Take a deep dive into forgotten Thames history as we explore the lost routes and the monumental hidden engineering where water meets land.
Doors: 7pm
Tickets: £13.50
Secrets of the shore that shaped the city
Join us for a deep dive into the Thames as we explore the hidden routes and monumental walls where London water meets London land.
Guide and chronicler of lost London topographies, David Sweetland, walks us step by step down the forgotten history of the Thames Stairs, Water Gates and Landing places. From Execution Dock to Traitor’s Gate, these routes cut into river banks, walls, and wharves, once thronged with life and a constant flow of sailors, travellers, merchants, convicts, and even corpses.
David explores the ghosts of these descents to the river’s edge. Where were they? Who used them? And why have so many disappeared? And he reveals surprising locations where some can still be glimpsed, even after the construction of the great embankments swallowed them or moved the rivers’ edge.
Those very embankments are a triumph of grim necessity. Beneath their promenades and behind their massive walls, lies a hidden revolution—Joseph Bazalgette’s great interceptor sewers, built in response to the cholera plagues and the infamous Great Stink. Historian of science Laurence Scales suggests a new take on the great engineer’s radical vision, and on the Victorian politics and civil engineering prowess that remade the river’s shore and the city's sanitation.
And Laurence investigates what was there before - and beyond - these marvels of empire engineering, and asks how they have fared in the centuries since their conception.
David Sweetland is a London guide and author of one ofLondon’s best-loved historical blog 'A London Inheritance’, an archive and resource inspired by the unique photographs of the city taken by his father from 1946 through to 1954.
Formerly in the engineering profession, Laurence Scales is a London guide and historian of science. He is an avid collector of the colourful and often neglected characters who made the extraordinary technological and scientific history of London.