London Waterworks

London comes as something of an afterthought in Roger Deakin’s Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain (1999), inspired by John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer” and its film adaptation starring Burt Lancaster. By his own admission, urban swimming is not high on Deakin’s agenda, and the capital of Britain has little to offer an advocate of wild, freshwater swimming. Deakin notes in passing that the Port of London Authority strictly forbids swimming in the Thames. “Apart from the danger from constant river traffic,” he writes, tacitly condoning this state of affairs, “the water itself, although not as polluted as it used to be, can still seriously damage your health.” London-based live artist Amy Sharrocks sets out to challenge assumptions such as these in her latest piece, Thames Water. Together with playfully reflective offerings by Tim Etchells and Search Party, and commissioned by home live art for the Mayor’s Thames Festival, Sharrocks’s Thames Water was one in a trio of new works made in response to the River Thames, jointly titled A River Enquiry.

The piece was a bid to bring Londoners closer to their river, or rather to bring the Thames closer to Londoners. A human chain of volunteers carried plastic buckets filled with Thames water from the river’s pebbly shore by Tower Bridge, up some steep moss-covered steps in the Horsleydown Old Stairs leading to the Thames, and a few yards down a crowded cobblestone passageway running alongside the river all the way to Potters Fields Park, on the other side of the Tower Bridge. It took ten people or so almost two hours, the duration of a performance repeated on two consecutive days, and considerable effort to half fill an inflatable paddling pool of rather modest proportions. Members of the public were then given a chance “to wade through the water of the city” in the paddling pool. Barring children and artists, few appeared to be tempted by its murky waters.

The Thames is purportedly one of the cleanest rivers in the world, though when you examine it at close range, sitting in a paddling pool, this defies belief. Its turbid brown color, according to a home live art representative, is not due to pollution but to the silt churned up by the ebb and flow of the tide; it would have looked much the same in Roman times. A cow’s bone polished by the waters, rusty nails, pottery shards, seaweed, and bits of refuse emptied out of the buckets, were carefully removed and displayed like so many trophies at a nearby table. Volunteers from Thames21—a charity dedicated to keeping London’s network of waterways clean—were on hand to demonstrate that the water’s pH and oxygen levels are ideally suited to support plant and fish life. Some one hundred and twenty fish species, freshwater and marine alike, have been recorded in the river over the last twenty-five years, including salmon, which returned to the Thames in 1974. So why shouldn’t Londoners follow suit?

This is precisely what Amy Sharrocks invites them to do. Having drafted fifty people to join her for a group swim across the capital’s public baths, ponds, and lakes in SWIm (2007), Sharrocks used Thames Water at last year’s Thames Festival to enlist public support for another art swim, one that would see a hundred hardy souls cross the river beneath Tower Bridge in the year of London’s upcoming 2012 Olympics. The petition-cum-manifesto for Swim the Thames 2012, which all interested parties were given to sign, does not propose to flaunt the Port of London Authority measures in a guerilla-style swim, but simply to draw attention to the Thames as...