The Charter'd Thames

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Abstract

Chapter from Gonzales-Ruibal, Reclaiming Archaeology. Boat-based engagement with the Thames and its estuary from a contemporary archaeological standpoint. Influenced by works on mercantilism, an archaeology of meanders and flow, this paper attemps to get beneath the surface without breaking it.

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time as the real prize of social housing has reverted to the low-rise house. Experiments in tower living came later.

Figure 21.2 Sustrans Thames Bridge. Courtesy Sustrans

Almost on the zero longitude line of the peninsula the Victoria Deep Water Terminal allows dredgers to load and unload in all tides. Dredged aggregates from the sea, or crushed rocks, come in, and sorted demolition wastes go out. When archaeologists moved in, ahead of con- struction work nearby, the unexpected finds included a 7-m-long, headless, whale skeleton. Although whaling ships were frequently at Greenwich, blubber being a vital ingredient for those stinking industries, the beast seems to have been beached and then deliberately mutilated. He was not the only one to be so left on the North Greenwich peninsular. those stinking industries, the beast seems to have been beached and then deliberately mutilated.

Figure 21.4 Beckton gasworks following the assault on Hué, 1987. Courtesy of Richard White Along the Plumstead Flats, distribution sheds form a flat white plain along the stretch of the river known as Galleons Reach. On the left bank, the North Woolwich Earth Station (built by recently privatized British Telecom in 1984 to service the new financial centre) and the glow- ing announcement of the Galleons Reach Shopping Park. This is Beckton, the hero of London, and another landscape of gasworks, removed. The real 1984 was playing out as a bonanza for state-legitimized private capital but for the gasworks, hired out as a dystopian stand-in for Airstrip One in that year’s film production of Nineteen Eighty-Four (Michael Radford, 1984), the constructivist mise-en-scéne of Orwell’s fictional ‘Ingsoc’ socialism was the death knell. The ‘magic world of plant and pipes’ operated from the 1870s into the 1960s, displaced by cleaner, cheaper, easier North Sea natural gas. When Nairn wrote that the works could become ‘one of the showpieces of London’ (2002 [1966]: 187) he could not have foreseen that the show would be Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987). The gasworks starring role as Hué, the historic arena of one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War (1968), was the final assault. From 1989 until 2001, the toxic spoil heaps — the Beckton Alps — of the western perimeter of the works were landscaped as a dry ski-slope brightening the drab horizon, bolstered by spoil from the new British Library. Beckton is also the hero of Bazalgette’s great sewage works. The northern outfall sewer brings most of north London’s waste to the river at Barking Creek. On the other side at Cross- ness, the southern outfall sewer does the same for south London. The Thames has always been

(BBC 2011). Then, ‘[i]Jn the widening of the shores sinking low in the grey, smoky distance: the greatness of the sea receives the mercantile fleet of good ships that London sends out upor the turn of every tide’ (Conrad 1946 [1906]: 104). But the sea is not the end. The tide turns and the ships come in. There is a misty opacity to the air on the Kent side, not the emissions of the many power stations that punctuate the flat shores, or sea mists, but the dust of chalk quarrying and cement works. Amid the quarries out on Dartford Heath is the road maintenance company Conway’s recycling plant. The aris- ings of its city works are taken there, washed, sorted, pulverized, and sent back to fill the city’s potholes, or underlie its roads, or mix its concrete, shipped up the river in aggregate haulers. This is what the river is, an ebb and flow of London’s values. The invisible cities of centuries of societal shifts and shimmies remain suspended within it. The brave Esmereldans, their mod- ernist dreams and migrant movements; the Eutropians, their new towns and malls, their state that wants to care but can’t afford to; the Ersilians, their ruins and rebuilds; the Euphemians, their containers, their sisters, their world. The ship’s archaeologist saw the triumph of the indi- vidual in a world dependent on cooperative systems; saw the spaces of work that doesn’t exist anymore, the containment of the replacement we are part of; and waste, recycling, pollution, climate change. But also advancement, innovation, betterment, homes and castles. Like Shah- razad, the Thames tells stories of commerce, consumption, social relations and stratification, the commons, the corporations, markets and anti-markets. Washed, sorted, pulverized and sent back to fill the city’s potholes. It is the trading city, watery Venice, whose Marco Polos might just as well stay home.