The House by the Thames
Gillian Tindall, Pimlico, 2007
I walk by the modest house that is the subject of Tindall’s book with some regularity, and I have often wondered about it. It’s clearly a remnant from a time when the south bank of the Thames was of a considerably different character. Its white stucco front sits incongruously, and not a little defiantly, near the outlet of the ultramodern Millennium Bridge, hard by the Tate Modern, the replica of the Globe and various other tourist attractions, with St. Paul’s cathedral directly across the river. Why and how this small house has remained when nearly all else like it has been swept away is a question that occurs to me whenever I see it (as it would to you, too). So I was naturally pleased to stumble on a book that was written expressly to address the question.
I have a soft spot for quirky histories like this, and Tindall does not disappoint. She writes well and weaves a narrative about the house and its inhabitants through the years that draws you in and makes you feel a part of the area and its evolving cast of characters. Some of what she writes seems fairly speculative to me (and I am not a trained historian by any stretch) but it is immensely enjoyable. Learning that references to “the stews” came not from brothels, as many have supposed, but from fish farming operations in the area (from the old French ‘estuve’, Tindall helpfully tells us)–to give just one example among many–is the kind of small detail that makes me smile.
Tindall also ties the tale of the house to the larger social narrative of London, touching on the Great Plague, the Fire, the rise of coal, steam power, gas lighting, rail lines, electrification and indoor plumbing (phew!). At one point, she recounts the brief rise and fall of the nearby Albion Flour Mills:
“. . . the grandest building in Great Surrey Street was a temple to steam. It was the type of industrial architecture that was now creating a new world in the north of England, but it was a novelty in London and much admired by some as a sign of Progress. This was the Albion Flour Mills, designed by Samuel Wyatt and equipped by Rennie with the latest in steam-powered rotary machinery. It could grind far more wheat, night and day, than the wind- and water-powered mills that were still generally in use: millers all around London and the south-east were alarmed, seeing the future and not liking it. However, the mill was in business only four or five years before a fire destroyed it in 1791.”
She could have left it at that, a note about a bump along the road to steam power, but she does not. Instead, we get the additional information that the mill’s burned-out husk was allowed to stand, ‘ruinous,’ for years. This, it turns out, is significant as more than just an indicator of waste: William Blake lived nearby and would have walked by it whenever he went into the City. As Tindall puts it, “. . . one may believe that it was this sight, rather than any general acquaintance with England’s new manufacturing towns, that was the inspiration for his ‘dark satanic mills.’” I’ve no idea if it’s true, but it put something old and accepted into a possibly new light for me.
Even with such broad and frequent excursions into the larger social history of the area, Tindall never loses sight of the importance of the house–this is not a comprehensive social history of London, but the intimate story of one small stretch of houses, and one home in particular, in South London. As the book nears its close, Tindall is able to draw on ever more recent sources, including the late former resident and film star Anna Lee. She wryly recounts an episode where one former inhabitant dropped in on a later resident in the 1970s who was apparently flamboyantly gay: “A good many visitors, chiefly male, passed through the house during Guy’s time there. Dan Black called once, when he happened to be on Bankside, and was hospitably invited to stay the night, an invitation he declined.”
This, to me, is the great strength of The House on the Thames: It succeeds in taking the abstract, sweeping arcs of history and showing them anew, from a vantage point refreshingly human in scale and in a way that makes us engage with the period in a way that few, if any, larger works of history can.
