London’s Riverscape Lost & Found
There’s nothing new about panoramas of the River Thames. In pen and pencil, oil, etching and engraving and latterly on film (and its digital successor), men and women have been picturing the continuous development of London’s riverscape.
To a list including James McNeill Whistler, Claude Monet, JMW Turner and Canaletto, add the names of Mike Seaborne, Graham Diprose and Charles Craig. Last year, these three London photographers set themselves the task of making a complete panorama of the north and south banks of the Thames from London Bridge: downriver to Greenwich on the southern bank and the Isle of Dogs on the north. One of the most fascinating results was the change that time had wrought … because of course the trio have been here before.
The story of the panorama really starts in 1937, when the Port of London Authority (PLA) commissioned Avery Illustrations to produce a complete set of overlapping photos, downriver from London Bridge to Greenwich and the Island. Why they did so was a mystery. The PLA was a mighty organisation, then-governor of the largest port of the world (London is still Britain’s second biggest), and very media-savvy, yet the photos appeared in none of its own publications nor in the press. The mammoth job of shooting 4.8 miles on either bank was completed - and then disappeared into the PLA library and archive, only to emerge 50 years later.
Chris Ellmers and Alex Werner immediately saw the potential of the find when they published ‘London’s Lost Riverscape’ in 1988. It was 20 years after the final mass closure of the docks (the London Docks in Wapping were closed in 1969). ‘Docklands’ was emerging as a commercial venture from the wreckage of 200 years of commercial, maritime and architectural activity. And Londoners, many of whom had forgotten the fact that theirs was a seafaring and trading town, were getting nostalgic. Werner and Ellmers’ book was a huge seller, and it fired the curiosity of Seaborne, Diprose and Craig. In 1997 the trio thought ‘why not do it again … but this time in colour?’.
They found an extraordinary world, where sweeping away two centuries of history and contamination. wasn’t so easy as the developers might have hoped. Trudging across the site of the yet-to-be-built Millennium Dome, in full protective gear, the snappers were warned ‘don’t tread on the green crystals, they’re cyanide’. They watched in amazement as a JCB digger gracefully sank into an unmarked coal-tar pit.
Their work was published in 2000 as ‘London’s Riverscape Lost & Found’, and provided a remarkable side-by-side comparison of what had been swept away by Luftwaffe bombs and redevelopment - and what had remained. Wapping’s Gun Wharves was still there, converted into luxury flats, as were New Crane Wharves and large chunks of the Limehouse waterfront;Crown Mill, Roneo, Eagle and a dozen other Limehouse wharves are now luxury apartment blocks, with cleaned-up brickwork and suspiciously modern windows giving the redevelopment game away. Alongside though, are acres of ‘faux Docklands’; eighties blocks pretending to be old warehouses, and ranging from the fairly convincing to the hideously garish - this was the 1980s after all.
So how much has changed in 2009? Many of the remaining post-industrial gaps have been plugged, and the Greenwich peninsula is no longer a polluted wasteland. After the false start of the Millennium Dome, the O2 has now brought that corner back to life. And interestingly, at a time when many are bemoaning the lack of access to the river, with private apartment blocks providing an impenetrable barrier, the trio found Londoners were using their river far more than a decade before. The development of the Thames Pathway, new gardens and public spaces, riverside pubs and restaurants, and new piers for the riverboats, are all pulling us back to the river … and reminding us of why London was here in the first place. And alongside the panorama pieces, the authors have selected candid shots from the early years of the 20th centuries - reminding us of when all this was docks, not just Docklands.
London being London, the process of change never stops of course. Mike Seaborne is also Senior Curator of Photography at the Museum of London, and has spent much time recently photographing the Lower Lea Valley - which is fast becoming the 2012 Olympic site. London writer Iain Sinclair isn’t alone in mourning the improvement of another slice of east London’s post-industrial present into a tidily packaged future. In ten years time we may be looking back at Seaborne’s Lea Valley photos and thinking - alongside what we’ve gained - of how much we’ve lost.
London’s Changing Riverscape, Panoramas from London Bridge to Greenwich by by Graham Diprose, Charles Graig, Mike Seaborne with Chris Ellmers and Alex Werner, published by Frances Lincoln, ISBN-10: 0711229414, hardcover, £30
Timeline:
43AD: Romans establish London as a fort and trading base.
1550s on: Dutch and Flemish painters come to London and depict Thames. Among them are Leonard Knyff Jan Siberechts and Johannes Kip
1740s: Canaletto’s paintings include one of the first Westminster Bridge.
1840s: First photographs of London and the Thames
1860s: Whistler produces numerous etchings, prints and oil paintings including ‘The Thames in Ice’
Early 1900s: Claude Monet’s London paintings including ‘London, the Parliament, Effects of Sun in the Fog’ (1904). Exactly a century later this painting sold for $20.1m
1920s on: Stanley Spencer produces paintings of the upper reaches of the Thames
1937: PLA commissions Avery Illustrations to produce a black-and-white photographic panorama of the Thames
1939: Second World War sees extensive damage to docks accelerating decline
1969: London Docks close and are taken over by Tower Hamlets. Remnants today include Tobacco Dock and the Shadwell Basin
1988: Alex Werner and Chris Ellmers produce the book ‘London’s Lost Riverscape’ based around the 1937 photos
1997: Craig, Diprose and Seaborne begin a colour panorama, extending the reach downriver to the Millennium Dome site on the south bank and Bow Creek on the north. Published in 2000 as ‘London’s Riverscape Lost & Found’