The River of London

by Hilaire Belloc

It was even more central when regarded as a nexus of communications.

How all the main roads centred there we have already seen. The roads alone would have given London a pre-eminence as a market above all other towns in Britain even if the Thames had dried up after their establishment. But the position was meanwhile further strengthened by the conditions of water carriage; and it is here that the meaning of the Thames as a whole appears, and the way in which the upper as well as the lower river has built up the greatness of London.

I have no space to show why and how water carriage was of supreme importance both in primitive times (that is, before the Roman civilisation came) and during the Dark Ages through which, in spite of decline, it survived. It should be sufficient to point out that in the decline of a civilisation, or in its absence, water carriage—suited to heavy burdens, requiring no repair of ways, and providing a mode of traction ready-made—is, wherever it is available, the chief economic factor of commerce.

Now when we recognise that the bulk of English wealth lay for centuries south and east of a line drawn from Exmouth to the Wash, and when we appreciate what the Thames valley is in that triangle, we shall see how necessarily the main market of the Thames was also the main market of England. The natural water communications of the south consist in a number of small streams, only one of which, the Salisbury Avon, may have been navigable for more than a dozen miles or so inland. East Anglia was better served, and particularly the northern area, which was drained by the three rivers converging upon Breydon Water. The northern part of that area was also fairly well served by the three parallel rivers of the Ouse, the Nen, and the Welland, but their service as a means of communication was handicapped by the nature of their entry into the sea through the Fens, and after that through the perils, sandbanks, and shallows of the Wash; while the good service of rivers along all the East Anglian coast had this drawback: that, as we there have nothing but a series of short systems, there was no water connection between one group of short valleys and another, not even one thought-out road. A dozen streams will carry produce from the sea to Worstead, to Norwich, to Beccles, to what was once the considerable port of Orford, to Ipswich, to Colchester, etc. But each avenue is a separate avenue. There is no “trunk” connecting the system.

With the Thames it is otherwise. Glance down the valley and see how one point after another, each the natural market of a whole district of its own, drains the produce from the north and the south of the river, to discharge it upon the main stream. From Lechlade (up to which point ran the “measure and the bushel of London”)[4] through Oxford, Abingdon, Wallingford, Reading, Marlow, the Middle Hythe (which we now call Maidenhead), and Windsor, you have a whole string of such centres, each gathering its own section’s produce from its scheme of roads, or of subsidiary streams, and turning the mass down seaward upon the “trunk” afforded by the Thames.

The Thames, therefore, with London as its port of transhipment between the inland communications and the sea, tapped the very heart of all that was wealthiest in England for fifteen hundred years, and all that commerce by river as by road drained upon London because London was “central” to exchange in the rich south and east of the island.

But, as we have seen, two further characters were attached to “draining” power. We must not only seek a point central for communications, we must also seek a point where there was a ready demand for import and a ready access to the best foreign markets.

Let us consider these two characters in their order:

A ready demand for import must exist either in a port itself or behind it, if that port is to develop into a great town and to acquire political importance. You have many instances, especially in contemporary commerce, of ports which do little more than export, and of other ports in which there is no demand for import, but which merely serve to pass the import inland. In the first case the international exchange is effected through imports at some other point. The clearing between export and import is a paper clearing, and the ships at the export point arrive in ballast—a drawback. In the second place, though a town may grow to some importance as a mere place of transhipment, it will never acquire the importance of a capital nor even of a great city—it will never have a great political place unless, round the handling of its imports destined for the interior, there grows up a considerable local power of demand for values. In other words, something of the imports transmitted through the town must “stick on the way.” Modern Liverpool is a good example of this. The primary economic function of modern Liverpool is still the transhipment of cotton to Lancashire just beyond its boundaries, but in the pursuit of this function Liverpool has claimed its tribute for now three generations, and so vast an accumulation of other activities connected with the port has grown up that even the digging of the Manchester Ship Canal, the effect of which was so much feared in Liverpool, seems to have been, if anything, a benefit to that town. What proportion the power of demand exercised for imported goods in Liverpool itself may bear to the total of values entering the port cannot be exactly calculated, but it is safe to say that the toll levied is not much less than one-fifth.