CHAPTER 36

The Light of the Thames

What are the colours of the Thames? There are the green banks of the upper river, broken not monotonous; there are always successive tints and shades in the colours within the river, fluctuations as subtle as the movement of quiet waters from the brightest to the palest green. The colours ripple and unfold, break apart and yield one to another. The green of the bankside, for example, is striated with golden moss and the yellow stars of the hawkweed, by wild geraniums and by wild strawberries; there is the sulphur of the toadflax, and the purple blue of the skullcap. The predominant colours of the river flowers are yellow and blue, to be seen, for example, in the fleabane and the dewberry that haunt the banks.

In the spring and autumn the riverside is sprinkled with yellow, with a gentle strain of white flowing through the mixture; in the spring, too, the trees are groaning with the weight of their blossom. The fields beside the Thames are white and yellow, with the river flowing between bank upon bank of blossom. In the summer months the purplish pink of the willow-herb and the loosestrife tends to predominate. This may subliminally change the mood of the river from one of optimism to one of meditation, but the general effect is that of natural congruity. There are no inharmonious colours in nature. The dark blue of the dewberry, together with the yellow head of the fleabane, are more deeply satisfying than the blue and gold of any painter.

The Thames has other colours. There is the silvery sheen to be observed at dawn or dusk in the estuary, an emanation of the light breaking through cloud onto the flat landscape. And there are the varied colours of the water itself. It can be the deepest green and the palest silver. In the colder months it can become wonderfully clear, and in its deeper reaches acquires the bluish green tint of spring water. It can be turbid, and muddy brown. In the shadow of a bridge it will sometimes seem to have become blue. Then, from a distance, its reaches seem like a thread of white. Its colour can sometimes be perceived by contrast; there are localities where a tributary, entering the river, is of a much darker hue than the Thames itself.

There are also local variations. At Oxford the water is deep green tinged with brown; downstream, at Radley, it has become dark blue. From Putney onwards samples from the river have a cloudy colour. In the reaches of London it can seem black, or sometimes a dark copper colour. It can become ash grey. And of course it is a mirror to the colours of the world. It reflects the life upon its surface, with the blue of a sail or the rusty vermilion of a barge. When storm clouds pass across it, it turns to the deepest grey and charcoal. The colours change perpetually in implicit communion with the wind and with the sky, with the sunlight and the scudding clouds. It can be silky green in summer, and blue in spring. But there are also times when the sky is brilliant enough and the river itself seems to be in shadow.

Any river can become black. But the Thames is not so much black as dark. It has always been called the “dark Thames,” but darkness is not a colour or even the absence of colour. Perhaps the river has no colour. Which is as much as to say that, if it partakes of all colours, then perhaps it is colourless. There are times along the upper Thames when the absolute clearness of the water is its most surprising quality—“as sweet as milke, as clear as glasse,” as the water-poet John Taylor put it in 1640. When the water settles it is generally clear at the top, sandy-brown in the middle, and a dirty olive colour at the bottom. And what colour do you call it when the plash of water beneath your boat seems to be amber—but then becomes dark green by the bank? What are the colours between the two? It is not amber or green, or black or grey, or even opal. It is a colour that no one can name. Some have called it the colour of death, all-enveloping. It is, perhaps, the colour or no-colour of oblivion. Just as white light is the emanation of all colours, so the transparency of water is the quintessence of everything. It is the natural presence of the world. It is unique but it has no identity. It becomes what it beholds.

The light of the river is something that will never be seen on sea or land. It can transform the landscape. At twilight the light of the river is a soft grey, a lacustrine light, sometimes touched by the saffron tints of the setting sun. Deep water emanates a light different from shallow water. The river can appear a broad sheet of light, in some places and at some times, while at others it is murky and confused. Sometimes the water within the estuary of the Thames seems to be covered by a skin of phosphorescence, and the brilliant surface of the water breaks into a thousand points of light when it is disturbed.

The artists of the river are considered in the next chapter, but it is worth remarking here that they have always been interested in these kinetic qualities of Thames light. Stanley Spencer’s The Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard, just beside the Thames, is a hymn to light; the light on the wall of the church seemed to Spencer to be the light that he saw when swimming underwater. In other paintings, Swan Upping and Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta, the light on the Thames is granted a mystical significance. It is the holy presence or the substance of the river. Spencer once suggested that the excitement of the holiday-makers in Swan Upping was that “for them the climax in heaven lay in the sunlit continuation of the marsh meadows beyond the bend in the river.”

