Thames River Quotes

No, the last thing she cared about was whether people were staring at the boy and girl kissing by the river, as London, it's cities and towers and churches and bridges and streets, circled all about them like the memory of a dream. And if the Thames that ran beside them, sure and silver in the afternoon light, recalled a night long ago when the moon shone as brightly as a shilling on this same boy and girl, or if the stones of Blackfriars knew the tread of their feet and thought to themselves: At last, the wheel comes to a full circle, they kept their silence.

TWENTY bridges from Tower to Kew - Wanted to know what the River knew, Twenty Bridges or twenty-two, For they were young, and the Thames was old And this is the tale that River told:

And now, dear reader, the story is over. It is time for you to cross the bridge once more and return to the world you came from. This river, which is and is not the Thames, must continue flowing without you. You have haunted here long enough, and besides, you surely have rivers of your own to attend to?

But we’re not trying to empty the Thames,” she told him. “Look at what we’re doing with the water we remove. It doesn’t go to waste. We’re using it to water our gardens, sprout by sprout. We’re growing bluebells and clovers where once there was a desert. All you see is the river, but I care about the roses.

The Thames Shouldered its way past Blackfriars Bridge, impatient with the ancient piers, no longer the passive stream that slid past Chelsea Marina, but a rush of ugly water that had scented the open sea and was ready to make a run for it.

Once sin is allowed to settle in your heart, it will not be turned out at your bidding. Custom becomes second nature, and its chains are not easily broken. The prophet has well said, "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard its spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil" (Jeremiah 13:23). Habits are like stones rolling down hill--the further they roll, the faster and more ungovernable is their course. Habits, like trees, are strengthened by age. A boy may bend an oak when it is a sapling--a hundred men cannot root it up, when it is a full grown tree. A child can wade over the Thames River at its fountain-head--the largest ship in the world can float in it when it gets near the sea. So it is with habits: the older the stronger--the longer they have held possession, the harder they will be to cast out.

Anne's lovers are phantom gentlemen, flitting by night with adulterous intent. They come and go by night, unchallenged. They skim over the river like midges, flicker against the dark, their doublets sewn with diamonds. The moon sees them, peering from her hood of bone, and Thames water reflects them, glimmering like fish, like pearls.

She raised her chin and looked him in the eye. “You see a river rushing by without end. You see a sad collection of women with thimbles, all dipping out an inconsequential amount.” He didn’t say anything. “But we’re not trying to empty the Thames,” she told him. “Look at what we’re doing with the water we remove. It doesn’t go to waste. We’re using it to water our gardens, sprout by sprout. We’re growing bluebells and clovers where once there was a desert. All you see is the river, but I care about the roses.

My New Year's Eve is always 2 July, the night before my birthday. That's the night I make my resolutions. And this year scares the life out of me, because no matter how successful, how good things appear, there is always a deep core of failure within me, although I am trying to deal with it. My biggest fear, this coming year, is that I will be waking up alone. It makes me wonder how many bodies will be fished out of the Thames, how many decaying corpses will be found in one-room flats. I'm just being realistic.

The Thames is a wretched river after the Mersey and the ships are not like Liverpool ships and the docks are barren of beauty ... it is a beastly hole after Liverpool; for Liverpool is the town of my heart and I would rather sail a mudflat there than command a clipper out of London

I went down not long ago to the Mad River, under the willows I knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call it what madness you will, there's a sickness worse than the risk of death and that's forgetting what we should never forget. Tecumseh lived here. The wounds of the past are ignored, but hang on like the litter that snags among the yellow branches, newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains. Where are the Shawnee now? Do you know? Or would you have to write to Washington, and even then, whatever they said, would you believe it? Sometimes I would like to paint my body red and go into the glittering snow to die. His name meant Shooting Star. From Mad River country north to the border he gathered the tribes and armed them one more time. He vowed to keep Ohio and it took him over twenty years to fail. After the bloody and final fighting, at Thames, it was over, except his body could not be found, and you can do whatever you want with that, say his people came in the black leaves of the night and hauled him to a secret grave, or that he turned into a little boy again, and leaped into a birch canoe and went rowing home down the rivers. Anyway this much I'm sure of: if we meet him, we'll know it, he will still be so angry.

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; 180 Departed, have left no addresses.

The NELLIE, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide. The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

The Thames was beautiful, dark, and swift beneath the billion yellow and white lights of the city…

The Thames that goes north, south, east, and west, to finally go east, that seeps to one side and the other as it moves forward, that goes slow as it goes fast, that evaporates into the sky whilst meandering to the sea, is more about motion than about beginnings. If it has a beginning, it is located in a dark inaccessible place. Better study where it goes than where it comes from.

His sister Kat, her husband, Morgan Williams, have been plucked from this life as fast as his daughters were taken, one day walking and talking and next day cold as stones, tumbled into their Thames-side graves and dug in beyond reach of the tide, beyond sight and smell of the river; deaf now to the sound of Putney's cracked church bell, to the smell of wet ink, of hops, of malted barley, and the scent, still animal, of woolen bales; dead to the autumn aroma of pine resin and apple candles, of soul cakes baking.

I’m guessing this isn’t the Mississippi,” I said. “The River of Night,” Bloodstained Blade hummed. “It is every river and no river—the shadow of the Mississippi, the Nile, the Thames. It flows throughout the Duat, with many branches and tributaries.” “Clears that right up,” I muttered.

