Thames Street

“ There is landing and scuffling and pushing; the quivering old barges, moored in the mud, are swaying and groaning beneath trampling feet. Then, for an instant, Thames Street, Upper and Lower, is invaded by an ant-hill swarm of spruce clerks, who mingle strangely with the fish-women and the dock-porters. But the insatiable counting-houses soon swallow them up: as though London’s commercial maw were an hungered too, for breakfast, at nine o’clock in the morning. ”

“ Thames Street was wholly impassable. Men were going hither and thither with barrows, and ladders and ropes, removing the rubbish, and trying to support the tottering habitations. Grace-church Street was entirely deserted, except by a few stragglers, whose curiosity got the better of their fears; or who, like the carpenter, were compelled to proceed along it. The tiles lay a foot thick in the road. In some cases they were ground almost to powder; in others, driven deeply into the earth, as if discharged from a piece of ordnance. ”

“ Another leading thoroughfare crossed the City from London Bridge to Bishopsgate, and another, Thames Street, by far the most important, because here the merchant adventurers—those who had ships and imported goods—met for the transaction of business. The rough cobbled pavement of Thames Street was the Exchange of Whittington and the merchants of his time, who all had their houses on the rising ground, among the narrow lanes north of the street. You have seen what splendid houses a London merchant loved to build. ”

“ No other sound reaches that cramped, underground chamber, in which one seems to be walking as in a coal mine, from the dark into the dark. After this dreary journey, we ascend a flight of stairs that is wearying, and that seems to be endless, and emerge on Tower Hill, into the sunshine, and the presence of green trees, and the sight of what is most venerable in the whole English realm.
Tower Hill is a sort of oasis in a desert filled with the whirling sands of traffic—the terminus to the great lines of warehouses which fill Thames Street. ”

“ A pleasant and almost poetical contrast can be furnished by viewing one of the busiest of City streets under different conditions; much as in a Diorama we are shown the same view by day or by night. If at the busiest hour of the day we descend from London Bridge into Thames Street, which passes under one of its arches, we shall see a curious specimen of antiquated trade, and very much what might have been noted a hundred years ago. ”

“ The Thames is here full of interest and of crowding associations. Over the water, behind the great, grim warehouses, slopes downward into Bermondsey that Tooley Street which the three tailors—“we, the people of England”—have made famous throughout the world. From amid grimy roofs and grey-brown walls rises the tower of St. Olave’s Church, half-buried and lost amid a London of which its builders never dreamed. Down here, in narrow street and dim entry, the bewildered stranger begins to feel that, after all, man is too small for the planet on which he lives. ”

“ Buckingham Street is another of the quaint, bright streets in the Adelphi, leading down to a cheerful opening, whence, as from a balcony, we look down on the animated Thames below, with its passing barges, tugs and river steamers: a scene which at first sight must impress the foreigner. ”

“ The modern idea of a street with its opposite row of houses all in line must be altogether laid aside when we go back to the eleventh century. It is, in fact, quite impossible to lay down a street as it actually existed at that time. The most important street in the City, Thames Street, did certainly possess a tolerably even line on its south side; the old course of the river wall and the quays compelled a certain amount of alignment ”

“ Fleet Street, with its Temple, is not unworthy of being contiguous to the Strand. The fire of London has deprived us of the delight of a real old quarter of the city; but some bits remain, and everywhere there is a stirring multitude, and a great crush and crash of carts and wains. The Inns of Court, and the quarters in the vicinity of the port, Thames Street, Tower Hill, Billingsgate, Wapping, Rotherhithe, are the best parts of London; they are full of character: the buildings bear a nearer relation to what the people are doing than in the more polished quarters. ”

“ A matchless stream for its congregated wealth. Miles of warehouses, miles of stone docks, miles of shipping, and thousands of seamen. And yet a dirty and turbid and ungrateful river at times, when it overflows the fish-stalls, when it overflows the high street in Wapping and drowns myriads of rats in Upper and Lower Thames street.
VAGRANCY AND PAUPERISM.
We went down the "London Stairs." Every bridge that spans the Thames has four stairs or flights of stone-steps running down to the water's edge. ”

