BELOW BRIDGE

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Below Bridge.

The first impression, and, needless to say, the longest, is that of the many miles of wharves compared with the few miles of embankments, drives, and of the holiday river generally. Not only have the black and brown warehouses, the chimneys, and the cranes possession of the whole right bank of the London Thames, but they hold both banks of the lower Thames through league-long reaches and noble curves, and such changes of aspect, sky, and direction as renew the scene by the rule of the sky.

Besides this slow variation of light, in which the view wheels under the wheeling cloud, there is no lack of variety along the dusky banks of the river of commerce. The subsidence of height along the warehouses as the river draws further and further from the middle of London is an incident of continuous interest, interrupted now and then, but holding on persistently, until the carrying river flows through a dark-gabled, low, and long village towards the eastern woods and heights and the further fields.

Of really old buildings, wooden and small, and in any conventional sense interesting, there is little indeed, but such as it is it takes the eye instantly. Looking along the swarthy, unequal frontage of brick houses that are no houses—somewhat as the biblia abiblia of Charles Lamb are among books,—you find the face of a single human little house, its timber looking old, delicate, and pale among the bricks; a Limehouse harbour-master’s title is written across the face, and it is in fact dwelt in—propped in the serried row that has the sightless aspect of a barn. There is therefore almost nothing of what used to be called the picturesque. Nevertheless, the whole continuous line has far more approach to beauty than any street of ‘handsome’ houses with columns and porticoes in the whole of western London; moreover, it is much finer than Regent Street. For the form of the normal warehouse is anything but bad; there is a good deal of plain wall, which—unless a building be in every way wrong—gives dignity; the windows are not too many, and for a mile at once the general repeated form is that of a single gable and a flat front. With this you cannot have anything entirely corrupt.

True, now and then there is a region or tract of buildings—‘works,’ these seem to be, not warehouses—that touch the extremity of possible ugliness and dreariness, and are flat-roofed, rectangular, and, without exaggeration, black. These are very few—two or three at the most—and all on the right bank. Otherwise the skyline of buildings is low, broken, pointed, and very various.