Philip Hensher

Flights upon the banks

Thames: Sacred River<br /> by Peter Ackroyd

Thames: Sacred River
by Peter Ackroyd

For some reason, the sight of the sea or a river in any historical film always strikes the viewer with a shock, as though some gross anachronism had been committed. It looks frankly very odd to see people walking along a beach, or even by the side of many rivers, in Elizabethan dress. It’s quite irrational, but it does suggest that, fundamentally, we don’t think of bodies of water in historical terms. They seem, as embankments and hills do not, like projections of the unconscious mind, and perpetually contemporary.

The Thames is, in geographical terms, not much of a river. It is only 215 miles long, shorter by far than dozens of rivers you’ve never heard of — a third the length of the Kuskokwim, a quarter the length of the Tobol. Its historical significance is in part the reason why a book of this substance and unflaggingly interesting detail can be written about it. The rest of it is accounted for by the archetypal place it occupies in the English mind, and in parts of the world where the English imagination exerted its force. It’s odd that Peter Ackroyd doesn’t acknowledge that no Londoner ever refers to ‘the Thames’: we call it the River, as if, like Fanny Price talking about the Isle of Wight, there were no other in the world.

It was there long before London was even thought of, spreading out far beyond its present boundaries, and has formed the mind just as much as it has formed the societies along its length and, especially, London. Both of those things are Peter Ackroyd’s subjects. The river, for centuries, was the best and most reliable form of transportation, and, until the 20th century, what trade rested on.

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