The Thames is in many respects the river of the dead. It has the power to hurt and to kill.’ Peter Ackroyd, Thames: Sacred River

And to “Florrie” Evans, whom I met while mudlarking on the River Thames in the summer of 2019...thank you for teaching me how to spot real delftware. Follow her on Instagram: @flo_finds.

He was sitting in his favorite spot: the window ledge in one of the south turrets of Greenwich Palace, his legs dangling over the edge as he watched the comings and goings of the people in the courtyard below and listened to the steady flow of the River Thames. He thought he finally understood the Meaning of Life now, the Great Secret, which he'd boiled down to this: Life is short, and then you die.

Early in his writing career Michael Lincoln expected he would look up from his word processor, out through his window and be able to take in the flat calm of the Pacific Ocean, or the choppy Atlantic. The North Sea, even, maybe the Thames river. Some body of water, surely. He glanced up from the first draft of his third crime novel and beheld the magnificent vista of Garrand’s Scrap Yard in Newton-le-Willows, Merseyside.

Ah, tributaries! That’s what I was meaning to come to. The Churn, the Key, the Ray, the Coln, the Leach, and the Cole: in these upper reaches of the Thames, these are the streams and rivulets that come from elsewhere to add their own volume and momentum to that of the Thames. And tributaries are about to join this story. We might, in the quiet hour before dawn, leave this river and this long night and trace the tributaries back, to see not their beginnings—mysterious unknowable things—but, more simply, what they were doing yesterday.

Yesterday I walked to Clerkenwell in the morning and stood by the iron grate where the Fleet flows, and listened, and imagined I heard the waters of all the rivers I have known - the head of the Fleet at Hampstead where I played when I was young, and the wide Thames, and the Blackwater, with its secrets that were hardly worth keeping. Then it carried me in spate to the Essex shore, to all the marsh and the shingle, and I tasted on my lips the salt air which is also like the flesh of oysters, and I felt my heart cleaving, as I felt it there in the dark wood on the green stair and as I feel it now: something severed, something joined. The sun on my back through the window is warm and I hear a chaffinch singing. I am torn and I am mended - I want everything and need nothing - I love you and I am content without you.

Isabel Valverde was coming home. The brief, terrible letter from her brother had brought her across five thousand miles of ocean, from the New World to the Old, and during the long voyage she thought she had prepared herself for the worst. But now that London lay just beyond the next bend of the River Thames, she dreaded what awaited her. The not knowing – that was the hardest. Would she find her mother still a prisoner awaiting execution? Horrifying though that was, Isabel could at least hope to see her one last time. Or had her mother already been hanged?

And now, dear reader, the story is over. It is time for you to cross the bridge once more and return to the world you came from. This river, which is and is not the Thames, must continue flowing without you. You have haunted here long enough, and besides, surely you have rivers of your own to attend to?

There is no river in the world to be compared for majesty and the witchery of association, to the Thames; it impresses even the unreading and unimaginative watcher with a solemnity which he cannot account for, as it rolls under his feet and swirls past the buttresses of its many bridges; he may think, as he experiences the unusual effect, that it is the multiplicity of buildings which line its banks, or the crowd of sea-craft which floats upon its surface, or its own extensive spread. In reality he feels, although he cannot explain it, the countless memories which hang for ever like a spiritual fog over its rushing current. ("The Phantom Model")

Being out in a boat on the river Lea, especially on Saturday afternoons, soon makes you smart at handling a craft, and spry at escaping being run down by roughs or swamped by barges; ... But it does not give you style. It was not till I came to the Thames that I got style. My style of rowing is much admired now. People say it is so quaint.

Pirate and Osbie Feel are leaning on their roof-ledge, a magnificent sunset across and up the winding river, the imperial serpant, crowds of factories, flats, parks, smoky spires and gables, incandescent sky casting downward across the miles of deep streets and roofs cluttering and sinuous river Thames a drastic strain of burnt orange, to remind a visitor of his mortal transience here, to seal or empty all the doors and windows in sight to his eyes that look only for a bit of company, a word or two in the street before he goes up to the soap-heavy smell of the rented room and the squares of coral sunset on the floor-boards—an antique light, self-absorbed, fuel consumed in the metered winter holocaust, the more distant shapes among the threads or sheets of smoke now perfect ash ruins of themselves, nearer windows, struck a moment by the sun, not reflecting at all but containing the same destroying light, this intense fading in which there is no promise of return, light that rusts the government cars at the curbsides, varnishes the last faces hurrying past the shops in the cold as if a vast siren had finally sounded, light that makes chilled untraveled canals of many streets, and that fills with the starlings of London, converging by millions to hazy stone pedestals, to emptying squares and a great collective sleep. They flow in rings, concentric rings on the radar screens. The operators call them ‘angels.

If this is hard to understand from a map, the rest is harder. For one thing, the river that flows ever onwards is also seeping sideways, irrigating the fields and land to one side and the other. It finds its way into wells and is drawn up to launder petticoats and be boiled for tea. It is sucked into root membranes, travels up cell by cell to the surface, is held in the leaves of watercress that find themselves in the soup bowls and on the cheeseboards of the county’s diners. From teapot or soup dish, it passes into mouths, irrigates complex internal biological networks that are worlds in themselves, before returning eventually to the earth via a chamber pot. Elsewhere the river water clings to the leaves of the willows that droop to touch its surface and then, when the sun comes up, a droplet appears to vanish into the air, where it travels invisibly and might join a cloud, a vast floating lake, until it falls again as rain. This is the unmappable journey of the Thames. And there is more: what we see on a map is only the half of it. A river no more begins at its source than a story begins with the first page.

fields and land to one side and the other. It finds its way into wells and is drawn up to launder petticoats and be boiled for tea. It is sucked into root membranes, travels up cell by cell to the surface, is held in the leaves of watercress that find themselves in the soup bowls and on the cheeseboards of the county’s diners. From teapot or soup dish, it passes into mouths, irrigates complex internal biological networks that are worlds in themselves, before returning eventually to the earth via a chamber pot. Elsewhere the river water clings to the leaves of the willows that droop to touch its surface and then, when the sun comes up, a droplet appears to vanish into the air, where it travels invisibly and might join a cloud, a vast floating lake, until it falls again as rain. This is the unmappable journey of the Thames.

