Jonathan Morrison
Secret Rivers at the Museum of London Docklands, E14
The Thames’s role in the capital’s development is hardly unrecorded, but there are surprising insights to be mudlarked from studying the others
It may seem obvious to say that London’s history is inextricably bound up with the rivers that brought commerce and invasion, prosperity and plague, but their sundry stories deserve a fresh retelling and still resonate today.
And while the pre-eminent role played by the Thames in the capital’s development is hardly undocumented, there are surprising artefacts and insights to be mudlarked from a study of those lesser-known rivers, such as the Walbrook and Wandle, the Fleet, the Lea and Neckinger. If nothing else, the rubble of Roman shrines and the offerings of prehistoric axes, medieval swords and Bronze Age spearheads suggests our ancestors understood the value of their waterways when they were perhaps more sacred than secret, far more than we do today.
Starting with a quote from Seneca and ending with one from the pop star Adele, this exhibition is a well thought out series of vignettes and themes from the long life of the capital — a sort of riverine version of Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography, if you like — that takes in the Knights Templar monastery at Blackfriars, the hideous slum of Jacob’s Island that helped to inspire Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and how the rich co-opted the Westbourne for pleasure gardens at Ranelagh in Chelsea and the Serpentine in Hyde Park, as well as much more besides.
What’s particularly fascinating is how different it all could have been. At one point the Fleet was almost the equivalent of the Grand Canal in Venice before it fell into decline and pollution, becoming an open sewer and spreading filth and corruption long before the journalists moved in. And how different it could still be too. There’s a fascinating proposal for “daylighting” some of the rivers buried after the “great stink” of 1858 (the real reason most are “secret” today) and letting the Tyburn flow through the streets of Mayfair. OK, so Buckingham Palace might get washed away, but that would be no great loss, architecturally or politically.
If there is a flaw, it’s the attempt to make everything so conspicuously relevant to kids today, through commissioned multimedia and modern art, the recycled-plastic cope of the Bishop of Lambeth and the audio of local residents. Do three dredged-up plastic dinosaurs from the Lea deserve their own vitrine? Hardly. Nor is such pandering likely to swell the new audience that the museum has set its heart on.
Yet the exhibition is certainly timely, given that the £5 billion Thames Tideway Tunnel, a new 25km super-sewer, is about to reshape the capital’s plumbing once again, and the bigger message is inescapable — we poison and neglect our rivers at our peril. This is a sagacious argument not to take them for granted.
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