Christian England arranged its most important buildings along this water. Westminster Abbey, where every English coronation since 1066 has taken place, stands on the north bank; Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the archbishops of Canterbury, faces it across the river, and for centuries the archbishop crossed by barge; St Paul's Cathedral sits above the north bank downstream. Sovereigns, mayors and archbishops all travelled the river in state, and the annual procession of the Lord Mayor was a water procession before it became a road one.
The river carried popular religion too. Dissenting congregations baptised converts by immersion in it from the seventeenth century, and open-air preaching drew crowds to its banks; the frost fairs held on the ice in the coldest winters had their own sermons and mock ceremonies. A blessing of the river is still held each January by the parishes on either side of London Bridge, at which a wooden cross is cast into the water in memory of the baptism of Christ.
Its recent history is a resurrection story that the churches along it have used more than once. Declared biologically dead in 1957 after a century of sewage, the tidal Thames has since recovered seals, salmon and hundreds of species of invertebrate, following the Victorian sewers, twentieth century treatment works and the tunnel completed in the 2020s.