“ The merchants met in the most convenient place, that is to say, for foreign trade, in Thames Street. They had their houses for the most part in the sloping streets north of Thames Street; here they received the foreign merchants. The lesser sort transacted business at the tavern.
As we continue our walk we discover that there are three or four principal streets in the City. The apparent labyrinth is pierced by parallel thoroughfares and by others at right angles, so that one need not be lost in the winding lanes. ”

“ Non omnis moriar. Though the so oft-mentioned hours be asleep, and the river glideth in peace, undisturbed by penny steamboats, the mighty heart of Thames Street is anything but still. The great warehouses are closed, ’tis true; the long wall of the Custom House is a huge dead wall, full of blind windows. ”

“ London on the one hand; on the other, being in disgrace. For the sight of the hot square garden, she had here this cool, green lawn; for the riband of dull wood pavement up Grosvenor Street, the silver line of the Thames; for the companionship of languid and heated mankind, the eager dogs; and for the hopeless tedium of a ball, the cool vast night pouring in through the open windows of the drawing-room. ”

“ Doubtless there are safer thoroughfares on earth than Lower Thames Street in the early evening, but they would not lead to as diverting a neighborhood. The wharves and storehouses may not be as tumultuous as by day, but the fastidious wayfarer encounters at Billingsgate enough strength of language and odor to satisfy. ”

“ When Peter the Great visited London in 1698, he frequented a tavern which stood on the spot where The Czar's Head is now opposite the church of All Hallows, Barking.
Lower Thames Street is as old as the City itself. It is enclosed by tall warehouses and shipping marts. ”

“ The Bishop of Winchester's palace once adjoined Bankside, as that of the Archbishop of Canterbury, at Lambeth, still stands near Westminster Bridge; but it fell into ruins and the bishops removed to Chelsea.
It is impossible to enumerate the palaces and fine houses that once stood along Thames Street, which, in the fourteenth century, was the most fashionable street in London. The part of the foreshore now occupied by wharves and great warehouses—where cranes swing and lighters await their loads all day long, and every working day—has all been reclaimed from the river. ”

“ Sellers of fish not to throw their water into the streets but to carry it to the Thames.
17. Schools for fencing and buckler play not to be kept within the City.
18. Foreign butchers (i.e. butchers who have not the freedom of the City) to bring into the City the hides and pelts of the oxen and sheep: to be allowed to sell their meat until high noon (Riley interprets this to mean from one to three o’clock) .
19. All the lanes leading from Thames Street to the river to be kept clear so that persons on horseback may ride up and down.
20. No tavern to be kept open after curfew. ”

“ And happy. Nurse of art! the city rear'd
In beauteous pride her tower-encircled head;
And, stretching street on street, by thousands drew, ⁠115
From twining woody haunts, or the tough yew
To bows strong-straining, her aspiring sons.
⁠Then Commerce brought into the public walk
The busy merchant; the big ware-house built;
Rais'd the strong crane; choak'd up the loaded street ⁠120
With foreign plenty; and thy stream, O Thames,
Large, gentle, deep, majestic, king of floods!
Chose for his grand resort. On either hand,
Like a long wintry forest, groves of masts
Shot up their spires ”

“ Off the wharves of Thames Street lay the shops of all the nations of Western Europe. In the narrow lanes leading down to the stairs between the quays lived the seafaring folk and those who worked for them, and those who worked for the merchants.
London at one time was roughly divided into belts of population. The first belt is that of the Service. It consists of the foreshore between Thames Street and the river, with the lanes and houses upon it. The second is that of the Merchants, between Thames Street and the Markets of West and East Chepe. The third is that of the Markets. ”

