Read The House by the Thames Online
Authors: Gillian Tindall
The House by the Thames
Chapter I: In which we find the House
Chapter II: London's Other Town
Chapter III: Of Winchester Geese, Bird's-eye Views and Show Business
Chapter IV: Of Water, Fire and the Great Rebuilding
Chapter V: Genteel Houses and a Glamorous Trade
Chapter VI: Of Bonds, Leases and Other Dirty Delights
Chapter VII: The World of Edward Sells II
Chapter VIII: All Modern Conveniences
Chapter IX: In which Invisibility Settles on Bankside
Chapter XI: Bad Guys and Good Ones
Just across the River Thames from St Paul's Cathedral stands an old and elegant house. Over the course of almost 450 years the dwelling on this site has witnessed many changes. From its windows, people have watched the ferrymen carry Londoners to and from Shakespeare's Globe; they have gazed on the Great Fire; they have seen the countrified lanes of London's marshy south bank give way to a network of wharves, workshops and tenements â and then seen these, too, become dust and empty air.
Rich with anecdote and colour, this fascinating book breathes life into the forgotten inhabitants of the house â the prosperous traders; an early film star; even some of London's numberless poor. In so doing it makes them stand for legions of others and for whole world that we have lost through hundreds of years of London's history.
Gillian Tindall is well known for the quality of her writing and the meticulous nature of her research. She is a master of miniaturist history, making a particular person or situation stand for a much larger picture. She began her career as a prize-winning novelist and has continued to publish fiction, but she has also staked out a particular territory in idiosyncratic non-fiction that is brilliantly evocative of place. Her
The Fields Beneath: the history of one London village
, which first appeared almost thirty years ago, has rarely been out of print since; nor has
Celestine: voices from a French village
, published in the mid-1990s and translated into several languages, for which she was decorated by the French government. Her two most recent books are
The Journey of Martin Nadaud
(âhaunting and moving ⦠impossible not to love for its humanity and integrity'
The Times
) and
The Man Who Drew London: Wenceslaus Hollar in reality and imagination
(âa book that is both elegant and thoughtful'
Sunday Telegraph
), also published by Pimlico. Gillian Tindall lives with her husband in London, in a house that is old â though not as old as the house by the Thames that forms the centrepiece of her present book.
The House by the Thames
âTindall is a painstaking scholar, but it is her empathy with ordinary lives that makes this book so remarkable.' Frances Spalding,
Sunday Times
âThis graceful discursive book restores forgotten lives, and unlocks a door to reveal London in its glorious breadth and entirety.' Christopher Fowler,
Independent on Sunday
âThis is London's history as detective story, an assemblage of minutiae, a layering of clues ⦠from vestry minutes books to old Thames flood prevention maps â through which Tindall has dredged and sorted in order to reconstruct the fascinating and, at times, touchingly intimate history of this tiny spot. What strikes you, above and beyond the sheer volume of graft that must have gone into compiling this book and its delightful illustrations, is the generosity of its author in writing it. Central London has been dissected by someone with the patient eye, the gift for elegant renovation and the forensic skills of Gillian Tindall.' Melanie McGrath,
Evening Standard
âThe story that Gillian Tindall weaves in this book is no less fascinating for an absence of grand characters and in many ways it is the better for it.' Clive Aslet,
Spectator
âTindall is a microhistorian with a rare power to communicate the fruit of her diligent and meticulous research ⦠a wonderful book.'
BBC History Magazine
Long View of London from Bankside
. Wenceslaus Hollar, etching (c.1640).
The Tudor âFish House'. Engraving.
Edwards Sells's first market sale note (1755).
Thames Coal-boat. After a daguerreotype by Beard, in Mayhew's
London Labour and the London Poor
.
Edward Perronet Sells II. Courtesy of Andrew Sells.
Edward Perronet Sells III. Courtesy of Andrew Sells.
Bankside 1927
. Etching by Grace Golden. © Museum of London. Courtesy of Colin Mabberley.
Anna Lee at home in number 49 (1936). Courtesy of the late Anna Lee.
Bankside power station, from across the river (1946). Courtesy of Southwark History Library.
Bankside 1970
. Oil painting by Trevor Chamberlain. Courtesy of Alan Runagall.
Part of the family tree of the Bankside Sells
THE HOUSE BY THE THAMES
and the people who lived there
GILLIAN TINDALL
O. G. S. Crawford, archaeologist and aerial photographer (1886â1957)
Chapter I
I
N WHICH WE FIND THE
H
OUSE
YOU CAN REACH
the house a number of different ways. It will still be the same, an inconspicuous but remarkable survivor in a landscape where almost everything else has changed. And changed. And changed again.
You may approach it from London Bridge, as people did when it was a new house, because that was then the only route from the opposite bank of the Thames, on foot, on horseback or on wheels. There was already a bridge there under the Roman occupation, and a later one was constructed in wood on the remains of the Roman stone work. The song that is still sung in our nurseries today commemorates this wooden bridge: it was burnt down in the Danish wars about a thousand years after the Roman invasion. Subsequent bridges on the site also suffered from fire, or were broken down by gales and flood tides. â
Sticks and stones will wash away
â¦'