The River of London

by Hilaire Belloc

But for that capital accident in the history of the city, which renders London so different in outward aspect from all other great European towns, the Middle Ages would still break upon one in a sheaf of spires showing over the flats from Woolwich Reach, at least, and perhaps from farther down the stream. But that accident—the Great Fire of the seventeenth century—has left London stripped of the Gothic and, alone of the great capitals of Europe, no impress of our four hundred years of Gothic remains with the traveller as he comes upstream. When we consider the two parallels to London upon the Continent—the parallels I have chosen as ports upon the two great tidal rivers of the north-west—Antwerp and Rouen, the loss will be apparent.

For miles and miles over the flats of the Scheldt the sailor making for Antwerp sees the high steeple upon his horizon fixed against the sky, and, late as was its building, this watch-tower of Antwerp is of the true Middle Ages; Europe was still Europe and one when its last stone was laid.

Still more does the sailor making for Rouen have the Middle Ages before him as he rounds the Ferry Reach and comes up northward into the sweep of the river before the town. In spite of the extraordinary and meaningless gate which the new travelling bridge makes for the city, its cathedral still dominates the whole view; surrounding it, the high pitch of St. Vincent, the belfry of St. Maclou, the rebuilt towers of St. Ouen, give their character to all the smoky basin of houses between the Seine and the hills.

A far more splendid sight was the Gothic group of London as one came upon it up river before the Great Fire. A score of spires stood in varying height and perspective before the master spire of the cathedral. Old St. Paul’s upon its hill carried the loftiest cross in Christendom—far higher in the air than Strasburg; and old St. Paul’s had been built, as had nearly every great monument of the Middle Ages, with a special eye to the landscape whence it should be seen and which, in a sense, it should control. The huge and somewhat ill-proportioned pyramid of St. Dunstan’s by the very excess of its bulk made a landmark which is the first thing to strike us when we look at a sketch of the river made at any time before 1665. We are fortunate, moreover, in our retention of such memorials. No other northern town, I think, possesses a complete panorama of its appearance in the first half of the sixteenth century such as London possesses in the great work of Wyngaerde in the Bodleian. And though the seventeenth century, with its triumph of engraving, produced a great number of such documents throughout Europe, Visscher’s drawing is unique in its importance, while we have at the end of the series Hollar’s careful delineation of the square mile of ruins after the Great Fire.

This is perhaps the most remarkable piece of pictorial evidence open to English history, and any one who will look at that long string of churches burnt out to shells, and of private houses reduced to a few feet of black and crumbling wall, will see what a revolution in the outward aspect of the river and of its port, and what a breach in the outward continuity of London the Great Fire means. The Conservative temper into which the English fell (with regard to their externals, at least), after the sixteenth century, would have preserved the architectural past of London (and that to our own day) much more perfectly than the past of any great city of the Continent has been preserved. It seems due to the national spirit that a view more ancient even than that of Rouen should greet the traveller coming in by Thames; but the accident of the Great Fire has forbidden it.

On the contrary, the note of the approach to London nowadays from the Lower Thames is a note peculiarly and strongly modern. It is as though the abnormal expansion of our perilous Industrialism in the last hundred and fifty years had not only conquered but obliterated the eighteen centuries from which it suddenly arose. Here and there an odd survival left remaining of deliberate purpose serves but to emphasise the capture of the Lower Thames by that crazy mechanical giant so recently born and already so blind and old. You have the noble front of Greenwich, you have the charming little “mail” opposite, you have, most distinctive, perhaps, of all the survivals upon the river, the Fort of Tilbury. Save for these a huge and hardly national commerce, plainly suffering the domination of a few, has eaten up the scene of Thames-side and marks it more and more as one comes in through the outlying miles until one is relieved by older, dingier, and more gracious things near the heart of the whole business in the Pool.

It seems unjust to pass, with no more than a mention, that lovely little isolated relic at Tilbury. Here was for centuries the natural gate, the military defence of the port. When the range of ordnance was not much more than hailing distance, no defences could be thought of upon the broadening water of the Hope, still less in the funnel of the Sea-reach. But Tilbury, standing over against Gravesend, defended the first point at which the river had narrowed sufficiently to be commanded by batteries from the shore.

In the earliest map of this point (which is preserved in the Admiralty) one may trace the way in which the river was closed. There ran out from the northern bank, pointing somewhat downstream, a sort of barrier. We have no indication of its structure. A few piles would have been sufficient to prevent a passage and to canalise traffic into the open space that was left in the midst of the stream; for this space was not left free, as we might have supposed, just under the guns of the fort, but at a range which seems upon the drawing to be about 250 yards. Whether a corresponding permanent work existed upon the Gravesend shore I am ignorant, but it was obviously easy to emplace guns there when they might be needed. Meanwhile Tilbury, with its continual preparation for arms and as continual innocence of them, with its one chief historic memory of the Armada, remains the most perfect relic of the past upon all the stretch of the river. The swamped land round about has defended it and isolated it, and that great regard for the old things of the nation which is a virtue to be proud of has saved it from decay.