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The elitism of the river Thames Londoners aren't welcome on the riverside

The Thames — History as water. Credit: Daniel LEAL / AFP/Getty

The Thames — History as water. Credit: Daniel LEAL / AFP/Getty


December 19, 2022   5 mins

London is a cruel city. Live here long enough, and you will see everything familiar vanish: neighbourhoods transformed, venues closed, old friends moving on. There is just one permanent thing in the capital, one thing that transcends the flux of urban life, and that is the river snaking through its centre.

The Thames is the only place I feel truly rooted, even if it too is rushing out to sea, as the poet John Denham wrote, “like mortal life to meet eternity”. The river is the reason London is here: it is a primordial presence in the city, with its murky waters and oozing tidal beaches.

It is also a human artefact, its banks and bridges part of the ever-changing fabric of the city. The spaces and structures along the Thames determine who can enjoy its redemptive powers, and in what ways. With sensitive design, London’s riversides could be an unparalleled treasure — but we’re not there yet.

The Thames encompasses many worlds, from the bucolic neighbourhoods of Kingston to the pincushion of skyscrapers that is the Isle of Dogs. That is what makes it a true index of London’s character, for the city remains in many ways a disparate collection of villages. And the riverside is at its best when it provides an intimate dialogue of public and private, something all too rare in the contemporary mega-city. In Wandsworth and Battersea, for instance, the Thames path passes riverboat communities and occasionally zig-zags, in almost labyrinthine fashion, around the contours of low-rise apartment buildings. The private spaces enrich the public by making them less anonymous, but there is enough distinction that you don’t feel like an interloper.

In all of these ways, the Thames allows Londoners to see and know their city, and discover its hidden corners. These are glimpses of how the river could tie the city together.

But only in the past 50 years has it been possible to imagine the Thames as something Londoners share in common, and that prospect is rapidly disappearing again. Before the Seventies, the river had for centuries been dominated by warehouses, docks, shipping and industry; more toil and smoke than afternoon walks. This was the often brutal and impoverished landscape that Dickens observed throughout his life, having worked as a boy in a shoe-polish factory on the Thames’s shore (now the site of Charing Cross station), and which gave him the unforgettable opening of his last novel, Our Mutual Friend, where a pair of scavengers salvage a corpse from its waters.

All that is gone now, apart from some exotic place-names recalling the goods that used to arrive here. Since the Nineties, London has found a new role as a safe deposit box for global wealth, especially through its property market. This change in fortunes has brought new forms of architecture, in particular high-rise glass apartment buildings, with the most profitable locations overlooking the river. As though by some reversal of the tide, the gritty poverty of Dickens’s Thames has turned to pristine wealth, and the capitalism Britain once exported to the world along this river has returned to colonise its very banks.

As a result, the public potential of the Thames is being squandered. Long stretches between Putney and Vauxhall, for instance, have become a monoculture of generic glass towers. Sometimes these protrude right out to the waterside, forcing you to walk around them, and are often arranged on plots of private land with signs reminding passers-by not to skateboard, cycle, or walk dogs. Such developments are to a thriving urban realm what a commercial plantation is to a forest; instead of ecosystems you get sterile, monotonous repetition. Signs of life are rarely seen in these compound-like spaces, which may reflect the fact that many of them are just storing capital for foreign investors. Or it may simply reflect that there is no longer anything interesting to do in these areas.

In the Eighties, during the first phase of redevelopment on the Thames, new apartment blocks still reflected the capital’s traditional character as a low- and medium-rise city of brick. Now, thanks to the growing flood of commercial development, London is rapidly acquiring a high-rise skyline. These structures are obvious symbols of the city’s disturbing inequality.

This trend is especially destructive in the river’s historic areas, where monuments are being crowded out by luxury apartments and offices. At the recent Battersea Power Station development, new buildings have squeezed the historic structure into a kind of glass corset. The same will happen to the South Bank if the enormous new building proposed there, 72 Upper Ground, is not stopped by governmental review.

