London’s a beach

Will Self
9 Jul 2009

I love London — don't get me wrong; but it's a love that's only the positive pole of a quite profound ambivalence. I think all of us can agree that there are times when the sheer size and weight of the city closes in on us — a vice of bricks, mortar, concrete and steel. For this reason I've never liked living in those districts of the city that have no natural features at all. This isn't too much of a problem, for London — being in a river valley — abounds in hills and rises.

Perhaps the most London-locked time I ever experienced was when I had a house in Shepherd's Bush, and then latterly on the fringes of Notting Hill. True, I could get a prospect from the top of Ladbroke Grove — but it was only of more Ladbroke Grove; if I wanted any sense of relief — in both senses — I had to walk to the western edge of Wormwood Scrubs, from which corner of the urban veldt the towers and trees of Campden Hill appeared as a distant oasis.

For the past decade, however, I've been in Stockwell, and while a trip along Wandsworth Road to Clapham Junction offers some vistas, the most prominent natural feature hereabouts is the daddy of 'em all — Old Father Thames. No matter how claustrophobic I may feel, a stroll along the embankments never fails to reposition me in a world that's as natural as a cormorant scudding across its empurpled wavelets rather than as artificial as a red-faced Cabinet minister tendering his resignation.

Over the years I've been strolling the riverside between the South Bank and Battersea Park, I've had occasion to notice that at low tide large portions of foreshore are exposed. Between the MI6 Building at Vauxhall Bridge and Jeffrey Archer's penthouse, a quite extensive riverine beach is conjured into being by the moon god's powers, and when I'm particularly down I like to go and sit there, watching the Duck Tours' amphibians come wallowing up on to the slipway, or envisioning Whistler's paintings of this self-same reach that are housed in Tate Britain on the opposite bank.

It occurred to me that it might be possible, on the lowest tide of the year, to do the whole Battersea Park to Lambeth Bridge stretch — a distance of a couple of miles — on the exposed shore. This would be a beach walk, complete with the salt tang of the tidal river, the bird life and the beachcombing; moreover, by abandoning the embankments altogether I would be taking a trip back in time, to before the late 1870s, when the Thames was walled up as part of Bazalgette's grand scheme to rid the metropolis of its Great Stink.

I had seen photographs of the unbounded Thames, and especially on the south side, the forests of spars, the shaky walkways protruding out into the water, the myriad jetties, coal chutes, and all the other impedimenta of a working river reminded me of a far eastern city — a Benares or a Bangkok. How strange this place would have been to us contemporary Londoners, for whom the river is something to be crossed over in a few seconds rather than worked and dwelt upon for a lifetime.

On a Wednesday evening, at 8pm, an hour and 20 minutes before low water, I met my nephew Jack on the south side of Chelsea Bridge and we descended to the river. There was a clear dry run to the west at the base of the sloping retaining wall of Battersea Park, but to the east, after skipping over a ballast barrier beneath the bridge and slopping along a narrow fringe of sludge, we found water barring our way under the rail bridge that debouches into Victoria.

Still, neither of us was about to be deterred. I was already gripped by the odd poetry of the experience: in a hundred yards I'd spotted bundles of car bodywork trim, a fishing reel, a magneto, oodles of good quality London bricks — if I'd been a Victorian mudlark, who made my living by scavenging the foreshore, I'd already be able to knock off for the night. Besides, before setting out Jack had asked: “What shoes should I wear?” and I'd told him: “Ones you don't care about.” No doubt what we did next was a bit dangerous — and possibly even illegal — but I don't mind telling you about it, gentle reader, because I very much doubt that you'd have followed our example and waded under the rail bridge, hanging onto the chain length pinioned against the wall.

The water wasn't that cold, and there was a pleasing ooziness to the silty bottom. We now found ourselves between the embankment of Battersea Power Station and the jetty alongside, upon which stand two great hulks of cranes from the inter-war period when coal was still being offloaded, then fed into its mighty furnaces.

In my view, not least among the blights resulting from the continuing desuetude of the site — the power station eats prospective developers for breakfast — is the failure to open up the riverside walkway. A safe pedestrian and bike path all the way from Waterloo to Wandsworth would be a huge asset for thousands of Londoners; so it was a thrill finally to be able take the direct route, even if this involved climbing over a container barge, then oozing past the cavernous shed of the refuse transfer station, where more containers were being shifted about by overhead winches.

