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Introduction
London owes it commercial and cultural excellence to the main artery that feeds it – the glorious, industrious River Thames.
The past 10 years have been an exciting time for the Thames. After a long period of depression following the closure of the docks and the demise of other riverside industries in the 1970s, the river now beats again at the heart of our city, reborn as London’s residential, commercial and entertainment hub.
The Thames was always a working river. There is evidence of trade being conducted here as early as the third millennium BC but I wasn’t until the arrival of the Romans in AD50 that the river got its name – Caesar called it “Tamesis” – but by then its importance to London was well-established.
For the next thousand years the Thames was London’s main transport network. Paintings and drawings from the 16th and 17th centuries show the river crammed with vessels of all descriptions. By the end of the 18th century, river traffic had got so heavy, especially in the Pool of London that something had to be done. The passing of the West India Dock Company Act in 1799 paved the way for the creation of the docks on the Isle of Dogs, until then an underdeveloped marshy wasteland. London’s other waterways, the canals, which connect the river with outlying districts of the city, also date from this time.
For the next 150 years the working Thames was one of the wonders of the world. But by the 1960s containerization had threatened the docks which then drifted into dereliction and disuse.
However, in the 1980s a new chapter in the life of the River Thames began, driven by the redevelopment of Docklands. The renaissance then followed the Thames upstream: the old Oxo factory, now occupied by two top-class restaurants, and Bankside power station, today home to Tate Modern, embody the revitalization of the capital’s greatest natural resource.
