How well do you really know London's river?
Available for the first time, a unique book of drawings and commentary illustrating the heart and history of London's glorious waterfront as it appeared at the beginning of the 21st Century.
The drawings contain a wealth of detail and form a continuous and colourful panorama taking the reader on a 25 mile journey of discovery along the north bank from Chelsea in the west, via Westminster, the City of London, The Isle of Dogs and Docklands to the Thames Flood Barrier. The return trip takes the reader back upstream along the south bank taking in the Millennium Dome, Greenwich and the old Naval College, Southwark and Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, the dynamic South Bank and the London Eye to Battersea.
This unique and comprehensive book provides the answers. It features a host of architectural detail and descriptions of how each part of the river has come to look the way it does today. This very special publication presents London's Waterfront its history, architecture and regeneration:
- as a panorama of over 500 detailed drawings
- in 272 pages illustrating over 1500 buildings along the 25 miles of both banks of the river as it appeared on 1 January 2000
- including the fascinating historical background to interesting and important buildings
- with its 16 bridges
- in a beautiful hardback edition
and much more…
Your personal and unique record
If you live or work on the river Thames or simply have an interest in London and one of the greatest arterial waterways of Europe, this book is for you. It will provide you with an unrivalled illustrated, historical and permanent record of London's Waterfront at the turn of the 21st century.
Introduction
London is a magnificent city of many dimensions, by most measures one of the greatest in the modern world. It has a population of over eight million people, with a multitude of social and cultural backgrounds and it occupies over 600 square miles. London was the biggest port of the world's greatest trading nation for a period of 400 years between the 16th and the 20th centuries. It was the hub of that trade and the centre of the British Empire. London's diverse waterfront architecture bears witness on the one hand to its past and on the other to the new influences in the global order. London today remains at the centre of the world's commercial stage although the maritime and industrial landscape has made way for apartment blocks and the offices of the financial institutions of the City. It still plays host to the mother of parliaments and a centuries-old monarchy. The centres of national government continue to occupy Whitehall and Westminster, Chelsea has maintained its domestic charm and exclusivity, while south of the river the arts and recreation continue to play a full part in the lives of Londoners. As it has since London's earliest beginnings in the first century AD as the Roman Londinium and through all this hive of activity runs this great natural asset, Old Father Thames.
In autumn 1997 a trip from Richmond in West London to Greenwich aboard MV Jacana, my brother-in-law Peter Banks' Dutch barge, started it all. We Londoners had a wonderful ringside view on the journey downriver but to our chagrin, we could not identify many of the buildings or derive the pleasure of discovery as we cast around for information on their names, historical connections and architecture. We had books on London and the Thames aplenty, but none presented the riverside panorama as it unfolded. Hence my project began and the product is this book, which sets out to present the industrial, commercial, political, and residential faces of Britain's capital city as seen from the Thames as they appeared at the dawn of th 21st century.
Our purposes in comprehensively documenting the richness and variety of London's coastline from Battersea Railway Bridge to the Thames Flood Barrier are twofold; firstly to provide an architectural record of London's waterfront as it appeared on 1 January 2000. Secondly, we hope to contribute to the pleasure of the host of men, women and children who live, work, play in or visit London by helping them to recognise their surroundings and excite an interest into how the riverfront has come to look the way it does today. We have augmented the panorama by a simple historical and architectural digest where we think there is something of particular interest to be said. We have chosen this stretch of the river because it is the most important, both architecturally and historically. It is also the most densely populated and has been the subject of substantial change in recent years.
We decided to record the waterfront through drawings as drawings have, in our view, a charm of their own. Creating the record in this way overcomes the technical problems of matching several hundred photographs and correctly aligning the skyline over some 25 miles of riverbank. But photography did play an essential role in providing the initial material from which Graham Reed made the illustrations. We realised that each building and the spaces between buildings had to be photographed square on, and it took 120 plus rolls of film to create the record. The London landscape is blessed with many trees and this is particularly noticeable in Chelsea and along the Embankment, and for that reason I did most of the photography during the winter months. The Thames Path provided a perfect vantage point to "shoot" one riverfront from the other bank but downstream of Tower Bridge the photography was done from a boat, or rather boats, for it took several trips.
I have attempted to achieve a consistent relationship in size of buildings relative to one another as seen from across the river. Getting a consistent scale was a real challenge, firstly because the distance from the camera changes with the width of the river, and secondly because not all buildings are right at the water's edge, in fact very few are. We invented our own scale and a telephoto lens on a 35mm SLR camera gave us the flexibility we needed to adjust the image size to allow for these factors. I decided to use colour film: it is readily available, inexpensive to process and, at ASA 100, of sufficient sharpness for our purposes, and of course provided the record of colour for the selected drawings.
From the photographs - we did our final run up and down the river in December 1999 - Graham produced an illustration of each building and its surroundings. This was not at all a straightforward undertaking, as he had to overlay prints to get a true perspective of anyone building and its correct location especially in relation to the skyline. A number of prints was needed to record some buildings, not only in their length but also their height; the Houses of Parliament required no fewer than twenty. Together we checked each drawing against the photograph for detail - windows, drain pipes, lampposts and so on - but the number of amendments needed was quite small, a testament to Graham's experienced eye in the field of technical illustration. Once we were content that the drawings were complete and each included a key to mate to its neighbour when scanned, they were photocopied onto plain paper. Those drawings with elements we felt were of particular interest, or simply to make the panorama come alive were coloured. We set about the task of identifying each building and every feature, trawling through maps old and new, walking the riverbank and quizzing those we met going about their daily business, visiting libraries and much reading. For information on the names of the literally hundreds of wharves that existed in the 1950s I called on the Port of London Hydrographic Department in Gravesend. Today the working wharves can be counted on the fingers of two hands. This information formed the basis of an index of the 560 plus drawings showing the buildings and other features, which was sent to the writers to do the research and write the descriptions. Once complete, this body of work was handed to the expert to scan and stitch together the drawings to form the panorama and to add the texts. This was a greater undertaking than any of us involved had imagined calling for much patience and skill to match small changes in scale and to produce a page that is both true and attractive.
The panorama in the book has been laid out as it appears to the observer. The north bank therefore reads from west to east, the south from east to west. We identify prominent features on the skyline -church spires are an example - often without further commentary. Graham Reed has also augmented the introductions to some chapters with other illustrations. The bridges of London and the Thames Flood Barrier seemed to us to merit special mention, hence the one chapter devoted to them. Where there are open spaces - and London is happily well endowed with them - or wharves devoted to the storage of aggregates or simply stretches of warehouses of no particular merit, we considered abbreviating the riverscape. However, on reflection we decided to keep to our original purpose of documenting the river's bank completely and with one exception of a few hundred yards in Battersea Park, we have reproduced the panorama of London's waterfront from Battersea to the Barrier in its entirety.
We believe that this is a unique and an attractive record of a moment in London's history - the beginning of the third millennium. We hope you find as much pleasure in reading or dipping into it as we have derived from producing it.
Nicholas Waldemar Brown - Summer 2003
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