I say “even” — but I don't mean that at all. In fact it was a huge buzz to be wading through the Thames mud. The sky was a beautiful swirl of magenta and violet cirrus, and the cormorants were indeed skimming the wavelets. While ducks and geese bobbed in a companionable huddle, a solitary heron lazily flapped over to Pimlico; as for us, we felt completely cut off from the city, adrift in fluvial time, with the enormous and mouldering infrastructure of the Cringle Dock and the Tideway Industrial Estate looming above us like the monumental buildings of some long-gone civilisation.

We reached the inlet around which has gathered a floating town of barges and houseboats, looked for somebody to ask permission from to come aboard their jetty, but could find no one, so climbed up, slopped along the steel walkways, then dropped off again at the eastern end. The silt in the inlet itself was worryingly deep, so we climbed a ladder to the embankment, walked past the two big freighters which are permanently moored here (so permanently that their inhabitants have cultivated lawns on their steel decks), then reached the Battersea Barge, a floating restaurant now resolutely grounded, and dropped back on to the foreshore from its gangway.

There was a party going on on the barge, tipsy twentysomethings in summer dresses — but even though we slopped right by them no one seemed to notice us. It was the same all the way along the river — although people on the bank looked right at us as we crunched over shingle and slithered through mud, they seemed to see through us. It was an eerie feeling, and made me think that by coming at London from this unexploited angle we had slid into another dimension.

A warning of storm drain outlets from the Thames Water Authority took the form of an enormous signboard; beside it, a steel loading hopper three storeys high bore the graffito BEWARE MAD DOG. The hopper's legs sat on petrified swirls of rock, other reefs of which were exposed along this reach by the still ebbing tide. A treatise could be written on the vagaries of the Thames's riverbed, another on the peculiarly intense green of the weed growing on wooden bafflers. I'd rather devote my words to these things, and the groves of buddleia, and the odd sight of an entire tree growing horizontally out from the river wall, than I would to the odious sight of St George's Wharf, the gull-winged uglification of apartments that cleaves the sky beside Vauxhall Bridge.

We came up to the twice-lifesize bronze statue above the pier of Vauxhall Bridge nearest to the southern bank, a female personification entitled Pottery by Frederick Pomeroy. Some say these statues — four upstream, and four more downstream — are little noticed because of the lack of a suitable vantage. But since the walkway was opened along St George's Wharf, Pottery has been as exposed as a lapdancer — albeit a rather heavy, dull, Edwardian one.

We'd been on dry land for quite a stretch now, and this seemed only fitting, for at Vauxhall remains of London's first bridge were found; the wooden piles of a Neolithic structure that may have spanned the Thames altogether, or led to an islet in the marshy stream. It was also at this point that, cycling into town one day in January 2006, I chanced to see the bottlenose whale that lost its way, swam upstream and eventually became fatally stranded — as unpleasant a symbol, if any were required, of how the anti-natural character of London can sometimes crush visitors as well as inhabitants.

Jack and I were far from crushed, though — our destination was in sight, the small freighter on the Albert Embankment that's licensed as a pub and restaurant, and which bears the eminently suitable moniker, The Thamesis (the original Latin form of the river's name). The Thamesis was beached on a positive atoll of dried mud and shingle, its rudder completely dry — but to get there we had to wade, thigh-high, through the waters.

For a native Londoner who feels he's seen the city in all its guises, this had to be one of the strangest ways of reaching the centre. It was humbling too, the cold silt sucking my calves, while Westminster shone like a Disneyland legislature on the north bank. I don't know, perhaps all new MPs should be required to make this entrance, rather than merely bowing to a man in a gown and business suit — that would remind them that they're mortal.

Nathan, one of the staff on the Thamesis, very kindly let down a simple aluminium ladder and we climbed aboard, then disembarked into the rush and push of a summertime evening in the city. As our wet feet slapped the paving along to the South Bank I realised that I was inordinately happy. The walk had worked triumphantly; for this evening at least, my love for London was fully requited: she had loved me back, fiercely — if wetly.

• 

  The first date debate: who picks up the bill?

  We ask two young singles where they stand on divvying up for drinks and dinner this Valentine's Day

  ---

• 

  Chris Powell: racist abuse between players was accepted in my day

  Exclusive: After high-profile allegations this season, Charlton's manager is pleased the issue is now being addressed but says the authorities still have plenty of work to do

  ---