SIR BARNET and Lady Skettles, very good people, resided in a pretty villa at Fulham, on the banks of the Thames; which was one of the most desirable residences in the world when a rowing-match happened to be going past, but had its little inconveniences at other times, among which may be enumerated the occasional appearance of the river in the drawing-room, and the contemporaneous disappearance of the lawn and shrubbery.

spaces beneath our feet, in the fractures and voids in the rock, in caverns and fissures and channels, there are waterways as numerous, as meandering, as circuitous, as anything aboveground. The beginning of the Thames is not the beginning—or, rather, it is only to us that it seems like a beginning. In fact Trewsbury Mead might not be the beginning in any case. There are those who say it’s the wrong place. The not-even-the-beginning is not here but elsewhere, at a place called Seven Springs, which is the source of the Churn, a river that joins the Thames at Cricklade. And who is to say? The Thames that goes north, south, east, and west to finally go east, that seeps to one side and the other as it moves forwards, that goes slow as it goes fast, that evaporates into the sky while meandering to the sea, is more about motion than about beginnings. If it has a beginning, it is located in a dark, inaccessible place. Better study where it goes than where it came from.

English law was summarized in a document of 1632 entitled “The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights”: In this consolidation which we call wedlock is a locking together. It is true, that man and wife are one person, but understand in what manner. When a small brooke or little river incorporateth with Rhodanus, Humber, or the Thames, the poor rivulet looseth her name. . . . A woman as soon as she is married, is called covert . . . that is, “veiled”; as it were, clouded and overshadowed; she hath lost her streame. I may more truly, farre away, say to a married woman, Her new self is her superior; her companion, her master. .

Early risers strolling along the Thames would see the toshers wading through the muck of low tide, dressed almost comically in flowing velveteen coats, their oversized pockets filled with stray bits of copper recovered from the water’s edge. The toshers walked with a lantern strapped to their chest to help them see in the predawn gloom, and carried an eight-foot-long pole that they used to test the ground in front of them, and to pull themselves out when they stumbled into a quagmire. The pole and the eerie glow of the lantern through the robes gave them the look of ragged wizards, scouring the foul river’s edge for magic coins.

They bear down upon Westminster, the ghost-consecrated Abbey, and the history-crammed Hall, through the arches of the bridge with a rush as the tide swelters round them; the city is buried in a dusky gloom save where the lights begin to gleam and trail with lurid reflections past black velvety- looking hulls - a dusky city of golden gleams. St. Paul's looms up like an immense bowl reversed, squat, un-English, and undignified in spite of its great size; they dart within the sombre shadows of the Bridge of Sighs, and pass the Tower of London, with the rising moon making the sky behind it luminous, and the crowd of shipping in front appear like a dense forest of withered pines, and then mooring their boat at the steps beyond, with a shuddering farewell look at the eel-like shadows and the glittering lights of that writhing river, with its burthen seen and invisible, they plunge into the purlieus of Wapping. ("The Phantom Model")

Isis is the Egyptian mother goddess of magick, whose worship prevailed in the Greco-Roman world.  Her name means “Throne”, reflected in her headdress which is shaped like a throne.  Her spouse was originally Osiris, but became Serapis in the Greco-Roman myths, and her son became transformed from Horus to Harpocrates. Evidence of her worship in Britain has been found in an inscription on a jug  found in Southwark (London).[369]  The inscription on the jug indicates an Iseum (Isis temple) in London, but the location of this temple has yet to be determined.  An altar found in Blackfriars records the restoration of a temple to Isis in the third century CE, further reinforcing evidence of her worship.[370]  It has been suggested by some modern writers that the river Isis in Oxfordshire was named after this goddess, though this may in fact be a coincidence. The name of the river Isis is most probably a contraction of the name Thamesis. It is likely that "Thamesis" is a Latinisation of the Celtic river names "Taom"(Thames) and"Uis"(is), giving "Taom-Uis"meaning "The pouring out of water". An engraved onyx intaglio found at Wroxeter (Shropshire) dating to the third century CE shows Isis bearing a sistrum in her right hand.[371]  Another gem from Lockleys (Hertfordshire) dating to the fourth century CE shows Isis standing between Bes and a lioness, all surrounded by a serpent ouroboros.[372]

The Sailor-boy’s Gossip You say, dear mamma, it is good to be talking With those who will kindly endeavour to teach. And I think I have learnt something while I was walking Along with the sailor-boy down on the beach. He told me of lands where he soon will be going, Where humming-birds scarcely are bigger than bees, Where the mace and the nutmeg together are growing, And cinnamon formeth the bark of some trees. He told me that islands far out in the ocean Are mountains of coral that insects have made, And I freely confess I had hardly a notion That insects could world in the way that he said. He spoke of wide deserts where the sand-clouds are flying. No shade for the brow, and no grass for the feet; Where camels and travelers often lie dying, Gasping for water and scorching with heat. He told me of places away in the East, Where topaz, and ruby, and sapphires are found: Where you never are safe from the snake and the beast, For the serpent and tiger and jackal abound. I thought our own Thames was a very great stream, With its waters so fresh and its currents so strong; But how tiny our largest of rivers must seem To those he had sailed on, three thousand miles long. He speaks, dear mamma, of so many strange places, With people who neither have cities nor kings. Who wear skins on their shoulders, paint on their faces, And live on the spoils which their hunting-field brings. Oh! I long, dear mamma, to learn more of these stories, From books that are written to please and to teach, And I wish I could see half the curious glories The sailor-boy told me of down on the beach. Eliza Cook.