It’s worth noting here that, along the Thames as elsewhere in the capital, it isn’t just a case of private developments reshaping public space, but often of public space itself turning out to be privately controlled. A 2017 Guardian investigation reported that the site occupied by City Hall — the home of the London Assembly and Mayor — was owned by the sovereign wealth fund of Kuwait. A reporter seeking details was bundled away by private security guards and told that “unsanctioned journalistic activity is banned on the site”. Similarly, the land surrounding the ExCel centre in the Royal Docks area, another seemingly public space, belongs to a United Arab Emirates investment vehicle.

Tall glass construction has become emblematic of the degrading of the public realm, though this is not to say it has no place on the river. The Isle of Dogs financial district, as seen from the Docklands Light Railway pulling out of Canary Wharf station, is one of London’s most remarkable sights. Given its economic function and discrete location, this cityscape feels like a more natural part of the capital than what sits across from it on Greenwich peninsula. Here, we see the other downside of post-Nineties commercial development: not dull monotony but a random assortment of architectural gimmicks, including the O2 arena, Ravensbourne University and the mother of all InterContinental Hotels.

The river can accommodate many forms of expression: the modest and the monumental, the intimate and the extraordinary, the classical and the kitsch. But it is a question of composition; every building and landscape depends for its effect on the way it contrasts those surrounding it, just as every musical note and motif does.

How can the Thames achieve a better rhythm? As Rowan Moore has written recently, many of the recent failures stem from familiar political dynamics. Successive Mayors promised to humanise the river, before succumbing to the temptation of huge foreign investment and the accompanying housing and job statistics, however misleading those inevitably are. Meanwhile, any prospect of co-ordinated planning along the river has been scuppered by the financial motives of the multiple boroughs that control its banks.

The obvious answer is to create more scope for unified planning, although that would have its own stifling effects on riverside variety. There should at least be stricter limits on how much of the riverbank in a given area can be given over to private high-rise buildings, as well as a firmer hand used in the application of guidelines, which currently allow developers to claim they are working sensitively with their surroundings, when anyone can see the opposite is true. Above all, the paths that give the public access to the riverside must be protected from further encroachments.

But it may be that London’s characteristic restlessness and impermanence will provide part of the solution. The return to brick-faced building with more traditional proportions, known as New London Vernacular, over the past decade is a reminder that urban form is always shifting in response to economic conditions, political pressures and taste. The boom in glass towers began after the economic slump of the early Nineties; will these monuments to inequality and corporate power make it through the period of hardship ahead? Sadiq Khan’s decision to block Foster + Partners’ 1,000 foot “Tulip” skyscraper in 2019 suggests there is already a political ceiling to the skyline. It’s perfectly plausible that, in a generation’s time, people will have turned against the luxury architecture of today, much as they began dubbing Brutalist buildings “monstrosities” in the late 20th century.

That said, it will require more than a change of style to give Londoners the river they deserve. The Thames Path was designated a National Trail in 1989; today, much of its passage through the capital has been entrusted to private landowners, who have lined it with gates, security cameras and metal fencing. Only a wider revulsion at the erosion of public space in the city, powerful enough to spur political action, will secure London’s most ancient asset for the future.


Wessie du Toit writes about culture, design and ideas. His Substack is The Pathos of Things.

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polidori redux
polidori redux
1 year ago

I wonder what happens when we run out of things to sell off. It must be getting close.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
Reply to  polidori redux

We’ve always got Scotland and at a pinch Wales!

Milton Gibbon
Milton Gibbon
1 year ago

Scotland is also being bought by foreign investors. The largest landowner is Danish among a host of others. They probably don’t realise the land-grab that will happen if SNP ever get their way.

Michael Davis
Michael Davis
1 year ago

Couldn’t give them away

Milton Gibbon
Milton Gibbon
1 year ago

Scotland is also being bought by foreign investors. The largest landowner is Danish among a host of others. They probably don’t realise the land-grab that will happen if SNP ever get their way.