In Sunset on the River, and other paintings of the Thames, Turner registers an impression of the overwhelming effect of the light lingering in the sky; it is a continuation of the river or, rather, the Thames itself is a continuation of that effulgent and radiant light that inhabits creation. There is no river in Turner without sky, the two sources of light reflecting one another in a thousand fugitive and evanescent ways. For Turner the river was an experiment, or a study, in light. That is why he was so deeply drawn towards it. That is why it is the central subject of his art. Light was at the core of the river. It was part of his purpose to elicit it and thus to celebrate it.

Yet how to paint water? It was a subject about which he thought hard and deeply. It is no less than moving light, and therefore cannot be rendered as fixed and immobile upon a canvas. Water looks “like” movement. When it is painted, it becomes some other thing. It is a question that Turner only resolved when he scattered the world into a prism, into a mist of colour whose wreaths continually change tone and hue. When light becomes the transcendent fact of his painting, then the river acquires its natural power. The light of the Thames can be considered “pure” in implicit analogy with its waters. When Dorothy Wordsworth stood upon Westminster Bridge she noticed, in her journal for July 1802, that “the sun shone so brightly with such a pure light” that it entranced her. It was the river, even here, that made it pure.

As the Thames moves and mingles with London it becomes the most interesting light in the city. At night, with the reflection of the myriad lights above its surface, it comes alive. Then we have that phenomenon of the glitter of the river, that fugitive and mercurial scattering of light that is peculiar to water. The “silver Themmes” can become quicksilver, scattered across its shifting silver surface, and reflected below by streams of easy brightness descending into the ooze. The effect is that of stars, or constellations of stars, in the night sky. For some this is a cold light, a distant light, as cold as the depths of the waters themselves. This light is different in depth and texture from the soft light of the Upper Thames. The glittering is a warning not to come too close.

But, at night, the river can also become a pool of sleeping blackness. Once it has lost its sheen of silver, it becomes ink-dark and viscous. It is silent. It is as still as a river of the dead. In midstream it has a greenish hue, but the rest is purple or black. The shadows of the riverside buildings lend another tone of darkness, and the colour has faded from the city itself so that it is lost in the obscurity of the sky. This was the river, at least, for many centuries. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is never wholly dark as it winds through London. The street-lights, and the lights blazing in innumerable buildings, keep it illuminated. Down by the estuary the vivid flaring lights of the treatment plants and refineries are like giant torches guiding it on its processional way to the sea. Only in the Upper Thames, and on certain stretches of the river by the marshes, is still the perfect pitch of darkness; only there is the water still black and silent.

The sounds of the river are as various as those of the natural and human worlds. It might seem unnaturally quiet in the estuarial region. Where once the river was filled with life and activity, there is now very little business upon the water. It has become in part an empty river, which imparts the illusion of silence. But there is still the flurry of the wake of tankers and of small-engined boats crossing the flat surface like water-beetles. A little upriver, in the neighbourhood of Greenhithe or Tilbury, the noise of the Thames is that of clangour or loud lament, with the sound of cranes and other machinery fighting against the lap of the water and the raucous cries of the seagulls.

In its upper reaches the Thames partakes of that peace which is always associated with quiet or isolated waters. In that way it can be a balm and restorative. Thoreau believed that by looking into water, the “earth’s eye,” “the beholder measures the depths of his own nature.” This is the context for the presumed silence of the river. It is a place for inward contemplation. But it can never wholly be silent. The sounds of the world surround it—the innumerable callings of birds, the wind in the branches overhanging the water, the occasional splash of a fish, all these sounds have accompanied the course of the river for millennia upon millennia before the onset of human time. If we could by an act of sympathetic magic return to that unimaginable epoch, would the sound be the only familiar element?

Once the sun has set, the sounds of the night surround the river; the leap of the fish is then more like a pistol shot than a splash, the leaves fall upon the bank with a definite crack, the wind is louder and the noises of the creeping creatures of the night seem very close.