I soon found my feet, and was much less homesick than I was at prep school. Thank God. I learned that with plenty of free time on our hands, and being encouraged to fill the time with “interests,” I could come up with some great adventures. A couple of my best friends and I started climbing the huge old oak trees around the grounds, finding monkey routes through the branches that allowed us to travel between the trees, high up above the ground. It was brilliant. We soon had built a real-life Robin Hood den, with full-on branch swings, pulleys, and balancing bars high up in the treetops. We crossed the Thames on the high girders above a railway bridge, we built rafts out of old Styrofoam and even made a boat out of an old bathtub to go down the river in. (Sadly this sank, as the water came in through the overflow hole, which was a fundamental flaw. Note to self: Test rafts before committing to big rivers in them.) We spied on the beautiful French girls who worked in the kitchens, and even made camps on the rooftops overlooking the walkway they used on their way back from work. We would vainly attempt to try and chat them up as they passed. In between many of these antics we had to work hard academically, as well as dress in ridiculous clothes, consisting of long tailcoats and waistcoats. This developed in me the art of making smart clothes look ragged, and ever since, I have maintained a lifelong love of wearing good-quality clothes in a messy way. It even earned me the nickname of “Scug,” from the deputy-headmaster. In Eton slang this roughly translates as: “A person of no account, and of dirty appearance.

lost: greenery, fresh air and once in a while a glimpse of the river that still had the ability to reflect sunlight. Once the Thames entered the city it turned into the dirtiest stretch of moving water in the whole of England. Crawling through London it became saturated with cadavers from each of the many species populating the city, including

Fifteen feet away, the wide River Thames rolled past, dark and deep and mysterious is the sullen-not-quite sunrise.

Large signs were painted on the outsides of the warehouses, which were named after the spices stored inside them. Cayenne Court; Cumin Wharf; the Cardamon Building; there was a warehouse for each variety. Centuries of spices had infused the brickwork of the buildings; the smell of spices, and the stink from the mud and slime on the banks of the the river was overpowering.

A man’s character and honor made him stand above others, not his religion or strata in life.

went by back roads, past pines, swamps, shacks, the small towns of Lorman and Fayette, a school flying a Confederate flag, and down one road on which for some miles there were large lettered signs with intimidating Bible quotations nailed to roadside trees: “Prepare to Meet Thy God—Amos 4:12” and “He who endures to the end shall be saved—Mark 13:13” and “REPENT”—Mark 6:12.” Finally I arrived at the lovely town of Natchez. Natchez is dramatically sited on the bluffs above the wide brown Mississippi, facing the cotton fields in flatter Louisiana and the transpontine town of Vidalia. It was my first glimpse of the river on this trip. Though the Mississippi is not the busy thoroughfare it once was, it is impossible for an American to see this great, muddy, slow-moving stream and not be moved, as an Indian is by the Ganges, a Chinese by the Yangtze, an Egyptian by the Nile, an African by the Zambezi, a New Guinean by the Sepik, a Brazilian by the Amazon, an English person by the Thames, a Quebecois by the St. Lawrence, or any citizen by a stream flowing past his feet. I mention these rivers because I’ve seen them myself, and written about them, but as an alien, a romantic voyeur. A river is history made visible, the lifeblood of a nation.

Roper shrugged, cleared his throat and then swallowed the phlegm. ‘Never liked fish anyway.’ ‘Just pick it up,’ she muttered. ‘Throw it in a damn bin.’ He looked at her for a few seconds, licked his bottom lip, and then turned towards the river and walked away, leaving it there. Jamie stared at it, weighing up whether to pick it up and prove Roper right, or to leave it and admit to herself that it wasn’t that important. She didn’t like the idea of touching something that had been in his mouth, so she left it and followed him. This morning, they did have bigger fish to fry. Whether Roper liked them or not. There was a police cordon set up around the area and three squad cars and an ambulance parked at odd angles on the street. It ran parallel to the water, with a pavement separating the road from the grassy bank that led down to the body.  A bridge stretched overhead and iron grates spanned the space between the support struts, stopping debris from washing into the Thames. It looked like the body had got caught on one and then dragged to shore.  Some bystanders had gathered on the bridge and were looking down, at a loss for anything else to do than hang around, hoping for a look at a corpse.  Jamie dragged her eyes away from them and looked around. The buildings lining the river were mostly residential. Blocks of apartments. No wonder the body had been seen quickly.  There were six uniformed officers on scene, two of whom were standing guard in front of the privacy tent that had been set up on the bank. It looked like they’d fished the body out onto the grass. Jamie was a little glad she didn’t have to wade into the water.  To the right, a man in his sixties was being interviewed by one of the officers. He was wrapped in a foil blanket and his khaki trousers were still soaked through. Had he been the one to pull the body out? It took a certain kind of person to jump into a river to help someone rather than call it in. Especially in November. That made three officers. She continued to search. She could see another two in the distance, checking the river and talking to pedestrians. The conversations were mostly comprised of them saying the words, ‘I can’t tell you that, sorry,’ to people who kept asking what had happened in a hundred different ways. Jamie was glad her days of crowd control were over. She’d been a uniformed officer for seven years. The day she’d graduated to plainclothes was one of the happiest of her life. For all the shit her father did, he was one hell of a detective, and she’d always wanted to be one — minus the liver cirrhosis and gonorrhoea, of course. She was teetotal. The sixth officer was filling out a report and talking to the paramedics. If the victim had washed up in the river in November then there would have been nothing they could do.

