Hilaire Belloc

“ It is true that a wall of earth everywhere controls the flood to-day, and that the traveller in his boat does not see, as he would have seen two thousand years ago, the glint of water to the north and south at high tide over tufted grass and drowned banks of mud for miles upon either side of his going. ”

“ No great monastic nucleus of the Dark Ages could be founded in that inhospitable land. There was no palace of the kings standing near the central stream until the neighbourhood of London was approached. There was not even a fortress. Indeed it is odd to think how empty all that approach from the sea to the greatest of the western Roman towns was and remained. It was not until the Middle Ages began to flower that the Lower Thames put forth any human signs—at least of such a sort as have come down to us. ”

“ For all this lamentable cloak of purposeless industrialism, chaotic and already murmuring with the sounds of its own dissolution, the gradual envelopment of a man who comes up river, his reception by the hugeness of modern London is a thing which no one who has experienced it can forget. ”

“ Each has been and will always be famous in the arms and in the commerce of Europe. Each forms a sort of long great street of ships crowded in a traffic to and fro. For each has its great port. The one Antwerp, the other London. The Scheldt is the name of the first, which leads to Antwerp, and makes the opportunity for that great market of the world. But the second is the River of London, much older in its destinies, and probably more destined to endure in its functions of commerce. ”

“ We have a right to exclude the fantastic—such as the astonishing idea that a great Roman town like London could be wiped out and then resettled by a totally new population, and we have a right to exclude as very nearly worthless odd stories cropping up hundreds of years later in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When all these conditions changed—when the discovery of the New World, and of the Cape route to the Indies, when the growth of north-country industries and one hundred other factors had taken away from the site of London its old topographical supremacy, the port was so firmly established that it provided its own sources of vitality.
It is always so in the economic affairs of a town or of a nation. Material causes are discovered to be more powerful in the middle period of their growth; once the town or nation are rooted they nourish themselves. ”

“ Indeed, the utter ruin of order and of plan, which is but the outward manifestation of the ruin of religion, has destroyed the sense of approach everywhere around that great helpless, apathetic nation which we call London, save where it could not be wholly destroyed, and that is along the water which was its most ancient highway.
RICHMOND BRIDGE
Come in from what direction you will, save by the Thames, and the approach to [Pg 33] London is a waste of eyesight. No one has imagined for two hundred years such a thing as a gate or a limit. ”

“ The Thames made London. London is a function of the Thames, and it is in such a connection that I propose to regard it in this essay: London as the great crossing place of the Thames, and as the [Pg 8] custodian and fruit of what early may have been the chief ferry, but has for nearly two thousand years been the chief bridge; London as the market of which the Thames is the approach and the port; London as a habitation of which the great street is the Thames, a street for centuries the main highway of its people, lost for a time and now recovering its ancient use ”

“ London does not face the New World. It looks away from it.
The truth is that the singular position of the Lower Thames as a terminal for international commerce, and of its port as an international market, must be sought in a medley of causes, the chief of which fall into two clear categories. We have first the causes which made London what it was before the transformation of commerce through the discoveries of the Renaissance and the later gigantic expansion which reposes upon modern facilities of communication. ”

“ On the contrary, the note of the approach [Pg 28] 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. ”

“ For the Thames is all that every other river is to every other capital, wherever some great stream is connected with a chief city. But whereas in every other case it is but one or another of the functions of such a stream that history can remark, in the case of London it can remark them all. [Pg 9] Little sea-borne traffic reaches Paris by the Seine; the Tiber could never be a street for Rome; Vienna neglects the Danube; Antwerp protects no great crossing, nor has ever been the nucleus of a State ”

“ But it is the Scheldt and the Thames which still remain the greater opponents. The united political life of Gaul, which was inherited and transformed by the French Monarchy, forbade the growth of a great commerce to the north. Paris became not only the political centre of France but its main market as well, and to-day the water carriage of Paris—that is, the traffic of its port—is greater than that of any maritime town in the country. Only if Normandy had developed as an independent state would Rouen have become what Antwerp and London have become. ”

“ Now when to this power of demand created by the “sticking” at the point of transhipment or port of import, of goods coming from abroad, there is added the power of demand caused by the residence of government, of a court and of wealthy men apart from those who are wealthy through commerce, you get, of course, a very highly increased power of demand which makes of the port of import a specially great economic centre. A ship coming to such a port in order to take on board there the export in which it deals, can enter loaded with imports which are sure of a ready market. ”

“ Woolwich faces the expanse of originally flooded soil between the Lea and the Roding, with the most of which even the economic forces making for the expansion of London have been able to do nothing, and of which so unpleasant a relic of its original condition is left in Plaistow Marshes to-day; while opposite Greenwich and Deptford lay that perfectly impossible morass, which, though turned into water meadows by a river wall many centuries ago, is still perhaps the worst building ground within the London area. ”

“ It is, if we consider the economics of commerce during at any rate the first 1500 years of our era, almost at the edge of the world.
To explain the supremacy of London as a market more than one thesis is put forward for general acceptance which must, I think, be condemned. Thus we have the thesis that London occupies the position it does because it is almost in the centre of the land hemisphere. As a matter of fact the actual centre of that hemisphere is not far from the neighbourhood of Falmouth, and is at any rate within the limits of Britain. ”

