The River of London

by Hilaire Belloc

To explain the supremacy of London as a market more than one thesis is put forward for general acceptance which must, I think, be condemned. Thus we have the thesis that London occupies the position it does because it is almost in the centre of the land hemisphere. As a matter of fact the actual centre of that hemisphere is not far from the neighbourhood of Falmouth, and is at any rate within the limits of Britain. If we trace upon a globe a great circle or “equator” so as to include the greatest mass of land surface possible, we find our southern ports, and London amongst them, to lie near the Pole of such an Equator, and this argument has been of some weight with those who have not paused to consider what that “land hemisphere” means. If the climate of the world were everywhere equal and most of its soil equally productive, then the fact that the great estuary of the Thames lay almost central to the greatest mass of land would have its importance—though the mouths both of the Seine and of the Scheldt, of the Rhine, and for that matter of the Elbe, would not be so far distant as to explain the peculiar supremacy of London. But in the first place the most part of that mass of land did not enter into the commercial scheme until quite modern times, and secondly, the variations of its climate and of its productivity destroy the theory. Not far to the north of our port (relatively to so great a thing as the planet) lies that vast circle of uninhabited or hardly habitable frozen land which is not only almost useless for the purposes of exchange, but which also bars any passage of commerce across it. Not so very far to the south, again, runs the belt of desert east and west across Africa and Asia, the worst part of which, the widest, is also the nearest to us and is called the Sahara. It is of little use to have a central position between, say, Japan upon the one side and Cape Town upon the other, if the Greek Circle which connects us with Japan passes, as it does, through the Polar Ice. There are certain central positions which explain the supremacy of some particular site, but these positions are nearly always central to limited areas over which travel is uninterrupted. The great market of Nijni Novgorod in Russia is an example of this sort. Chicago in the United States of America is another. But London is no parallel to such cases as these, so far as the world or even Europe is concerned. It is fairly central (as we shall see) to what was once the chief wealth of England: it is ex-centric to all else.

THE THAMES FROM GREENWICH PARK

Still less will the many arguments based upon fairly modern conditions solve the problem which confronts us. Thus the great export trade of modern England is mainly based upon coal. But the estuary of the Thames is not a natural place of export for coal. The political relations which necessarily bind this country to-day to other countries of the same speech throughout the New World have a vast effect in continuing and expanding our oversea exchanges, but all the ports natural to such ties lie upon our south or west. London does not face the New World. It looks away from it.

The truth is that the singular position of the Lower Thames as a terminal for international commerce, and of its port as an international market, must be sought in a medley of causes, the chief of which fall into two clear categories. We have first the causes which made London what it was before the transformation of commerce through the discoveries of the Renaissance and the later gigantic expansion which reposes upon modern facilities of communication. Once London is thus established as the second great city of the West, we have the later causes which permit it to continue in the enjoyment of that position, and to nourish it until the city whose port was the Thames became not the second but by far the first of all the great markets in wealth, population, and shipping.

I will take these two sets of causes separately.

As to the first, what made the greatness of the Thames as a port for London, and of London, therefore, as a market before the modern era of geographical discovery?

A natural market exists only where two natural conditions are present: ease of approach from without, and what may be called draining power from within.

I mean by ease of approach from without a natural facility for the arrival of goods from areas of production foreign to those of the market. And I mean by “draining power from within” some topographical or other condition which makes domestic produce run naturally towards the one centre of this market.