London’s River – Westminster to Woolwich
The River Thames has been the lifeblood of London since before Roman times. It’s the reason the city is here, and has been responsible for the growth of London as a world trading centre. If it weren’t for the ships, docks and people that once physically moved wool, sugar, coal and a thousand more commodities in and out of London, the financial markets of the Square Mile would never have grown up either – the wealth of London flows from the Thames.
Ironically, it is only in recent years that many of the people of London have really seen the business bit of the river, the bit that flows through Tower Hamlets. Ironic, because that view has come with the demolition of the now-redundant warehouses that hid the Thames, and the conversion of many more into flats. And the river we see now is far quieter than at almost any point in the last two thousand years.
A new book *London’s River – Westminster to Woolwich takes a broad slice of that recent history. Chris Thurman has been photographing the Thames for more than forty years. In that time he has captured the changes along the river, from the decline of shipping to the demolition of warehouses, and finally the explosion of housing along its banks.
Chris got his ‘first good camera’ as a Christmas present. Living in Barking, a short hop along the District Line, it was inevitable that he would travel into London to capture ‘the major tourist sights’. But the portfolio he built up captured much more than those. For every picture of the Houses of Parliament, of the Royal Festival Hall or St Paul’s, there are more of the Thames downriver of Tower Bridge. Not only do these present an altogether more sombre and bleak picture, they show a London in rapid change and decline.
‘Many years later I realised that my photographs had recorded a scene that had changed considerably … In effect I had been taking photographs at the end of an era of many centuries,’ recalls Chris. The great port of London, which had risen and grown for two millennia, was in the last years of a century-long decline.
‘It became clear that my photographs of the Upper Pool taken in the 1950s and 1960s were really scenes from Victorian times,’ he decided. And so Chris started taking ‘now’ pictures to complement the ‘then’ shots already in his archive. Much of the docklands had been destroyed by enemy bombing in the Second World War; much had survived but then been redeveloped in the 1970s, at a low point for the area, when maritime trade had gone but ‘Docklands’ hadn’t yet been reinvented as a desirable residential area. Ironically, shots of now-demolished warehouses in Narrow Street suggest that if they had escaped demolition, they would have made perfectly good flats. In many cases, the old buildings have now been replaced by faux-Victorian facades – new flats pretending to be old warehouses.
There are poignant snapshots of the crossover between old and new. A picture of ships moored by Canary Wharf in 1986 must have caught some of the last vessels to moor in the docks there. Behind a vessel, the new DLR bridge skirts the dock, a sign of the Docklands that was to come.
The docks had themselves swept away traditional ways of life in the East End. Although London had always been a port, the explosion of activity during the 19th century was dramatic. Between 1802 and 1880 the West India, London, East India, St Katharine, West India South, Royal Victoria, Millwall and Royal Albert Dock were all constructed. The King George V Dock was only completed in 1921 – an optimistic venture when the London docks were already in the early stages of decline, the dock was to last just 60 years.
These enormous civil engineering projects swept away a whole way of life, of boat builders, candle-makers, chandlers, brewers, sugar refiners and more that had once operated on this area of the Thames. The docks came to dominate the economy of the east London riverfront. Think then of the devastation when every dock closed during a decade and a half between 1967 and 1981.
Now Docklands is rising again. The shining new towers of Canary Wharf in stark contrast to the apparently deserted London of earlier pictures. Now, of course, the traffic is mainly on land, with the river providing background scenery … and quite empty.