“ The land has been so often turned and returned in at least twenty centuries of building that it is not easy to-day to reconstruct the original conditions of that crossing; and, unless we look at all the evidence, slight as it is, it is easy to fall into errors upon it. Thus several writers upon this subject have often spoken as though the gravel-topped knoll upon which the original London stood was the sole factor in establishing the crossing, and I have myself fallen into the error of believing that the approach from the south could only be made over a long artificial causeway. ”

“ Draggle-tail financial experiments of no interest or purpose to those responsible for them, save abstract wealth, stand isolated in fields as often as not given up to weeds and rubbish, and new roads half made end everywhere in dust-heaps or in mud. Then for one mile after another you pass the thousands of little houses all shamelessly similar, for in none does a man intend to make his being, to possess his soul, or to live and die there. ”

“ She has the dull duty to do of turning to the right or to the left, and her orders bind her to the river of the Netherlands or of England as it may be. But if you will consider many centuries and the changing adventures of business you will still—as you pass northward between the two shores of Flanders and of Britain, and as you see their recession upon either side of the northern way which opens before you—understand that doubt upon the future and the rivalry of the two rivers which is soon to be so deeply impressed upon the politics of our time. ”

“ I think that to know the River of London the journey must be made from the sea upwards, in something not larger than a barge, in a motor boat, or in a fishing vessel, or little half-rater, and taken upon one tide with an easterly wind, as all the men of the past took it, making the great port upstream under the weather they had chosen. ”

“ For the rest, as I say, and with the exception of those rare survivals of which Tilbury is the most striking, modern industrialism, down to its last manifestations, has captured the Lower Thames and stands in a bleak contrast against the windy emptiness of the flats. ”

“ The rare places at which high and firm land comes down to the modern stream are, as it were, isolated, and live a life upon the defensive. Nowhere (as we shall see when we come to examine London as a crossing place) does some good habitable site stretch down to either opposing bank. There is no natural gateway upon the Lower Thames; no twin [Pg 20] villages defending a gap; nor the projection from the north as from the south of tongues of high land or even good arable land, the proximity of which, one to the other upon either shore, would give humanity to the river. ”

“ 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 [Pg 102] 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. ”

“ That a bias towards the mechanical and the necessary should be present in the physical sciences—in chemistry for instance—is to be expected, that it should have invaded biology was less excusable, but that it should have been permitted to affect (as it did) the business native to man—his building, his institutions, his very dreams—was an excessive blunder, and the spirit of all the younger men to-day is running if anything too strongly in reaction against that ebb-tide of the soul. ”

“ Unless a man had so considerable a fleet that he could cut off supplies by River, so well organised a transport that he could keep both banks of that broad stream perpetually in touch, and finally so very large a command that he could hold the whole circuit of the walls securely and the Bridge end on the Southwark side as well, London could not be, strictly speaking, besieged, and, from the Danish Wars onwards, London never was. ”

“ There was even a phase, the beginning of which is to be found in the seventeenth century, the close of which we have unhappily seen in our own generation, when the wealth of England was so superior to that of any other rival that the material circumstances of life among the wealthier classes of the country seemed to belong to a different world from that of neighbouring nations, and when the economic supremacy of England was translated into a credit, a command of money, and an almost contemptuous security to which no other European people could pretend. ”

“ London is on no general European highway but lies ex-centric to Europe far upon the north and west of the general area which European culture covers; nor does its more central position since the discovery of the New World avail the argument, for the greatness of London was planted and its future continuance assured long before Europeans had known and developed the Western Continent. London, again, does not seem to invite commerce by lying upon the frontier common to two civilisations ”

“ Rouen—the nearest parallel—was not the strategical pivot of Normandy, nor ever formed, as London forms, a chief fraction in the economic power of its province. The two rivers which are sacred to Lyons never fed that town; the Rhone watered but did not lead to Arles. The towns of Lombardy depend upon the fertility of the Po Valley, but the stream is nothing to their commerce or to their political eminence, and Milan, and Venice, and Turin are independent of it. ”

“ When we consider something more than distance and think of London as the “centre [Pg 97] of gravity” of the Midlands, the east and the south, we find it still more central for the centuries immediately preceding our own. Their staple export was wool. The pasturage of the chalk ranges runs right round London in the Chilterns and their extension into East Anglia, in the north and south Downs and the Uplands of Wiltshire, Hampshire, and Dorset. London is the obvious centre of all that triangle of chalk. ”

“ A man desiring to go from Boulogne to Flushing by sea or from some lower French port to, say, [Pg 113] Amsterdam, would very probably find his cheapest road to lie by way of going into the Thames and out of it. We must not exaggerate this element in the present position of London, where it is but a survival and that a small one: but in the past, and particularly in the establishment of the port at the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the Middle Ages, this ‘facing’ of London River towards the great political frontier line of Europe, was of capital importance. ”

“ It is a commonplace which must be repeated whenever the connection of the Thames with London is referred to, that the capital matter in that connection is London’s position as the lowest crossing point upon the Thames. That affirmation, standing alone, is of no use to history unless one also explains why it was so important to find a crossing place as low as possible down the river, and the many causes which combine to make that lowest crossing place the neighbourhood of London Bridge. ”

“ Civilisation has so considerably changed the aspect of all our streams, it has so embanked them and drained their neighbourhood, that in order to appreciate the original conditions which made it impossible to find a crossing place below London one must consult the new sheets of the Ordnance Geological Survey. They give us the drift or top-soil—which alone of course concerns travel. In this new survey the area covered by alluvium and the line where that alluvium impinges upon the older and harder soils to the north and the south are very clearly marked. ”