A contemporary commentator drew an analogy between the East India Company’s ownership structure and the River Thames’ splendid flux, which leaves it ‘still the same river, though the parts which compose it are changing every instance.’ Once the property rights over a firm become detached from the people that set it up and work in it, it becomes a corpus in flux. It acquires a liquid life of its own, it can grow out of any human proportion. Indeed, like a river, it becomes potentially immortal.

I propose that an area of no more than 300 square miles, centered roughly upon Henley-on-Thames, has made this quintessentially British town Britain's 'small town and village murder capital'.

During the ice age around 425,000 years ago (five ice ages before the most recent glaciation) a vast lake of water became trapped between the Scottish and Scandinavian ice sheets and the 30-kilometre-wide ridge of rock then still linking England and France. This lake was filled with meltwater from the ice sheets as well as the discharge from rivers like the Thames and Rhine. And with no outlet to escape through, the water rose and rose, until inevitably it began to spill over the top of the land bridge. These colossal waterfalls scooped out vast plunge pools on the channel floor and gouged backwards through the barrier until this natural dam collapsed. The entire trapped lake emptied itself as a catastrophic megaflood, widening the gaping breach in the barrier and carving the landforms on the floor of the Channel we can see with sonar today. This first megaflood 425,000 years ago

/Basil/ she clap-signed. His head came up, and he frowned at her over his glasses. ​/You do know that I hate you/ she signed. His frown deepened. ​“I’ve been aware of that for some time, yes,” he said. Then, the edge of his mouth twitched up. “Did I commit something terrible to prompt this particular outburst, or is it just my very being that is infuriating to you?

Where to, sir?” he called down. ​“221B Baker Street,” Basil replied.

he distracted the two of them by recounting, with compelling detail, what exactly had brought him to Baker Street, and the first two cases he had tackled with Sherlock Holmes. /You should write these down, Doctor Watson,/ Victoria signed.

/The Pendywick Pair?/ ​Basil’s smile increased, and then he shrugged. ​“Rather like the sound of it.

Running changes the city. Sight and sound blazes into slithering sentience, the river is moving black popping with reflected lights of sodium orange, white, green and yellow. The Thames slurps its way down the thin tidal beach below the high walls of the embankment catching on muddy sand, belching wet gloop, the sky is a brown smear stained with bruised rushing clouds, buses unnaturally slow as they crawl across the Westminster Bridge; the Houses of Parliament are all illuminated acrylic blaze and deep recesses of shadow, strips and nooks of blackness where only the pigeons can penetrate.

Beyond sufism, beyond advaita, beyond christian mysticism, beyond humanism, beyond atheism, agnosticism and pantheism, there is a river - a river that's pure - a river that's chaste - a river that’s incorruptible - a river that has the power to breathe life into even the most degraded society - but you can't find it anywhere, for it doesn't exist in the way we usually perceive existence, that is, it doesn't exist as a tangible physical river, like the Hudson or the Thames or the Nile - rather it exists as particles in your brain, and all it needs is the right kick to get formed. And when enough such rivers start flowing from the fountainhead of enough awake brains, the whole world will turn into an ocean of vigor, virtue and love.

You know,” he said, “when I first saw you I thought you were with the Thames girls, or a new sort of fae or something really outlandish like a witch doctor or an American.

Habits are like stones rolling down hill — the further they roll, the faster and more ungovernable is their course. Habits, like trees, are strengthened by age. A boy may bend an oak when it is a sapling — a hundred men cannot root it up, when it is a full grown tree. A child can wade over the Thames River at its fountain-head — the largest ship in the world can float in it when it gets near the sea. So it is with habits: the older the stronger — the longer they have held possession, the harder they will be to cast out.

The Amazon is not a normal river, like the Thames, for instance - it is the focal point of a huge sheet of water that surges through the forest when the waters are high. This deluge can be more than 100km wide in places; it is the same distance as London to Paris at its mouth where it gushes out at over 200,000 cubic metres per second in to the Atlantic Ocean

There’s a goddess of the river,” I said. “Yes—Mother Thames,” he said patiently. “And there’s a god of the river—Father Thames.” “Are they related?” “No,” he said. “And that’s part of the problem.” “Are they really gods?” “I never worry about the theological questions,” said Nightingale. “They exist, they have power and they can breach the Queen’s Peace—that makes them a police matter.” A

Far below, the bends in the river Thames were outlined by the lights of the city, shimmering and winking through the thinning clouds like elusive diamonds. Siena’s fingers clutched the armrest as the knots in her stomach tightened.

I had decided to take a walk by the famous Thames River; the stretch that ran alongside Woolwich town centre, not very far from the Woolwich ferry landing. It’s interesting that at that time, Woolwich was referred to as the “Naija” capital in Britain

Celebrating Valentine's Day is like falling in love with London all over again.

