Read Online The House by the Thames by Gillian Tindall - Free Book Online Page B

for their horses.
    Since the parishes provided the structure of day-to-day authority and such social services as existed, dislocation in the Church led to general breakdown. Many of the public water conduits that had been installed over the last few generations became blocked or holed; streets flooded and paving disintegrated. Crime and street disorder also increased. John Evelyn, returning from a circumspect exile in France in 1652, found the inn landlords on the journey from Dover lacking in their old respect and that, as he passed through Southwark on the way into town, small boys pelted the coach with mud and stones – ‘You would imagine yourself among a legion of devils’, he wrote, ‘and in the suburbs of hell.’
    But in fact, away from the main road of Borough High Street, and crowded Bermondsey to the east of it, Southwark was still quite a rural, peaceable place: the houses on that side petered out very soon into meadows to the south and Lambeth marsh to the west. There was the odd glasshouse and soap-boiling works established near London Bridge, with more to come later in the century; and a brewery started near the site of the defunct Globe which, a hundred years later, was to become the great works owned by Dr Johnson’s friend Henry Thrale. But then the north shore of the river too had its share of new wharves, workshops and smelly manufacturies, even as far west as Whitehall, to the disgust of John Evelyn who took the view that these signs of crude economic activity were unworthy in ‘the Imperial seat of our incomparable Monarch’. The British Empire in its full resplendence still lay a long way in the future, but it was true that fragile ships setting out from the Thames reached as far as America to the west and India, or even China, to the east. They brought back from these ends of the earth decorative goods which found their way into London houses and new plants which began to be cultivated in London’s gardens.
    There was one particularly splendid and innovative garden near the river west of Lambeth palace (that of the Tradescant family, gardeners to the royal family), but Bankside itself was not short of gardens. They appear with great clarity on the bird’s-eye map made by Wenceslaus Hollar’s friend and colleague William Faithorne in 1658, two years before the Restoration. The fish ponds, still visible near the end of the preceding century, have all gone by this date, and of the entertainment industry only one bear garden is shown. (Twenty-five years later that, too, was suppressed.) But each of the run of houses now squashed together along Bankside in a continuous line, in the way of ribbon-development on the edge of town in every era, has its own garden behind. Drawn as decorative parterres, they must have been for a mixture of flowers and vegetables, and beyond each lies its own orchard. There is, as yet, no sign of the commercial wharves that would appear on Bankside in the next century. The garden plots all end in a narrow stream (the ditch first dug in the thirteenth century) over which each household has its own plank bridge. The houses at the west end of Bankside, which stand between the roadway and the river, have no gardens, but from the roadway numerous little bridges cross a wider section of stream to further individual orchards. The two streams curve round to join one another by Barge House stairs. Evidently Bankside was still a very well-watered place, indeed the water levels in all the channels still rose and fell with the river tides.
    The only problem with Faithorne’s image of this garden suburb is that, in the tradition of London map making, it stops short at the southern edge of the Bankside properties, the rest of the space on the sheet being taken by the large, rectangular key to the churches of London and its surrounding districts. In reality, we know that Maid Lane, complete with quite a few houses, was already there on the southern