Greenwich to London Bridge via Limehouse & Wapping

The foreshore on both sides of the river is home to an activity which occurs along almost the entirety of the Thames Path: Mudlarking.

In its current form ‘Mudmooching’ is now a popular hobby but was once a grim and sometimes desperate source of income for the river’s poor, as they waded in the filth and mud searching for anything: old ropes, scrap metal, fragments of wood, lost coins, bricks and tiles, while occasionally pilfering what they could from the merchants’ boats.

Now the hobbyists can be seen at low tide, hunched over, scouring and scanning the shore for a wide and sometimes bizarre range of relics, trinkets and scrap. Recently made famous by Lara Maiklin’s book, the activity is now more popular than ever, though still licenced and, in some places, strictly controlled, notably around the Tower of London’s foreshore.

You’ll probably have already noticed the extreme tidal nature of the river; it’s this daily shifting, sifting and sorting of the river’s edge which turns and roils the mud, producing a continuous bounty of odds, sods, knickknacks and curiosities dating from prehistory to last Wednesday.

Limehouse’s reputation as a fog filled maze of cobbled streets inhabited by strangers from strange lands, the dispossessed and the dangerous has been built on myth, literary imagination and reality.

Literary references abound:  Pepys visited, Conan-Doyle used the Chinese opium dens that once populated the area as an atmospheric setting for a Sherlock Holmes investigation. More recently Philip Pullman wrote, ‘Sherlock Holmes and the Limehouse Horror’ further embedding the area’s dodgy reputation in the public imagination.

However it is the description of The Grapes pub (hardly disguised) in Dickens’ novel ‘Our Mutual Friend’ which stays in the mind:

“A tavern of dropsical appearance… long settled down into a state of hale infirmity. It had outlasted many a sprucer public house, indeed the whole house impended over the water but seemed to have got into the condition of a faint-hearted diver, who has paused so long on the brink that he will never go in at all.”

At low tide just off shore you may be lucky to catch a glimpse of the Anthony Gormley life-size statue, Another Time, standing in the water (pictured above); this can be viewed from Dunbar Wharf apparently, however the best views are from the terrace bar at the back of the pub, naturally.

The pub’s co-owners are the actor Sir Ian McKellen and Russian tycoon Evegeny Lebedev… make of that what you will. Lord of the Rings fans should call in for a glimpse of Gandalf’s staff which is kept behind the bar.

Originally dating from 1520, this pub is a contender for the title of Britain’s oldest riverside tavern. Once named the Devil’s Tavern, like the other pubs on this route, The Prospect continues and no doubt gently fosters the area’s reputational theme of crime and assorted murky misdeeds. It was recorded that this was, “the usual place for hanging of pirates and sea-rovers, at the low-water mark, and there to remain till three tides had overflowed them”.

In the 1600s this was the local for ‘Hanging’ Judge Jeffreys who was known for his rude and rowdy exchanges with hapless defendants and their counsel, coupled with a fondness for capital punishment. He achieved a personal best at the ‘Bloody Assizes’ following the Monmouth Rebellion, a.k.a. the Pitchfork Rebellion of 1685, executing several hundred rebels who had aimed to overthrow James II.

Revisionist accounts now seem to propose that Jeffries was in fact quite a reasonable bloke, evidencing that in the same year while sitting in Bristol he turned to the fully robed mayor of Bristol, sitting next to him on the legal bench, had him arrested and fined £1000 for being a ‘kidnapping knave’; the mayor had a lucrative side hustle of kidnapping his own countrymen and selling them into slavery.

Just who occupies the moral high ground in this account remains a mystery;  I remain unconvinced about JJ’s current rehabilitation, as just a bit of a character…

The Learned Judge liked his beer and had his reasons to do so as his revisionist sympathisers say; we shall hear more of him at our next pub…

The various quays along this walk tended to have their own signature trades and connections. Surrey Quays was, for a large part of its working life, busy with trade from the Baltic and Scandinavia, with an emphasis on ice, timber and whaling. Thankfully the huge, vile, blubber boiling houses which stank out the area have gone, now replaced with cafes selling sushi.

Another contender for the oldest Riverside pub, The Town claims heritage dating back to the War of the Roses in the1460s. Its current name derives from its association with the fishermen of Ramsgate who unloaded their catch here to dodge the higher taxes further up the river at Billingsgate.  Captain Bligh’s ship The Bounty was purchased while moored behind the pub before his voyage to Tahiti and the infamous mutiny.

Here we encounter Judge Jeffreys again but this time at a turning point in his life and that of his boss James II. With The Glorious Revolution of 1688 the King fled the country while William III’s troops approach London. The story that has been passed down is that Jeffrey shaved off his prominent and distinguishing eyebrows, disguised himself as a sailor and, hiding in the Town pub, waited to board a ship to Hamburg. A former victim of his highly individual justice recognised him; an angry and vengeance-seeking crowd gathered, the terrified Jefferies was dragged away to the Tower for his own safety.

Typically misunderstanding the public mood he begged his captors “to show him that same Mercy he had shown to others”.

It was rightly assumed that he was facing execution but for those looking for revenge – even if only symbolic – they would have to wait a couple more centuries. Jefferies died in the Tower of liver disease before he could be tried.

Then, in the 1940s during the Blitz, the tomb in the City church in which he was buried had a direct hit;  Jeffries mortal remains were blown into history.

More recent historians have contended that his pain from liver disease accounts for his fondness for his beer and the fact that he married a forceful wife for his behaviour:  An explanation admirable for its combination of patriarchal claptrap and poundland  pop psychology.

 It was said by some that “St George slew the Dragon and secured the maiden while Judge Jeffries missed the maiden and married the Dragon by mistake.”

So, he may have been a merciless, blood thirsty executioner but that’s because he wasn’t very well and lived with someone who spoke her mind.

That explains everything.

Wapping Old Stairs, next door to the The Town of ramsgate pub, once a destination for homecoming sailors was also a site for executions by hanging, and the three-tides rinse cycle treatment as once practiced at The Prospect of Whitby (see above Features link).

However, it is perhaps what they represent which is worth some thought.  These are just one of 11 remaining Riverside Stairs – legal rights of way  – from the original scores of stairs which were a vital loading and embarkation point for the trade and traffic on the river. A combination of Luftwaffe skill and equally ruinous postwar developer ‘vision’  saw the vast majority bulldozed out of existence.

However local resistance, particularly from those families who could remember the centrality of the stairs to Thames life, led  to the City of London recommending preservation in 2002.

Countless people – prisoners, adventurers, traders, political fugitives, emigrants and immigrants – have used these and the ten remaining Stairs: their first, or last , glimpse of home, or a new life. We can be grateful that these little gems of history have survived the extraordinary pressure of commercial development… so far.