Michael Davis
Michael Davis
1 year ago

Couldn’t give them away

Dominic A
Dominic A
1 year ago
Reply to  polidori redux

NFTS. Trump has some for sale.

Peter Joy
Peter Joy
1 year ago
Reply to  polidori redux

Why not sell the Palace of Westminster? We’d get a couple of billion for that from the Qatar National Investment Fund.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
Reply to  polidori redux

We’ve always got Scotland and at a pinch Wales!

Dominic A
Dominic A
1 year ago
Reply to  polidori redux

NFTS. Trump has some for sale.

Peter Joy
Peter Joy
1 year ago
Reply to  polidori redux

Why not sell the Palace of Westminster? We’d get a couple of billion for that from the Qatar National Investment Fund.

polidori redux
polidori redux
1 year ago

I wonder what happens when we run out of things to sell off. It must be getting close.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 year ago

Is the Thames also racist and misogynist? I think we should be told.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Definitely!
After we used to call it ‘Old Father Thames’’.
It also an entirely English, unlike say the Severn, and thus must be racist.

My Ob
My Ob
1 year ago

Oh the Patriarchy!

My Ob
My Ob
1 year ago

Oh the Patriarchy!

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Absolutely, and the Thames Barrier must be torn down immediately.

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Definitely!
After we used to call it ‘Old Father Thames’’.
It also an entirely English, unlike say the Severn, and thus must be racist.

Steve Murray
Steve Murray
1 year ago
Reply to  Hugh Bryant

Absolutely, and the Thames Barrier must be torn down immediately.

Hugh Bryant
Hugh Bryant
1 year ago

Is the Thames also racist and misogynist? I think we should be told.

Milton Gibbon
Milton Gibbon
1 year ago

A much better article than the one last week about Mormons – an actual point (even though I disagree with it). I know a couple of people who have bought flats in these high-rise flats on the river, an aussie and a young couple, who seem to be very happy with their purchases. Just because others (including myself) thinks they are awful would it really be better to have crumbling dockyards or industrial zones that were previously there (like Liverpool)? I’m not sure the article knows where it stands on that point. The writer is wrong to say that brutalism was only decried in the late 20th century – it was at the time by the majority of people who weren’t architects. The writer at least acknowledges his own suggestion (central planning) would probably be a recipe for even greater sterility.
As an ex-north londoner I never really felt an affinity with the river in a way that I am told by others that Parisians feel about the Seine or Hamburgers about the Elbe. The centre of London has always appeared as a place of work rather than leisure but as a place of work there is nowhere better. Hyde Park is a poor substitute for Richmond or Hampstead Heath. Compare the jobs market in London to anywhere else outside of West/East coast USA and you would be hard pressed to find somewhere better for a bright, driven individual. Would the UK be better or worse off without the magnet of London drawing in expertise, investment and innovation from the home nations as well as Europe? I would suggest the UK would be relegated to a par with Spain or Poland if we didn’t have the second largest financial centre in the world with all the loss to tax revenue which would ensue if it were to decline. You don’t have to look far for a comparison: Birmingham is desperate for foreign investment but can’t get it and has been in managed decline for decades. Average house prices are a third of those in London but does that mean that young people can afford them?
The writer does well to point out the churn that is part of London’s nature but then goes on to decry the current trends. That is the way of an organic city, much more so than centrally planned ones in which parks are gridded and more sterile even than Hyde Park. London (and by extension the Thames) has its own rhythm, just not the rhythm that the author (or I) might like. At least the river is cleaner than it used to be – an unusual omission in an article on the river though perhaps not the thrust of the proposition. Why shouldn’t private landowners place fencing/gates/cameras to make their tenants feel safe? It is what any sane person does in a large city nowadays if they have enough money.
In short, as most people get the government they deserve, Londoners get the river they deserve.