“ They are least ashamed of it in Abbey Place. From that point onward it shows at the end of poor little streets, with meadows and willows beyond. From one of these—Blackfriars Road—a bridge crosses to the bathing-cut, which rounds the base of our ewer, and leads into the navigation stream. At the tail of an island formed by the cut the navigation stream itself comes in, and the united water bends round the gasworks, and so to Folly Bridge, past some broken little gardens and backs of houses in Thames Street. Folly Bridge is as poor as the other Thames bridges in Oxford. ”

“ This area, which is divided along the upper part by Thames Street, consists almost entirely of warehouses, wharves, and narrow lanes leading to the river stairs; the south of it consists of that curious little collection of inhabited streets, the whole of which was reclaimed from the foreshore; there are a tangle of narrow lanes and noisome courts lying among and between the wharves, which lanes and courts are always foul and stinking, inhabited by the people belonging to the service of the Port. ”

“ From the Obelisk at the junction, or approximate junction, of the Westminster, Waterloo, Blackfriars, Borough, and London-roads, in pretty well every direction to the banks of the Thames, are a mass of private-looking streets—as far as the absence of shops constitutes the privacy of a street—old and half-ruinous, or modern and trim, in all of which perhaps may be found street-sellers, and in some of which are pickpockets, thieves, and prostitutes. ”

“ Fishmongers Hall, situated in Thames street, a little above the Bridge, and has a view of the river. The entrance from Thames street is by a handsome passage which leads into a large square court, paved with flat stones, and encompassed by the great hall, the court room for the Assistants, and other grand apartments, with galleries; these are of an handsome construction, and are supported 302by Ionic columns, with an arcade. The front next the Thames has been lately repaired and ornamented at a very great expence. The ascent to the first apartments is by a double flight of steps from the wharf ”

“ From this wardrobe, by the west end of Carter lane, then up Creede lane, Ave Mary lane, a piece of Pater Noster row, up Warwick lane, all the east side, to a brewhouse called the Crown, as I said is of this ward. Touching lanes ascending out of Thames street to Knightriders’ street, the first [328] is Peter’s hill, wherein I find no matter of note, more than certain alms houses, lately founded on the west side thereof, by David Smith, embroiderer, for six poor widows, whereof each to have twenty shillings by the year. ”

“ Blinks, whom he left at the corner of the street—an obscure thoroughfare in Westminster. His rapid steps speedily brought him to the southern bank of the "fair and silvery Thames," as a poet who once possessed me (only for half an hour) described that uncleanly river, in some verses which I met in the pocket of his pantaloons. Diving into a narrow street, obviously, from the steepness of its descent, built upon arches, he knocked at a house of all the unpromising rest the least promising in aspect. A wretched hag opened the door, past whom the youth glided, in an absent and agitated manner ”

“ This is, according to the most probable conjecture, the place at which the great road which ran from the Straits of Dover to the north-western ports of the island crossed the Thames.
Here, of course, there could be no question of a ford; there can only have been a ferry. Such a ferry existed throughout the Middle Ages and up to the building of Westminster Bridge, and produced a large revenue for the Archbishop of Canterbury. The memory of it is preserved in the name of the street upon the Middlesex shore. ”

“ Morris, Hist. Outlines of Eng. Accidence, sect. 290, subsect. 4. Fish Street leads out of Lower Thames Street, close to the North end of London Bridge. The Harleian MS. alone reads Fleet Street, which is certainly wrong. [281] Considering that Thames Street is especially mentioned as a street for vintners (Liber Albus, p. 614) , and that Chaucer's own father was a Thames Street vintner, there can be little doubt about this matter. The poet is here speaking from his own knowledge; a consideration which gives the present passage a peculiar interest. Chepe is Cheapside. ”

“ Goring stands high among Thames villages, literally and figuratively. Its main street runs winding up-hill to the station, and though there are few of the genuine old cottages left, the small houses which have replaced them have been mostly built in the best modern river style, with exterior [61] beams, porches, projecting windows and ornamental gables. Creepers flourish abundantly. From the river the church is easily seen. A small and narrow backwater leads under a bridge to within fifty yards of the tower. ”