Scholars have argued whether Tacitus, who first records the Latin form of the name Londinium was recording this from the Celtic Lugdunum (fortress of Lug) or from another Celtic word, a word still surviving in the Irish root, londo – the wild place. London, as a Celtic trading town of the Trinovantes, stood on the north bank of the Thames, or Tamesis, as it was recorded. Tamesis means “the dark river”, cognate with the Sanskrit Tamesa, meaning exactly the same. Now the River Tamesa is a tributary of the Ganges, a sacred river of the Hindus, in which votive offerings were placed.

Hadn’t he been to London, and once fought for a prize on the frozen River Thames before a crowd of lords and ladies and fine gentlemen on a bed of coal ash as snow tumbled? He fought a Jew called Mendoza and their blood froze pink as a dog rose on the ice.

Manifold are the historic interests of the river Thames. There is scarcely a foot of its mud from London Bridge to Gravesend Reach that is not as "consecrated" as that famous bit of soil which Dr. Samuel Johnson and Mr. Richard Savage knelt and kissed on stepping ashore at Greenwich

Undulating rivulets emerged when Paleocene glacial ice had formed Fluvial rifts worn in naked chalk hills, Currents flowed over burnished boulders Moving past numinous burial mounds.

Numerous gifted objects; black granite Etchings, carved statues, broken goddesses, Inscriptions, pottery, jewelry, rough-hewn Garnets, flowers, consecrated herbs, skulls, Gold ornaments, weapons, prized artifacts; Sacrifices, ancestors’ ageless prayers Left with olden Father Thames. For them, The sinuous streams were alive, full worlds Of votive offerings inside murky depths, Lifeblood pleas, observances thereafter Troubles now vanished, solemn promises, Treasures carefully bestowed upon Spirits, watchful deities; faithfully Invoking his ancient name Tamesas.

From seasonal splashes near Trewsbury European eels migrate upstream; Myriad carp, redfin perch, brook lamprey, Dragonflies, mosquitoes, wee midges, Pale cormorant, herring gulls, wagtails, Swans glide round woodland tapestry, Braided channel islands rest alone, Arched medieval stone slab bridges, Tree lines fête ash, alder, chestnut, beech. Floodplains, tangled sedge reedbeds, Owls speed above tree-covered islets, Teaming alluvium water-meadows Growing lavender, iris, marigold.

Father Thames drifts beside misty heath Dark surfaces veil universes beneath, Hushed verge our temple, tall hedge my altar, Heeding eerie owl calls some reveal they have heard, long-expected wintery freeze, Unending run which travels further east, Aquatic animals receive refuge below.

Visiting sheer essence of bog and fen, Walking rough footpaths along edges Slowly nearing home, greeting itinerant Passers-by, contemplating end journeys We all take, flying towards distant seas Like great blue herons do, understanding Harmony amid nature’s undulate ways Of old river rhythms, oh Father Thames.

Andrei sometimes wondered how much a river would change Los Angeles. He pictured a long stream of water that divided the city, much like the River Thames or the Seine. Rivers nourished. The water happily rewrote the aisles of streetlamps and transformed one’s nighttime walk into a feature film. It carried boats filled with a surveying crowd that waved back at any brandishing hand on land that tried. It fostered lunch dates, amusing dares, and a reference for the lost. Andrei had spent one summer abroad and met these rivers. He was astonished at the difference in conversations the Europeans had with him. They were simple and alive. The pubs helped. The accents, too. Was it the rain that reminded? he speculated. The museums? The red buses? The cheap flights to any neighboring country? So—what was it about the geography of LA that made connection impossible? Just then, the sun glared at him. He glared back.

it began as springs arising from an aquifer at Thames Head in the Cotswolds, and it was only when the German George I—the first Hanoverian monarch in Britain—acceded to the throne and could not pronounce “th” that the name of the river might as well have been spelled “Tems.” She remembered asking about it when she visited London as a child, and her English grandmother informed her, “What the king says is what is right. And he said ‘Tems.

it began as springs arising from an aquifer at Thames Head in the Cotswolds, and it was only when the German George I—the first Hanoverian monarch in Britain—acceded to the throne and could not pronounce “th” that the name of the river might as well have been spelled “Tems.

scratched his head. ‘But he went home to have dinner with his mother. She’s just come up to London. Mind you, that’s not so far.’ He thought for a minute. ‘I think you’re right, sir. He said something about its being near the river –’ ‘My God!’ gasped James. ‘Wait a minute.’ Oliver was speaking now. ‘Is there a street … let me think. All Saints? All Fellows?’ ‘Allhallows Lane?’ said the clerk, and Oliver let out a shout. ‘That’s it! Allhallows Lane. And there’s a tavern there. The Black … Swan?’ ‘The Black Raven. There’s a public house called The Black Raven.’ The clerk was praying that these men had found what they were looking for and he could go back to sleep. James nodded. ‘Come down and instruct our coachman.’ ‘It’s easy enough to explain –’ ‘Come down!’ and he hurried out, with the others following in his wake. A damp fog was rolling up the Thames by the time Charles arrived at the narrow, cobbled street that led to the tavern.