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
1 year ago
Reply to  Milton Gibbon

Excellent intelligent comment

JR Stoker
JR Stoker
1 year ago
Reply to  Milton Gibbon

Excellent intelligent comment

Milton Gibbon
Milton Gibbon
1 year ago

A much better article than the one last week about Mormons – an actual point (even though I disagree with it). I know a couple of people who have bought flats in these high-rise flats on the river, an aussie and a young couple, who seem to be very happy with their purchases. Just because others (including myself) thinks they are awful would it really be better to have crumbling dockyards or industrial zones that were previously there (like Liverpool)? I’m not sure the article knows where it stands on that point. The writer is wrong to say that brutalism was only decried in the late 20th century – it was at the time by the majority of people who weren’t architects. The writer at least acknowledges his own suggestion (central planning) would probably be a recipe for even greater sterility.
As an ex-north londoner I never really felt an affinity with the river in a way that I am told by others that Parisians feel about the Seine or Hamburgers about the Elbe. The centre of London has always appeared as a place of work rather than leisure but as a place of work there is nowhere better. Hyde Park is a poor substitute for Richmond or Hampstead Heath. Compare the jobs market in London to anywhere else outside of West/East coast USA and you would be hard pressed to find somewhere better for a bright, driven individual. Would the UK be better or worse off without the magnet of London drawing in expertise, investment and innovation from the home nations as well as Europe? I would suggest the UK would be relegated to a par with Spain or Poland if we didn’t have the second largest financial centre in the world with all the loss to tax revenue which would ensue if it were to decline. You don’t have to look far for a comparison: Birmingham is desperate for foreign investment but can’t get it and has been in managed decline for decades. Average house prices are a third of those in London but does that mean that young people can afford them?
The writer does well to point out the churn that is part of London’s nature but then goes on to decry the current trends. That is the way of an organic city, much more so than centrally planned ones in which parks are gridded and more sterile even than Hyde Park. London (and by extension the Thames) has its own rhythm, just not the rhythm that the author (or I) might like. At least the river is cleaner than it used to be – an unusual omission in an article on the river though perhaps not the thrust of the proposition. Why shouldn’t private landowners place fencing/gates/cameras to make their tenants feel safe? It is what any sane person does in a large city nowadays if they have enough money.
In short, as most people get the government they deserve, Londoners get the river they deserve.

Dominic A
Dominic A
1 year ago

Strange – my experience is the exact opposite. Over the last 40 years I’ve been up and down the Thames both sides, country (where most of it is) and city, on/in water and land. As far as London is concerned, access has opened up enormously. For at least a couple of decades it has been a legal requirement for developments to install/maintain the river path (even where there was none before). Now that the rehab of Fulham stadium is restoring the path, one of the last holdouts is the Hurlingham Club – that bastion of modernity.

Moreover, the super-sewer is being built, in a few years all the effluence will be carried away, and it may be healthily possible to swim centrally.

To the well travelled person, it is clear that access to the river Thames, in London or outside, is extraordinarily broad – a minor miracle of openess. The longest, best maintained, best protected public path in the country. Many many places to launch your boat, sit, swim if you dare. All I take from this article is that the author doesn’t like modern high rises along the river – in the case of St George’s Wharf he is 100% correct – complaints about most of the others will fade in time (part of the long tradition of bemoaning modernity, and then loving it when it’s older).

Peter Joy
Peter Joy
1 year ago
Reply to  Dominic A

Good post, but on a point of info, there are several public footpaths in England longer than the Thames Path: the South West Coastal Path, at over 600 miles, for one.

Peter Joy
Peter Joy
1 year ago
Reply to  Dominic A

Good post, but on a point of info, there are several public footpaths in England longer than the Thames Path: the South West Coastal Path, at over 600 miles, for one.

Dominic A
Dominic A
1 year ago

Strange – my experience is the exact opposite. Over the last 40 years I’ve been up and down the Thames both sides, country (where most of it is) and city, on/in water and land. As far as London is concerned, access has opened up enormously. For at least a couple of decades it has been a legal requirement for developments to install/maintain the river path (even where there was none before). Now that the rehab of Fulham stadium is restoring the path, one of the last holdouts is the Hurlingham Club – that bastion of modernity.

