History:This is a handsome book. As companion volume to Ackroyd's excellent London: The Biography, an initial flick through attractive end papers, period etchings, copious maps and 32 illustrated pages promises hours of contentment for the armchair boatman, writes Aisling Foster.
Chapter headings, too, suggest a vast sweep of information. Indeed, in navigating the great river's 215 mile course from prehistory to beyond the site of the 2012 Olympic Games, Peter Ackroyd is clearly determined to leave no stone unturned. Facts are accumulated on everything from geography, natural history and the water's artistic and medicinal inspirations to man's ever-changing construction and reconstruction along its banks.
The range of information is impressive, but the sheer weight of what has been gathered seems to wash away the author as it may do the reader. Order and chronology are more or less abandoned. Apart from a narrative thread which meanders from river source to sea, facts are mustered under themes, so that whether really interesting, dull or totally irrelevant, a torrent of names, dates, lists, quotes and personal observations from every century are dropped into the text to bump and bob against one another like flotsam in a flood.
The secret is to dip in and out of the work, pausing to consider a period "when there were turtles and crocodiles in the Thames", or reflect on ancient claims about the differing characteristics of the river's inhabitants along its banks. Ackroyd even claims the ancient Morris-dancing people north of the Thames were considered "more refined and more artistic than the southerners" though lacking "tenacity and independence of spirit". He also rehearses his own theories about geology and landscape: "There is no reason to doubt that human consciousness is changed by the experience of living above clay, rather than above chalk, even though the nature of that change is not understood".
From earliest times, the river has enabled both liberation and strife. But despite much evidence of archaeology and invasion, the narrative is at its most engaging when describing the modern periods of English history. In the early years of the Civil War, the middle reaches of the Thames were controlled by Royalists, "with many Catholic and Royalist houses, beside the river and its tributaries, besieged by Parliamentary troops".
Later, Charles II's progress with his bride from Hampton Court to Whitehall, in imitation of Tudor pageants, allowed Londoners "to exorcise their previous association with Cromwell and the Protectorate - a London crowd had gathered for the execution of the present monarch's father - and it was also an opportunity for the Thames to be recognised again as the sovereign river of England".
AS A DISTINGUISHED historian and novelist of London, it is not surprising to find Ackroyd's writing flows more easily in the final stretches of the Thames. His descriptions of the Great Fire are horribly vivid, as is the stink of excrement and pollution which, by the mid-19th century, "bubbled on the tide". Drapes soaked in chlorine and hung against the windows of Parliament failed to keep out the smell.
A contemporary report recalls how the Chancellor of the Exchequer "with a mass of papers in one hand and with his pocket handkerchief clutched in the other - hastened in dismay from the pestilential odour".
Despite such nastiness, locals continued to eat fish and shellfish from the river, so it is not difficult to believe that in 1861 Prince Albert probably died "from typhoid spread by the foul waters beneath Windsor Castle". Eventually, the engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, was allowed to begin work on his sewage pumping stations, though it would take another hundred years before the river was considered reasonably clean.
Nonetheless, exceptionally wet weather still causes overflows, as in the summer of 2004 when: "freak storms meant that a million tonnes of raw sewage were discharged into the river, causing the death of more than ten thousand fish".
CONTINUING DOWNRIVER FROM Gravesend to the North Sea, the writer senses "strangeness and melancholy at dusk". Apparently, these estuary marshes were once notorious for malaria "or what was known as the ague".
Daniel Defoe, on his tour around Britain in 1724-6, claimed that because of such high mortality, it was not uncommon for men in the marshes "to have had from five to six, to fourteen or fifteen wives". Dickens, too, was famously affected by the place: "the two rows of thirteen little tombstones in Cooling Churchyard, the inspiration for the gloomy scene at the beginning of Great Expectations, are no doubt the tokens of infant malaria".
At such times, one longs for the creator of Hawksmoor to have allowed his novelist's imagination free rein. It might have done more with his own tantalising discovery on a river wall by Erith of "a knife with blue handle with blood on the blade, a white T-shirt with blood stains upon it, and a roll of Sellotape". But he continues inexorably as the historian of every ripple and eddy. Survivors who go with the full flow are likely to wear anoraks as well as life jackets.
Aisling Foster is a novelist
Peter Ackroyd digs deep to uncover the hidden history of London's famous river Thames: Sacred River By Peter Ackroyd Chatto & Windus, 490pp. £25