London's Thames: The River That Shaped a City and Its History (review)

In recent years, the environmental, social, and economic history of the Thames has begun to attract sustained scholarly attention. Dale Porter, who goes unmentioned in Gavin Weightman's brief and unhelpful bibliography, has narrated the astonishingly complex and contested story of the construction of the Embankment. Stephen Halliday, also omitted from Weightman's note on further reading, has revisited the pollution crisis of 1858—the so-called Great Stink—which paralyzed Parliament and sickened all those living or working within sniffing distance of the river. Jonathan Schneer has contributed a typically elegant and comprehensive cultural history.

Somewhat earlier, Gloria Clifton and John Owen wrote revisionist accounts of the Metropolitan Board of Works, established to administer the construction of the massive mid-nineteenth-century interacting sewage system. Subsequently this body insistently and controversially claimed an "interest" in policing pollution, thereby alienating the ancient and self-avowedly "independent" Thames Conservancy. (Weightman grants the board a cluster of mentions.) Roy Porter's sparkling social history of the capital touched on river matters; and two very useful books by Stephen Inwood, neither of them noted, clarified changing aspects of metropolitan government that had a direct bearing on water supply and environment. As if all this were not enough, the astonishingly productive Peter Ackroyd has produced a massive longue durée rumination on the history of the capital—part survey, part semi-imagined magical-mystery tour—which wanders down to the foreshore, the docks, and hidden riverside city squares and lanes that the author knows better than any other living writer.

So, do we need a brief—very brief—overview of the Thames that seeks, in less than 150 large-print pages, to take the reader from the immediately postprehistoric era to the early twenty-first century? The answer must be in the negative. Moving back and forth between past and present, and present and past, Weightman's skimpy account comprises twenty or so chapters of three or four pages each, and devotes equal space to topics as diverse as the evolution of London Bridge, the Boat Race, and the Barrier. Perhaps this in some ways comforting vade mecum would make a helpful pocket-companion for an intelligent visitor who had decided to center his or her wanderings around a tantalizing city on Eliot's once mysterious but now altogether more humdrum "strong brown God." There can be no doubting Weightman's fluency, modesty, and love of his subject, nor of his knowledge of the Thames, particularly of issues relating to the pollution, purification, and the restoration of aquatic life to a waterway that, between 1800 and 1850, became a repository for the outpourings of vast numbers of water closets.

But despite these redeeming features, the origins and rationale of Weightman's study are rendered obscure in light of the fact that he is himself already the author of London's River: The Thames Story (1990). Nobody wants there to be an end to the making of books, but this set of random observations on this, that, and the other in, on, and around the Thames neither fills an identifiable niche in the market nor gets to grips in a sequential or summary manner with some of the most pressing problems that have exercised London and Londoners for decades and centuries.