The House by the Thames Read Free Page B

building.
    Bankside itself seems to have been built in the early thirteenth century as a causeway leading from the Bishop of Winchester’s quays and tide-mills near St Saviour’s, west round the shore line. Initially it would have been constructed in an attempt to keep the river water from invading the meadows, pastures and gardens of the Bishop’s park. But incidentally it served as a landing-stage for boats and thus became a useful location for building. There are indications in early documents that the owners or tenants of the houses that gradually appeared overlooking the water were personally responsible for maintaining the section of causeway fronting their own properties. No doubt, over the course of time, more earth and gravel were heaped on the bank and there was more timber shoring to keep the flood tides at bay: the causeway became higher and more substantial. It was extended further, along the shore line of the Paris Garden and beyond towards Lambeth: that section became known as Upper Ground, presumably a description of its contour, the name it still bears today. After several centuries, according to the earliest ‘road map’ of Southwark, which was drawn in 1618 as part of a legal wrangle about access, Bankside was said to be wide enough to accommodate two carts abreast.
    Another part of the thirteenth-century flood works, that was to become an enduring feature of the landscape and determine later road-contours, was a substantial drainage ditch like a small stream. This was cut roughly parallel with Bankside but further south, through both the Bishop’s Park and the Paris Garden, and looping round at the west end to flow out into the Thames. Other ditches were added later, but the problem was never entirely solved: there were major floods at intervals on the south bank till the nineteenth-century arrival of proper sewers. The Paris Garden end of the parish was particularly vulnerable, since much of the land on that side originally lay several feet below the high water when it lapped at Bankside. Earlier names for the manor referred to withies and willows, and the memory of this was preserved long after, in the eighteenth century, when the western part of the Bankside was known as Willow Street.
    By Elizabeth’s time the Knights of St John had been dispossessed: the willows no longer provided a secure refuge for criminals, but the area remained a popular, if marshy place for clandestine encounters and a kind of pleasure garden was established there. It was said that the tree-cover was so dense that even on moonlit nights ‘one man cannot see another’ and that this created ‘a notable covert for confederates to shroud in’. The words are those of a City of London lawyer, writing of secret political meetings in the Paris Garden between the French Ambassador and the Bishop of Ross – possibly on the matter of Mary, Queen of Scots. Paris Garden stairs, the access point for boats along that part of the Bankside, was, of course, easily reached from any of the Whitehall stairs a little further up river on the opposite shore. Indeed, the Royal Barge was kept on the south side of the river, in what sounds to have been a rather grand building complete with glass windows and gilt decoration.
    Today, in spite of all the bridges, Bankside seems spiritually further from Westminster than it was in the days when the Royal Barge House lay at its western end. However, the trees have returned. Not willows, but rather similar silver birches, they are planted in a grove in front of the Tate Modern-Power Station. Paris Garden sleeps, fathoms deep, beneath the Blackfriars Bridge Road. The Barge House survived, derelict, till the mid-eighteenth century, but by the early nineteenth century it lay beneath a timber yard and a soap works. Only the water-stairs at that point continued to bear the name, which still survives today in a side road behind the Oxo Tower.
    Further east, the medieval