Sample snail porridge at Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck UK // Consistently voted among the world’s best restaurants, The Fat Duck is nestled near the River Thames in the storybook setting of the village of Bray, from where it invites diners on a nostalgic and imaginative journey where nothing is as it seems. Imagine soup that is both hot and cold; sashimi served with a foam conjured from seafood on a bed of tapioca sand; or snail porridge. As the visual cues for each dish belie the taste, your senses soar into the unique gastronomic universe of Heston Blumenthal’s creation. With just 42 daily spaces for lunch and dinner, you won’t be surprised to learn that booking slots are only opened at certain times of the year, and your wait will usually run to about a four months–which will give you plenty of time to save up for the £ 300 meal. Without drinks.

But, frustratingly, this clarity dissipates on closer consideration. There are nine Avon rivers in Britain. Another problem: monarchs did not attend plays in the public theaters. The “flights upon the Thames / That so did take Eliza and our James” cannot refer to performances at the Globe, Rose, or other theaters on the Thames. Elizabeth and James enjoyed their entertainment at court, where Shakespeare’s plays were often staged. (“ These dramas, the most treasured jewels of our literary heritage, were not composed for the gawkish groundlings of the Globe,” writes the scholar Richard Levin, “but for theatres and audiences far more worthy of them.”)

The Great Stink (or How a Crisis Can Kickstart Radical Planning) Picture London in the 1850s. In fact, don’t picture it—smell it. Since medieval times, the city’s human waste had been deposited in cesspools—stinking holes in the ground full of rotting sludge, often in the basements of houses—or flushed directly into the River Thames. While thousands of cesspools had been removed since the 1830s, the Thames itself remained a giant cesspool that also happened to be the city’s main source of drinking water: Londoners were drinking their own raw sewage. The result was mass outbreaks of cholera, with over 14,000 people dying in 1848 and a further 10,000 in 1854.20 And yet city authorities did almost nothing to resolve this ongoing public health disaster. They were hampered not just by a lack of funds and the prevalent belief that cholera was spread through the air rather than through water, but also by the pressure of private water companies who insisted that the drinking water they pumped from the river was wonderfully pure. The crisis came to a head in the stiflingly hot summer of 1858. That year had already seen three cholera outbreaks, and now the lack of rainfall had exposed sewage deposits six feet deep on the sloping banks of the Thames. The putrid fumes spread throughout the city. But it wasn’t just the laboring poor who had to bear it: The smell also wafted straight from the river into the recently rebuilt Houses of Parliament and the new ventilation system conspired to pump the rank odor throughout the building. The smell was so vile that debates in the Commons and Lords had to be abandoned, and parliamentarians fled from the committee rooms with cloths over their faces. What became known as the “Great Stink” was finally enough to prompt the government to act.

The Thames is England's longest archaeological landscape and thousands of the objects that fill our museums have come from its foreshore. (p.47)

need say was I need some time off. But she couldn’t do it. “The St. James house at half-past seven,” she repeated. “Got it, sir.” He rang off. Barbara hung up. She tried to plumb the depths of her feelings, to put a name to what was slowly washing through her veins. She wanted to call it shame. She knew it was liberation. She went to tell her father that they would need to reschedule his doctor’s appointment for another day. Kevin Whateley had not gone to the Royal Plantagenet, which was the pub next door to his cottage. Rather, he had walked along the embankment, past the triangular green where he and Matthew had once learned to operate their pair of remote-control planes, and had instead entered an older pub that stood on a spit of land reaching like a curled finger into the Thames. He’d chosen the Blue Dove deliberately. In the Royal Plantagenet—despite its proximity to his house—he might have forgotten for five minutes or so. But the Blue Dove would not allow him to do so. He sat at a table that overlooked the water. In spite of the night’s falling temperature, someone was out, night fishing from a boat, and lights bobbed periodically with the river’s movement. Kevin watched this, allowing his memory to fill with the image of Matthew running along that same dock, falling, damaging a knee, righting himself but not crying at all, even when the blood began to seep from the cut, even when the stitches were later put in. He was a brave little bloke, always had been. Kevin forced his eyes from the dock and fastened them on the mahogany table. Beer mats covered it, advertising Watney’s, Guinness, and Smith’s. Carefully, Kevin stacked them, restacked them, spread them out like cards, restacked them again. He felt how shallow his breathing was and knew that he needed to take in more air. But to breathe deeply was to lose his grip for an instant. He wouldn’t do that. For if he lost control, he didn’t know how he would get it back. So he did without air. He waited. He didn’t know if the man he sought would come into the pub this late on a Sunday night, mere minutes before closing. In fact, he didn’t even know if the man came here at all any longer. But years ago he’d been a regular customer, when Patsy worked long hours behind the bar, before she’d got her job in a South Kensington hotel. For Matthew’s sake, she had said when she’d taken on the

The Thames here had a vastly different character to the wide, muddy tyrant that seethed through London. It was graceful and deft and remarkably light of heart. It skipped over stones and skimmed its banks, water so clear that one could see the reeds swaying deep down on her narrow bed. The river here was a she, he'd decided. For all its sunlit transparency, there were certain spots in which it was suddenly unfathomable.

Algal overgrowth has killed streams, lakes, and coastal ecosystems across the Northern Hemisphere. And it’s not just the fish that are dying. The birds that eat the fish are dying, too. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is now the size of New Jersey and is growing. Worse, more than a 150 smaller dead zones have been identified throughout the world. The Baltic Sea north of Germany is one of the most polluted marine ecosystems on the planet; in the 1990s, the Baltic cod industry collapsed. The Thames, Rhine, Meuse, and Elbe Rivers in Europe also contain more than a hundred times the amount of synthetic nitrogen that is considered safe. Similar problems are occurring in the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and China’s two largest rivers: the Huang He and Yangtze.