In the human river, and in those stretches of it moving within London, there is perpetual sound, even if only the waters lapping rhythmically against the side of old wharves and docks. In the river of London, too, there is the noise of the tide running against the banks. In the days of the great docks the noise of commercial activity never stopped, night or day, upon what was principally an industrial waterway. The hymn of the river was then the bumping of bales and the hissing of steam, the riveting and the scraping of keels, the shouting of orders through the night. On the Embankment itself there were the boom of fog signals and the muffled roar of motor-cars mixed with the whistle of the trains and the ringing of the bells of the City churches. These were also the circumambient sounds of the river, as if the Thames itself had become the echo-chamber of the city.

It is sometimes forgotten how noisy the river once was in the centre of the capital. In previous centuries, at night, it would have been heard in most of the streets within the walls. George Borrow, in his novel Lavengro (1851), dwelled upon the cacophony of the Thames:

there was a wild hurly-burly upon the bridge which nearly deafened me. But if upon the bridge there was confusion, below it was a confusion ten times compounded…Truly tremendous was the roar of the descending waters, and the bellow of the tremendous gulfs, which swallowed them for a time, and then cast them forth foaming and frothing from their horrid wombs.

The river had become a “roaring gulf,” like the roar of the city all around it. In the same period Henry Mayhew chose in London Labour and the London Poor to hear the more soothing sounds of the Thames, with the airs of the “four bells” upon the ships mixed with “the tinkling of the distant purl-man’s bell” the “purl-man” was a purveyor of beer who worked upon the river, selling his product to the sailors and labourers. Mayhew also heard “the rattle of some chain let go” and “the chorus of many seamen heaving at the ropes” with “the hoarse voice of someone from the shore bawling through his hands to his mate aboard the craft in the river.” This is the human voice of the river; its waters seem monstrous and “horrid,” but its devotees or inhabitants issue a more sympathetic sound.

The smells of that earlier river, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were legion. Some of them survive still. There was the smell of mud, exposed on the foreshore at low tide, strong and pungent. There was the smell of smoke or, rather, of the smoke-laden vapours that travelled upriver from the Port. It is not an unpleasing smell for those who savour the various products of humankind; it is redolent of energy and labour, somehow mixed with the melancholy pleasure of the bonfire. When people returned to London by way of London Bridge or Westminster Bridge, they were greeted with a familiar smoky aroma. There was the evocative scent of tar, always associated with shipping; it was the smell that Thomas Carlyle noticed when he first moved to Chelsea. By the dockside the odour of tar was mingled with those of hemp and of tow. And then there was always the scent of beer (or, shall we say, of barley and malt and hops) emanating from the huge breweries beside the Thames; the smell still lingers in Wandsworth, and fugitive odours have been gathered on the south bank near Southwark like the spectres of ancient manufacture.

The land of the Thames docks was the land of multitudinous odours. The atmosphere of pungent tobacco was succeeded by the more soporific aroma of rum; in some quarters the air was filled with the stench of hides, or of binfuls of horn, while from other parts emanated the smell of coffee or the savour of nutmeg and cinnamon. There are corners of Cinnamon Wharf, now a complex of apartments, where fugitive phantoms of that smell seem still to linger. The smell of softwood timber came from the Surrey Commercial Docks, while from Shad Thames came the smell of dog biscuits and the odour of Seville oranges. On the North Quay of the Isle of Dogs there was the smell of sugar, and on the South Quay of dates and tea. There was the smell of wine, and its various incarnations of sherry, port and brandy; there was the smell of oakum and of wool.

The upper reaches of the Thames are, in contrast, filled with the perfume of creation. Along the banks of the Upper Thames comes the smell of grass and of meadows, mingled with the peculiar dank richness of the water-meadows. It is an intoxicating mix of moisture and of growth. Here can be sensed the aromatic odour of sweet sedge and the sharper scent of the osier bark.

Does the river itself have its own smell? If it does, then it is an ancient one. Water itself has no smell, but all the associations and affiliations of the Thames have their own particular odour. It is, perhaps, the odour of the old. It smells of mud and weed and forgotten things. It smells of mould and of fungus. It smells of rotting wood. It smells of engine oil. It smells of metal. It is sometimes sharp. But it is also sometimes refreshing. It smells of the wind and the rain. It smells of storms. In some places it seems to smell of the sea. It smells of everything. It smells of nothing.