The Thames

Dredging and embankment work along the Thames in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries produced an extraordinary quantity of metalwork: Bronze Age rapiers and spearheads, Iron Age daggers in decorated sheaths, and two of the finest pieces of Celtic art from Britain, the Battersea Shield and the Waterloo Helmet, both recovered from the river in central London. Human skulls have also come out of it in numbers, concentrated in particular reaches and with few other bones alongside them.

Richard Bradley's analysis of finds of this kind across northwestern Europe changed how they are read. Antiquarians had explained them as cargo lost in accidents or wealth hidden in emergencies; Bradley argued from their patterning, the selection of object types, the frequent deliberate breaking, the repeated use of the same locations over centuries, that they are votive, a religious practice of putting valuable things permanently beyond use by giving them to water. The Thames is one of the richest such deposits in Europe.

The river was also a boundary between peoples, which may be part of the same logic, since deposition often concentrates at edges. When Rome founded Londinium on its north bank the pattern continued in a new idiom: the temple of Mithras excavated at Walbrook, on a stream running into the Thames, had its sculptures of the god and of Serapis and Minerva carefully buried in the temple floor in late antiquity rather than smashed.

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.