinnacles of Oxford penetrate the sky. But what is Oxford? What lies beneath the limestone facades of the English's most famous university city?

Part Three: The Interior
Amidst the grass and limestone of the Cotswold Hills, the infant river emerges from its cradle.

 

17) The High Pastures 

Oxford to Newbridge
Port Meadow, Godstow, King's Lock, Swinford, Bablock Hythe, Northmoor meadows, Newbridge

The final push through the upper valley begins, with this long trek from the north Oxford mythscape of Port Meadow and Godstow, round the woods of Wytham Hill, to the River Windrush and the oldest bridge on the Thames.

18) English Migrants

Newbridge to Lechlade
Harrowdown Hill, Shifford, Duxford/Chimney, Tadpole, Radcot, Kelmscott, Buscot, St. John's Lock

From William Morris to Dr. David Kelly, this is where they came to get away - a hinterland of silent fields and deserted villages at the top of the navigable Thames.

 

19) The Passages
Lechlade to Cricklade
Lechlade, the Limit of Navigation, Inglesham, Kempsford, Castle Eaton, Cricklade

Lechlade and Cricklade: the river's highest towns, and the passages through which its freshly-unified water sets out for a troubled world.

20) It Turns Round in a Circle
Cricklade to the Source
Cricklade North Meadow, Cotsworld Water Park, Ashton Keynes, Ewen, Kemble, Thames Head

Here it begins; here it ends. Or does it? What is the source of the Thames? Does it have one at all?