FACT: There are thirty bridges over the tidal stretch of the river Thames. FACT: The Thames is tidal for ninety-five miles inland, from the Outer Thames Estuary to Teddington Lock. Port of London Authority.

John Vernall lifted up his head, the milk locks that had given him his nickname stirring in the third floor winds, and stared with pale grey eyes out over Lambeth, over London. Snowy's dad had once explained to him and his young sister Thursa how by altering one's altitude, one's level on the upright axis of this seemingly three-planed existence, it was possible to catch a glimpse of the elusive fourth plane, the fourth axis, which was time. Or was at any rate, at least in Snowy's understanding of their father's Bedlam lectures, what most people saw as time from the perspective of a world impermanent and fragile, vanished into nothingness and made anew from nothing with each passing instant, all its substance disappeared into a past that was invisible from their new angle and which thus appeared no longer to be there. For the majority of people, Snowy realised, the previous hour was gone forever and the next did not exist yet. They-were trapped in their thin, moving pane of Now: a filmy membrane that might fatally disintegrate at any moment, stretched between two dreadful absences. This view of life and being as frail, flimsy things that were soon ended did not match in any way with Snowy Vernall's own, especially not from a glorious vantage like his current one, mucky nativity below and only reefs of hurtling cloud above. His increased elevation had proportionately shrunken and reduced the landscape, squashing down the buildings so that if he were by some means to rise higher still, he knew that all the houses, churches and hotels would be eventually compressed in only two dimensions, flattened to a street map or a plan, a smouldering mosaic where the roads and lanes were cobbled silver lines binding factory-black ceramic chips in a Miltonic tableau. From the roof-ridge where he perched, soles angled inwards gripping the damp tiles, the rolling Thames was motionless, a seam of iron amongst the city's dusty strata. He could see from here a river, not just shifting liquid in a stupefying volume. He could see the watercourse's history bound in its form, its snaking path of least resistance through a valley made by the collapse of a great chalk fault somewhere to the south behind him, white scarps crashing in white billows a few hundred feet uphill and a few million years ago. The bulge of Waterloo, off to his north, was simply where the slide of rock and mud had stopped and hardened, mammoth-trodden to a pasture where a thousand chimneys had eventually blossomed, tarry-throated tubeworms gathering around the warm miasma of the railway station. Snowy saw the thumbprint of a giant mathematic power, untold generations caught up in the magnet-pattern of its loops and whorls. On the loose-shoelace stream's far side was banked the scorched metropolis, its edifices rising floor by floor into a different kind of time, the more enduring continuity of architecture, markedly distinct from the clock-governed scurry of humanity occurring on the ground. In London's variously styled and weathered spires or bridges there were interrupted conversations with the dead, with Trinovantes, Romans, Saxons, Normans, their forgotten and obscure agendas told in stone. In celebrated landmarks Snowy heard the lonely, self-infatuated monologues of kings and queens, fraught with anxieties concerning their significance, lives squandered in pursuit of legacy, an optical illusion of the temporary world which they inhabited. The avenues and monuments he overlooked were barricades' against oblivion, ornate breastwork flung up to defer a future in which both the glorious structures and the memories of those who'd founded them did not exist.

Greeting the security staff, Mackay led Liz through the atrium into a busy and attractive restaurant. The tablecloths were white linen, the silver and glassware shone, and the dark panorama of the Thames was framed by a curtained sweep of plate glass. Most of the tables were occupied. The muted buzz of conversation dipped for a moment as they entered. Leaving her coat at the desk, Liz followed Mackay to a table overlooking the river. “This is all very nice and unexpected,” she said sincerely. “Thank you for inviting me.” “Thank you for accepting.” “I’m assuming a fair few of these people are your lot?” “One or two of them are, and when you walked across the room just then, you enhanced my standing by several hundred per cent. You will note that we’re being discreetly observed.” She smiled. “I do note it. You should send your colleagues downriver for one of our surveillance courses.” They examined the menus. Leaning forward confidentially, Mackay told Liz that he could predict what she was going to

are four main routes out of London and we might be moving on any one of them. North, into the flat lands beyond Finsbury Fields. Westward, down the river in the direction of Greenwich. Or perhaps eastwards – although on that route the cart would have passed through Holborn and Westminster, and a prudent driver might prefer to steer away from crowded places. These directions all involved traversing relatively law-abiding areas of the city. On the other hand, if we had crossed the river either by the bridge or ferry, we would have moved south through my own patch of Southwark. This was no particular source of comfort. Were I planning to take someone prisoner and carry him off to a secret destination, this is the direction I would take. Everyone knows that the law and authority of the city do not stretch far on our bank of the Thames. Men and women who have stumbled into trouble recognise that they have a bolt-hole here. Even those on the right side of the law but afraid of its frown – boatmen, for example, or the owners of bearpits – feel instinctively that they are at home south of the water. Respectable figures like the players of the Chamberlain’s Men are resident in Southwark. Master WS, he lived in the Liberty of the Clink, did he not? Though not Master Richard Burbage, no, he lived with seven little Burbages somewhere oh-so-proper north of the river . .

For their first date, Forstmann drove Diana to Marlow, near Windsor, for an intimate dinner at the Compleat Angler overlooking the River Thames. “We were sitting looking out at the water, and I said, ‘What

Frost Fairs nearly a century ago, when the entire Thames would freeze solid and merchants would move out onto the river with their carts and makeshift booths and stay there for weeks.