A Wander along the Thames

London is less than an hour’s express train ride from Cambridge. This has probably given me a bit of a case of “close enough to go anytime so I don’t.” Before the pandemic, I went occasionally to concerts and museums in London, always accompanied by a little wandering. But nothing like proper exploration (let alone top tourist attractions), which I could always do another time. Since the pandemic, repeated national lockdowns and Covid caution have kept me away until the last few months. It’s a shame, because London is like Cambridge on steroids for a place collector like me—nearly infinite nooks and crannies. The clock is ticking and I’m learning not to take London for granted.

The theatre district of the West End of London, comparable to Broadway in New York City, is one place I hadn’t managed to visit. So, recently, when TodayTix alerted me about a sale for West End tickets, I went for it, choosing the musical Come from Away on the next weekend. It also happened to be a weekend I was moving house, but like I said, London is so close you can do an evening or half-day and still get your money’s worth. So, another little wandering glimpse. Without any real plans other than wandering, I took an early afternoon train the day of the play. I had to go to London Liverpool Street Station because the slightly quicker route to Kings Cross Station was disrupted. This was a serendipity, because although it was several miles from the West End, it placed me close enough to the River Thames to do my wandering along the river. I’ve always been drawn to the Thames and its thoroughfares and bridges and waterfront skyline when I visit London—never mind its slight stench. So while the musical and West End were great, my walk along the Thames to get there ended up being an equally vivid highlight.

The station isn’t right on the river, so I had to take a little detour to get there, which took me through the back alleys of a posh financial district street. This was eerie, being 3pm on a Saturday; the shiny buildings and the streets were virtually empty. I had also just passed the old Medieval boundary of the City of London, the tiny nucleus of the now-sprawling metropolis, but I didn’t realize this until later. I did happen to notice, partway down Old Broad Street, the first Easter Egg of the day: Austin Friars.

This wouldn’t have meant anything to me before I read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, but now that I’m familiar with Mantel’s intensely researched and vividly imagined details of the antihero’s life, I knew that Austin Friars was his beloved London home, and I practically felt like I had been there. I didn’t actually know where it was in London, and it looks very different now; the house burned down in 1666, so all I saw was an engraved banner over a stone arch and a tucked-away, private-looking door. As a result I didn’t explore, and missed the remaining fragments I read about later—an old “Dutch Church” and a statue or two, somewhere around the corner. I’ll have to go back.

Next I wandered down Threadneedle Street onto the imposing Neoclassical scene of the Bank of England and surrounding Important Buildings. I paused in the late afternoon sun to admire the glowing façades and the towering monument to the Duke of Wellington and to read plaques about the Important Buildings. But I still had three miles to walk and I hadn’t reached the river yet.

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It was almost a straight shot to the London Bridge, the first of the procession of bridges on my walk. Even though I would be staying on the north bank, I crossed halfway with the busy stream of pedestrians to get a view of Tower Bridge in the sun just before a skyscraper shadow fell over it. The Tower of London and associated Bridge are one of those tourist attractions I just haven’t gotten around to actually visiting, but the view from afar is iconic. Also part of this view is the HMS Belfast, an old WWII warship now moored permanently in the Thames as a museum I haven’t been to.  Lots of people on London Bridge had the same idea as me, not crossing to get anywhere, just to look out over the water and wave and whistle at the dinner cruise boats passing under.

London Bridge itself isn’t a lot to look at, despite its falling-down fame. The plaque said that multiple London Bridges had spanned that part of the river over the centuries, including versions lined with houses that burned down in multiple London fires. Today’s low-lying concrete bridge with two wide arches was built in 1973, and the only distinguishing feature is “London Bridge” carved into the underside. I discovered this when I took the stairs going down and under the bridge to the Thames Path, my next serendipitous find that would take me most of the way to my destination with true riverfront views of buildings, boats, and the low-tide mud studded with rotted-away pier foundations.

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Funnily enough, the low-tide mud was one of the things I was most excited about. One of my favorite books I’ve read about London is Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames[1] by Lara Maiklem. I probably knew that the Thames was a tidal river before reading the book, but this fact gained incredible dimension when I learned about the class of hobbyists who track the tides and spend their free time picking along the foreshore to find the centuries’ worth of jumbled artifacts preserved by the Thames mud. These are mudlarks, and for the first time, I saw them in real life, otherwise nondescript people in knee-length boots and gloves roving over the mud below the bank wall. Lara Maiklem is a bit of a celebrity for me now, and when I saw a lone woman bending over to inspect something—a Tudor coin? a Roman potshard? a medieval marble?—I got excited even though I knew the chances of crossing paths with her were very low. In any case, I highly recommend her book and its tour of layered London history via the Thames, as well as the personal highs and lows of her mudlarking life. (She also posts about her finds on social media, @london.mudlark, if you don’t have time to read.) Maybe I’ll try mudlarking someday myself. If it didn’t require a permit and a bit more preparation and time, I might have climbed down one of the ladders or steep staircases to the mud right then and there.

