On John Boydell’s engraving of A View taken near Limehouse Bridge, looking down the Thames (1751)

We know this view. It is familiar, and its unchanging parts have become anchors for our mind’s home. The river flows. The sky stretches over. The shingle and sand scrape along the foreshore. These have been so before us, over the centuries – millennia even – and will persist beyond our days.

How many times have we seen such skies over us in this place? The light wind prevails from the southwest (clue: the ship’s pennants), across the river’s curve from Pageant Stairs, billowing and sweeping the clouds over the north bank’s rooftops. From the shadows and lightness of the sky above the larger ship to the right, we notice the sun is shining from the southeast. The angles of drawn rays and cast shadows tell us it is around mid-morning. Light clothing on the people, smokeless chimneys and washing put out to dry on the terraces points to a summer’s day. Smoke swirls upwards from a couple of doors up from where The Grapes pub is now. The kitchen’s fire has been lit. The cook of the house is hard at work.

Aquatint versions exist of this engraving, but the skies in those depictions are pastel coloured, prettiness spread over the quaintness of the washed walls below. This colouring in must have been some years later. Memory changes perception, although it’s likely the colourists were others who were not present when this particular scene was sketched.

Perhaps there is such accuracy in this work because John Boydell was the son of a surveyor. The view is ‘taken near Limehouse Bridge’, which is now the modern Swing Bridge next to Victoria Wharf. Blyth’s Wharf’s pier did not exist in 1751, so this view is from the river itself, eye level with the rear terraces of Narrow Street. Boydell could only have been looking from a vessel moored on the river itself. The tide is low. A few lighter craft rest on the foreshore. A Thames barge leans against the old brick river wall, where Blyth’s Wharf’s pier would be built in 1923. We are holding a snapshot of the working lives, and the life itself, of our river on this clement summer’s morning of 1751.



Boydell dots the shingle and damp sand as striations that follow the wash of the river’s edge. There are more boats moored on the river. Tristan Gooley in his book How to Read Water tells of detecting tidal currents by looking at boats at anchor, how they can be seen ‘pointing dependably into the current like a weathercock’. George Stillwell, my late mariner colleague, called the tide at its highest or lowest ‘slack’ water. The current is at a standstill then, he told us, then it rises or lowers. Accelerating to its halfway point, the current then slows down to slackness. This is the safest period for our marine contractor workmates to enter the water and secure foundations into the riverbed.

Over the years, I have watched out for this tidal point from the houses’ terraces. When I watch the river’s surface from here, I imagine it moves as a slow breath, almost imperceptible, pulling itself off the foreshore in its inhalation towards its pause: slack water. The hours will pass while the river’s water-breath returns. It will rise as the full exhale of the swell until it washes against the shoulders of Another Time.

But there is no such slackening in Boydell’s view. The passenger boats are full, heading downriver, taking advantage of the current as the river ebbs. In the foreground, two lightermen stand in their craft, pushing against the current away from the larger ship. In 1751, the Pool of London did not have enough off-load docks built yet. Ships would have to moor in the river for their cargo to be moved onto smaller boats, to be taken to the main wharfs. What is the cargo on this ship? Spices and tea from India or China? Sugar and rum from enslaved plantations in the West Indies? Did the wind carry these scents towards the houses along Narrow Street?

Now let us examine these houses of 1751. The drawing shows a heavy brick retaining wall that enclosed the cellars and earthen foundations of the houses along this part of Narrow Street. We know this still exists – although what we see here is embedded in additional layers built over to strengthen and protect, across the centuries. We know that waste riddlings of nearby sixteenth-century lime burners are buried under these houses, leaving a thick layer of lime. We discovered this strange white layer during our twenty-first-century basement excavations.

There are ladders from the foreshore leading up to the back of the ground floors. Along the front would have been shops facing the street, serving the river industries: chandlers, sail makers, rope makers and other boating suppliers. Above (what is now) nos. 90 and 92 Narrow Street – then called Fore Street – is a large sign boasting ‘WINE’. The census some years later stated a ‘victualler’ lived there. What a vital service for tired river people! The shape of no. 92’s roof is still the same to this day.

On the drawing, we can see little outcrops, overhanging the river wall: latrines for s(h)itting on, or emptying kitchen rubbish or bedroom chamber pots into the river. As in our modern times, the rear terraces run along the roofs of the ground floor extensions. Nos. 88 to 78 Narrow Street are clearly shown as a coherent block of terraced houses. No. 76, the current site of The Grapes, is drawn as a neat flat-fronted elevation, slightly stepped back from its neighbours. We can find this wall now on its upper floors, still stepped back from no. 78’s rear elevation. But the 1751 building is also wider. So some time later, between then and Dickens’s first visit, the building was halved, with the Harbour Master’s office and lodgings inserted next door. It appears that over the years, the accretion of rooms – was this always an inn? – caused the remnants of this earlier eighteenth-century building to become embedded in the ‘newer’ parts, until it has become the pub we know today. And westwards from The Grapes’s earlier ghosts to the modern Papermill Wharf, the rest is also gone – replaced by warehouses and twentieth-century developers’ cupidity.

But the river and its skies will remain. Even though modernity’s engines have conquered the currents, and their frothy wakes race past us, river vessels must still follow the ebb and flow. The foreshore will be shaped by its shingle and scraped by mudlarks. The tides keep their rhythm of rise and fall, spring and neap. The waxing and waning of the moon, even the equinoctial sun, will always play their part on the water, well beyond the vagaries of our human lives.