Moreover, the super-sewer is being built, in a few years all the effluence will be carried away, and it may be healthily possible to swim centrally.

To the well travelled person, it is clear that access to the river Thames, in London or outside, is extraordinarily broad – a minor miracle of openess. The longest, best maintained, best protected public path in the country. Many many places to launch your boat, sit, swim if you dare. All I take from this article is that the author doesn’t like modern high rises along the river – in the case of St George’s Wharf he is 100% correct – complaints about most of the others will fade in time (part of the long tradition of bemoaning modernity, and then loving it when it’s older).

James Sharpe
James Sharpe
1 year ago

Earlier this year I stumbled across an interesting video from 1982 with Bob Hoskins’ talking about the sterilisation of the Thames on Omnibus. A good watch if you are also interested in what has happened to the land around the Thames. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTgqHsJ4410&t=330s

Peter Joy
Peter Joy
1 year ago
Reply to  James Sharpe

‘Revenge? It’s me that’s gonna take revenge. I’ll crush them like beetles!’

Peter Joy
Peter Joy
1 year ago
Reply to  James Sharpe

‘Revenge? It’s me that’s gonna take revenge. I’ll crush them like beetles!’

James Sharpe
James Sharpe
1 year ago

Earlier this year I stumbled across an interesting video from 1982 with Bob Hoskins’ talking about the sterilisation of the Thames on Omnibus. A good watch if you are also interested in what has happened to the land around the Thames. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTgqHsJ4410&t=330s

David Hedley
David Hedley
1 year ago

It is possible to walk from the South Bank, to Battersea and to the end of Battersea Park, almost entirely along the left bank of the Thames, save for short detours at Vauxhall Bridge and the Nine Elms sewage plant near Riverlight. (And much the same on the opposite bank). I think much of the new development in this area is rather good, and that the area is being progressively revitalised, even if the flow of investment has been bumpy. I’m not sure who would want to preserve a post-industrial wasteland of broken down warehouses and contaminated mud, which was here before? I know it is fashionable to decry ‘gentrification’, but this part of London desperately needed the investment it has received, and is generally the better for it (although I do wish that the Gehry buildings at Battersea had been more radical).

Last edited 1 year ago by David Hedley
Mr Bellisarius
Mr Bellisarius
1 year ago
Reply to  David Hedley

Wouldn’t that be the right bank?

David Hedley
David Hedley
1 year ago
Reply to  Mr Bellisarius

Depends which way you’re facing! I do mean the south bank, of course.

Paul Beardsell
Paul Beardsell
1 year ago
Reply to  David Hedley

You’re able to edit your post, which is otherwise good. It’s the right bank which you mean.

Paul Beardsell
Paul Beardsell
1 year ago
Reply to  David Hedley

You’re able to edit your post, which is otherwise good. It’s the right bank which you mean.

David Hedley
David Hedley
1 year ago
Reply to  Mr Bellisarius

Depends which way you’re facing! I do mean the south bank, of course.

Mr Bellisarius
Mr Bellisarius
1 year ago
Reply to  David Hedley

Wouldn’t that be the right bank?

David Hedley
David Hedley
1 year ago

It is possible to walk from the South Bank, to Battersea and to the end of Battersea Park, almost entirely along the left bank of the Thames, save for short detours at Vauxhall Bridge and the Nine Elms sewage plant near Riverlight. (And much the same on the opposite bank). I think much of the new development in this area is rather good, and that the area is being progressively revitalised, even if the flow of investment has been bumpy. I’m not sure who would want to preserve a post-industrial wasteland of broken down warehouses and contaminated mud, which was here before? I know it is fashionable to decry ‘gentrification’, but this part of London desperately needed the investment it has received, and is generally the better for it (although I do wish that the Gehry buildings at Battersea had been more radical).