The Thames Path hugs the river as much as possible, squeezing past pubs and construction sites and the backsides of shopping centers that have paved over old riverside docks and factories and wharfs. Mostly, only the river’s mossy concrete walls and the stubs of old barge beds remain. One historical dock, Queenhithe, has a mosaic commemorating it along the little inlet still slotted into the concrete riverfront. Here and a few other places the Thames Path had to veer off into underpasses or alleyways, less picturesque but with the slight mystique that unpolished, half-hidden industrial and urban landscapes can have (at least for me).

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After the stark railway bridge and colorful Southwark Bridge was the Millennium Bridge, the spine-like pedestrian suspension bridge that the Death Eaters dramatically snap at the beginning of the first Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows film. (In real life, it was dubbed the Wobbly Bridge when first opened because of a weird physics thing where people’s walking phased with each other and made the bridge sway; they’ve since fixed this.) I’ve been on this bridge a few times because it spans straight between St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Tate Modern Art Museum and other nearby attractions like the Shakespeare’s Globe replica. Of those, I’ve only been in the Tate Modern, which dominates the view from the opposite bank with its modernist brick power plant chimney.

Next were the twin Blackfriars bridges, a Railway Bridge and a road Bridge, with the exotic red Victorian pillars of a past Blackfriars Railway Bridge still standing between them. If they were ever removed there would be a sad decrease in Instagram photo ops in the world. (There was at least one other photographer there, but with a proper camera.) The existing Blackfriars Bridge is also Victorian, with the characteristic colorful painted wrought iron and pillar embellishments, and picturesque in its own right.   Across the river are a few towering skyscrapers, including One Blackfriars, or the Boomerang—one of the many shiny London skyscrapers with cheeky nicknames (although The Shard, probably the most famous, took that epithet as an official name out of spite).

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Here, waterfront construction forced me back up onto the main road, which became the Victoria Embankment, a Victorian (surprise) promenade-style development of the foreshore to make it more civically attractive.   It does have a grand feel—parks, wide streets, more historic warships, a cycle “superhighway.” And thanks to missing my turn, I stumbled on another quintessential Victorian installation: “Cleopatra’s Needle,” an ancient Egyptian obelisk flanked by statues of sphinxes. To be fair, it wasn’t exactly pilfered by the British like a lot of Egyptian stuff in England; it was actually given to England by an Ottoman ruler of Egypt (slightly before the Victorian Era) in commemoration of British prowess in Egypt. It wasn’t installed on the Victoria Embankment until 1878. The sphinxes were made to go with it by the same architect who designed the sturgeons coiled around the lampposts.

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Here I finally had to leave the Thames Path to head to the West End theatres and find some dinner. The West End theatres and restaurants were hit hard by the pandemic—I remember an appeal sent out by the theatres to the government to officially declare a lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic so that they wouldn’t lose their insurance for the missing audiences. Now, though, with restrictions lifted, all seems basically as before—theatres are fully bookable (though my theatre required proof of vaccination or a covid test), streets were buzzing, restaurants were busy. I appreciated the energy and lights and colors in the setting sun, though I was a bit disoriented by the contrast to Covid times and nervous about the crowds. I found a little Japanese place where I could eat a bento box outside and people watch.

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Finally, Come from Away—though the theatre was uncomfortably crowded, there was something right about this arrangement: the musical is based on the experiences of people in the small Newfoundland town of Gander when dozens of flights carrying thousands of people from around the world were diverted there from American airspace on 9/11. It was a high-energy, tear-jerking, warm and messily human show, which we were all watching and reacting to together, shoulder-to-shoulder, a week after the 20^th anniversary of the attack. Despite having come alone, I didn’t feel alone.

That feeling faded a bit when the show ended and we all went our separate ways, and when I got on the Underground where everyone avoids eye contact and the train where everyone is in their own little silo. But it was far from a lonely day. Being in the city is always an experience side-by-side with others, both physically and in the cultural hubs and reference points that so many have shared through so many layers of history. You’ll never run out in London.

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[1] Known in the US as Mudlark: In Search of London’s past Along the River Thames