The Thames of Whistler is the river of mystery ... Whistler illustrated the working banks of the river from a characteristically low view-point. From this vantage it is a world of mud and banks and bales. ibid.
The greatest twentieth century artist of the river however is Stanley Spencer whose enduring image is that of Cookham, the village by the Thames where he grew up, and where he spent most of his life. ibid.
Stanley Spencer – he had a reverence for the river just as if it were one of the holy rivers that flowed from Eden. ibid.
The river creates its own weather. ibid.
There are 134 bridges along the length of the Thames. ibid.
The Thames has given London a beauty and a grandeur it would otherwise not have possessed. It is the epitome, the liquidescence, the spirit of the City. ibid.
The Thames has always been a river of trade. Its tidal reaches from the estuary to London have always been hard at work. Peter Ackroyd’s Thames 3/4
It was said in the sixteenth century that, ‘From a distance the river looked like a forest of masts.’ ibid.
The Thames handled the trade of the world. ibid.
They endured for a thousand years, but then like their red sails they slowly mixed with the sunset. ibid.
And there were the watermen ... some forty thousand in the eighteenth century. ibid.
The watermen were faced with a terrifying menace ... steam. bid.
In the battle for the Thames steam would win. ibid.
The penny steam-bus became known as the omnibus of the River. ibid.
Not for nothing was it called the Silver Thames. ibid.
The first brick warehouses were as large as palaces and as well defended as castles. ibid.
The West India Docks survived until 1980. ibid.
The River inspires dreams, or what we may call dream-like reflections. Peter Ackroyd’s Thames 4/4
The great poet of the river was undoubtedly Charles Dickens – there is scarcely a novel by him in which the river is not present carrying all the burden of the novelist’s obsession. For Dickens the river was a river of tears and of darkness. And he knew of what he wrote. He had lost his hope beside the Thames; at the age of twelve he was put to work in a blacking factory beside the river at Hungerford Stairs. ibid.
The estuary is the brackish zone ... It has its own beauty. ibid.
In the poetry of the Anglo-Saxons it is a land of nightmare. ibid.
It was a day in late autumn, and the brickwork of the houses opposite was stained red with the declining sun. The street itself was littered with orange peel, scraps of newspaper and fallen leaves. An old woman, draped in a voluminous shawl, was clutching the pump on the corner. Peter Ackroyd, The Lambs of London p3
Holborn Passage itself was little more than an alley, one of those dark threads woven into the city's fabric which accumulate soot and dust over the centuries. There was a pipeshop here as well as a mantua-maker, a carpenter’s workshop and a bookshop. All of them worse with resignation the faded patina of age and abandonment. ibid. p14
Charles stepped out of the bookshop, looking left and right before he walked out of the dark passage into High Holborn. He joined the throng of carriages and pedestrians, all moving eastward into the City. It was for him a motley parade, part funeral procession and part pantomime, evincing to him the fullness and variety of life in all its aspects – before the City swallowed it up. The sound of footsteps mingled with the rumble of the carriage wheels and the echo of horse hooves to make what Charles considered to be a uniquely city sound. It was the music of movement itself. There were caps and bonnets and hats bobbing in the distance; there were purple frock-coats and green jackets, striped top-coats and check surtouts, umbrellas and great woollen parti-coloured shawls, all around him. ibid. p28
I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory, the place, the past speaks ... Just as it seems possible to me that a street or dwelling can materially affect the character and behaviour of the people who dwell in them, is it not also possible that within this city (London) and within its culture are patterns of sensibility or patterns of response which have persisted from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and perhaps even beyond? Peter Ackroyd, The Observer 28th August 1994
London goes beyond any boundary or convention. It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London. Peter Ackroyd, London
As a Londoner I was able to see how the world of power and money cast its shadow on those who failed. Peter Ackroyd
London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character – a living being – within each of my books. Peter Ackroyd
Rioting has been a London tradition for centuries. Peter Ackroyd, The Independent online article 22nd August 2011
He [Thomas More] was in the middle of London’s ‘low life’ and encountered a noisome and pestilential environment. He wrote once, with some conviction, of the taverns and bathhouses, the public toilets and barbers’ shops, used by servants, pimps, whores, bath-keepers, porters and carters, all of them swarming the streets. Thomas More, The Life of Thomas More pp134-135
Turner’s surfaces are still startling ... Turner makes light the vehicle of feeling. And he found inspiration for an amazing variety of ways to express feeling from the River Thames. Matthew Collings, Turner’s Thames, BBC 2012
Turner always returned to this relationship with the Thames. ibid.
Moonlight – A Study At Millbank ... Mood, feeling, emotion, ideas. ibid.
Turner was an awkward cuss as a personality. ibid.
Turner becomes the great romantic artist. Turner’s romantic ideal was that everything should seem to be either on the verge of dissolving or just about to be born. ibid.
His poetic painting. ibid.
Turner is the maverick artist, the visionary who is using the Thames as a trigger for an idealised scene that evokes the texture of everyday life as it was living in 1809. ibid.
In Turner’s time the sublime implied the greatest intensity of feeling. ibid.
England: Richmond Hill on the Prince Regent’s Birthday: It’s Turner’s big public statement to the nation. ibid.
The role of emotion in his art and its link to colour. ibid.
The solitary king of light. ibid.
The Fighting Temeraire: The magnitude and sorrow of loss. ibid.
A profoundly talented artist. ibid.
Good God in Heaven above. I must have taken the wrong turning. We seem to have driven into a place called – Tott-ten-ham ... We’re all going to die! The Catherine Tate Show, The Aga Saga Woman
Destruction and ruin have haunted this city. A Picture of London, BBC 2012
It’s true character lies in its unplanned chaotic nature. London has burned many times across the centuries. ibid.
The Great Fire of London burned for seven days. Over 13,000 buildings were destroyed. ibid.
Wren would create the first dome to be seen in London. ibid.
The Georgian London of Bloomsbury and Soho would be the definition of urban elegance for the age. ibid.
Around Covent Garden Market grew up a world of theatres, brothels and coffee houses that attracted writers and artists. Urban life in the raw was to become the subject matter of art. ibid.
Hogarth was the first artist to see the streets of London as theatre. ibid.
Monet v Marx: two very different pictures of London. ibid.
London’s Docks: at the turn of the twentieth century the busiest most important port on the planet. ibid.
Over the last half century London has become a city of towers. ibid.
What if anything is the sound of London? Jules Holland: London Calling, BBC 2012
Bells told an illiterate population everything. ibid.
The streets of London have always been paved with buskers. ibid.