"Thames Sacred River" by Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd is a phenomenon: he writes good books and he writes lots of them. A fervent Londoner, he has written some wonderful novels and many biographies, including Dickens, Chaucer and Blake (he specialises in Londoners). My favourite Peter Ackroyd book is the novel Hawksmoor which purports to be written by the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor who built churches with and alongside Christopher Wren (but Hawksmoor churches always contain something a little sinister). The novel is written in seventeenth century prose which is a little difficult for the first page but then you race along.

Thames Sacred River is also well written and has many points of interest. I was particularly interested because of my walk along the Thames from the Barrier upstream to Windsor (see pictures here). Otherwise I would have found it terribly heavy going.

Part of the problem is that I was much interested in the history of the communities alongside the Thames than in the sanctity of the river. Ackroyd goes overboard on the mystical communion between man and water citing Celtic deities to Stanley Spencer's paintings. There are many pages about these themes. Sometimes the work degenerates into lists such as the three pages of churches named for St Mary.

There are many points of interest in this book and Ackroyd's reading has clearly been immense but it is eclectic. The Hell Fire club receives about two sentences whilst Lewis Carroll's boat trip on the river recurs again and again. As a work of reference it is patchy and marred by its meandering organisation; I would rather have had a chapter on every town along the river or the material organised into centuries or something rather than this thematic approach: sacred river, river of trade, working river, stream of pleasure etc.

Hard going.

April 2009 447 pages

"The House on the Thames" by Gillian Tindall

If you cross the Millennium Bridge in London to the Tate Modern and then turn right towards the Globe Theatre you will encounter a small terrace of red brick buildings. One of them is the house of the title. This book charts its story from before it was built (when there was an Inn on the site) to the present day. The book tells about the people who owned it, including a family of coal merchants and a film star, and lived in it (including Peregrine Worsthorne). There is some fascinating detail about the area and the developments.

I really enjoyed it. It showed me that you can do history about anything and that microhistory can be as fascinating as Kings and Queens. There were some things that irked me slightly. The last few years are rushed over. The maps simply aren't good enough to be able to work out all the things the author talks about (I absolutely must go to Bankside to see the house for myself). And I never found out when or why the local parish church became Southwark Cathedral. But basically it was a surprisingly gripping read.

Jan 2009 247 pages