Last edited 1 year ago by David Hedley
James Kirk
James Kirk
1 year ago

I went to Esfahan a few years ago. Noticeably the riversides are accessible to all. We have to pay to see the sea from a council car park.
London is City One in the ‘Hunger Games’.

Roger Inkpen
Roger Inkpen
1 year ago
Reply to  James Kirk

If you think the only way ‘to see the sea’ is by sitting in your car – that’s your problem!

My Ob
My Ob
1 year ago
Reply to  James Kirk

Proving your age there James!

CHARLES STANHOPE
CHARLES STANHOPE
1 year ago
Reply to  James Kirk

You were fortunate to find any water in the Zayanderud, for much of the year it is now sadly dry.

David Lye
David Lye
1 year ago

I’m puzzled by “the bucolic neighbourhoods of Kingston”.

John Riordan
John Riordan
1 year ago

Personally I think the Thames ought to be lined with skyscrapers on both banks. The general character of low-rise development isn’t attractive at all in my opinion: you only have to look east down the river from Canary Wharf to appreciate how barren and uninspiring it can be.

High rise buildings can be extremely beautiful, they can be neither brutalist nor tackily opulent if done well, and there are many examples of how they can be done well. I don’t envisage turning the whole Thames into a skyscraper alley by any means, but there are still huge lengths of riverside that could be turned high rise, and this is, let’s remember, a time when we have never been so short of homes where people actually want to live, namely London.

My Ob
My Ob
1 year ago
Reply to  John Riordan

Would one consider Vauxhall and Nine Elms an architectural gem?
Even the view from the train into Waterloo brings utterly depressing thoughts of Hong Kong boxes and my pity for who choses to live behind those hermetically conformist windows. At ground level try finding a community or a shop.
I agree some high rise buildings are beautiful, but only if politics and vested interests take genuine local advise. Look how long Battersea Power Station had to wait while passing through various Malaysian, Singaporean,Chinese and Mayor’s hands.
If you’re looking east of Canary Wharf then don’t, unless you’re holding your passport. There have been concerted efforts since 1990 and all have failed. Stratford had the Olympics in 2012. Simply brilliant for a year – still not a place you’d live by choice then or now.
I live just downstream of the last lock on the Thames. Things have changed but character does remain.
Mr Riordan you speak like a detached architectural student hypothesing.
The needed homes don’t need building in London. Other towns perhaps?

Last edited 1 year ago by My Ob
My Ob
My Ob
1 year ago
Reply to  John Riordan

Would one consider Vauxhall and Nine Elms an architectural gem?
Even the view from the train into Waterloo brings utterly depressing thoughts of Hong Kong boxes and my pity for who choses to live behind those hermetically conformist windows. At ground level try finding a community or a shop.
I agree some high rise buildings are beautiful, but only if politics and vested interests take genuine local advise. Look how long Battersea Power Station had to wait while passing through various Malaysian, Singaporean,Chinese and Mayor’s hands.
If you’re looking east of Canary Wharf then don’t, unless you’re holding your passport. There have been concerted efforts since 1990 and all have failed. Stratford had the Olympics in 2012. Simply brilliant for a year – still not a place you’d live by choice then or now.
I live just downstream of the last lock on the Thames. Things have changed but character does remain.
Mr Riordan you speak like a detached architectural student hypothesing.
The needed homes don’t need building in London. Other towns perhaps?

Last edited 1 year ago by My Ob
John Riordan
John Riordan
1 year ago

Personally I think the Thames ought to be lined with skyscrapers on both banks. The general character of low-rise development isn’t attractive at all in my opinion: you only have to look east down the river from Canary Wharf to appreciate how barren and uninspiring it can be.

High rise buildings can be extremely beautiful, they can be neither brutalist nor tackily opulent if done well, and there are many examples of how they can be done well. I don’t envisage turning the whole Thames into a skyscraper alley by any means, but there are still huge lengths of riverside that could be turned high rise, and this is, let’s remember, a time when we have never been so short of homes where people actually want to live, namely London.