Extracts
1. ‘East Tilbury – a new start for the Bata Men’.
And this also has been one of the dark places on earth’. Those lines were spoken by Marlowe, the sea-going narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He was imagining the Thames estuary as it appeared to the Roman, advancing in his trireme to land in a swamp, march through unyielding woods, and feel the ‘utter savagery’ of the wilderness around him. You can still sense that remoteness on the shore at Coalhouse Point, even though there is nothing left of the four Romano-British huts of wattle and daub, which archaeologists once found in this vicinity. It has been suggested that the Romans had a ferry in this place, and even that Emperor Claudius crossed the Thames here shortly after the Roman invasion of AD 43. But there is no evidence to support the latter …read more »
2. ‘Industrial bread and a ship full of bombs’. An extract from the third Annual Docklands Lecture, July 2006 – which draws on material from the book.
Standing here beneath the towers of Canary Wharf and among the brasseries and tapas bars lining West India Quay, I am aware that it may seem frankly unworldly to suggest that we can still take our bearings from the river. Nowadays, the Thames impresses us primarily as a view: less a working thoroughfare than a silvery gleam that serves to enhance property values up and down the river. Yet it has other qualities that should be recognised as the development continues, whether in the name of the ‘Thames Gateway’ or of the 2012 Olympics … read more»