The Time Traveler's Guide to London

Dr Roula Pappa has seen a London few people can imagine. It’s a land empty of humans, the Thames a vast and churning thing that cuts through savannah, lily-padded pools and open woodland thick with oak and pine. The air is heavy with tropical heat, the reed-lined riverbanks teeming with life hungry to devour other life.

When we meet, however, it’s in the familiar surroundings of Kensington’s Natural History Museum. She holds her lanyard to a security door and beeps us into a warren of underground corridors. Above us, visitors flow into the entrance hall, slack-jawed under the whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling.

Slowly, the strip lights fizz into life, illuminating a room of gleaming wooden cabinets. She pulls the handle of one labelled ‘Trafalgar’ and lifts out a crescent of mottled ivory, cupping it with both hands. It’s what I’ve come here to see: the canine tooth of a hippopotamus that swam in the Thames 125,000 years ago, a time when temperatures were around 2C warmer than today. “This one lived below Nelson’s Column,” she reveals. “It dates to the last interglacial period, when the Thames would have been far wider.”

As senior curator of fossil mammals collections, Roula knows how to dress the part, her waistcoat shaggy with something I’d like to believe is mammoth fur. The archives she studies, representing a period of 65 million years, are home to remnants of some of the city’s most surprising former inhabitants, from the cave lions that prowled the site of The National Gallery to the straight-tusked elephants that once roamed The Strand, many of them unearthed in the geological terraces left by the flow of the ancestral Thames.

“Seeing what’s underneath gives you a completely different view of London,” Roula tells me, opening another cabinet to reveal the toffee-brown skull of a woolly rhinoceros. “My role has given me the opportunity to see how its environment and ecosystems have changed over millions of years — to perceive a wider, deeper sort of time.” 

This is the Thames’s power. It warps our sense of time by virtue of its grand old age, allowing us, even if only for a fleeting moment, to see the city for the complex creature it truly is. The Thames is the oldest thing in London and will be here long after the city is gone. What better way, then, to get to know the capital than with a meander along the river’s banks, meeting the people shaped by its flow. And my own meander begins one morning with a rather startling discovery.

Past

The sun is still tinting the clouds above St Paul’s pink when I happen upon the first bone. It’s gnarled and angular. A hip perhaps, reddened from age and still bearing traces of the blade that cleaved it. Then comes the femur, followed by a cracked windpipe — so fragile it nearly shatters as I pull it from the foreshore’s jumble of stone and driftwood.

Clutching my grisly findings, I hurry along the riverbank to seek out the expertise of Marilyn Greene, whose eyes are soon grazing the intricacies of the bone. She stays silent for a long time, running a hand through her dark ponytail. My brain whirs. “I think they once belonged to a cow,” she says finally. I’m surprised by my own disappointment. So not a Celtic warrior, then.

“I’ve never found a body,” Marilyn reveals, largely out of sympathy. “But I have a colleague who found a bit of human skull; it turned out to be Roman. Somebody else uncovered a 17th-century child burial right here on the foreshore. They had to call the police, but by the time they came, the water had covered it over again.”

Marilyn’s familiar with the Thames’s habit of spitting up the dead. She’s a mudlark: a person licensed by the Port of London Authority to search the riverside for remnants of the city’s past. Today, she’s here on behalf of the Thames Explorer Trust. She’s heading up a foreshore exploration tour between the northern tip of Millennium Bridge and the petrified stumps of Queenhithe, an ancient dock opposite Shakespeare’s Globe where Saxon coins stamped with portraits of Alfred the Great were once found buried in the clay.

“The original mudlarks were the poorest of the poor,” Marilyn explains as my group gathers on the foreshore, the thatched roof of Shakespeare’s Globe staring down on our anorak-clad ranks — comprised of everyone from young museum curators to amateur detectorists. “In the 18th and 19th centuries, they were the people who couldn’t make money any other way. They’d come down at low tide, probably without shoes, and search for lumps of coal to sell.”

Modern mudlarks are drawn more by the prospect of uncovering something astonishing. “The best discovery I know of occurred in the 1830s, near where they were going to build London Bridge,” Marilyn tells me as we walk east towards Queenhithe, occasionally dropping down to pluck shards of pottery and Victorian hairpins from between moss-clad mooring posts. “They found the head of the Roman emperor Hadrian. Not his actual head, of course, but the bronze one now in the British Museum. They never found the body, so maybe you’ll be lucky.”

Over the years, the Thames’s waters have given up all manner of remarkable things: the skull of a neolithic man, a flint hand axe, an Iron Age shield, a Celtic scabbard decorated with a dragon motif, a figurine of Apollo with its legs amputated, and several Roman effigies of Horus, the son of Isis. Some are thought to be ritual offerings — a reminder that the Thames was once a hallowed place; somewhere warriors’ swords were said to have been sunk in the hope they might find their owners in the afterlife.

We gather our finds and place them on a crescent of pale sand below the embankment wall. Roman tableware and pieces of green-glazed Tudor ceramics are laid out next to oyster shells — possible relics from when the molluscs were a staple food for many Londoners. Marilyn picks over the haul, gravitating to a pipe bulb carved with the initials of its owner. “It’s 1600s, I’d say,” she conjectures. “I like to think Samuel Pepys smoked one of these while he was watching the Great Fire of London. The fire was great for mudlarks today, because everyone threw their belongings into the water, then knocked down the burnt-out houses and pushed them into the river, too.”

Suddenly, Marilyn notices the water lapping quietly towards us. “The tide’s coming in; we’d better go.” We hurry back up the set of old stone stairs that brought us down to the foreshore, leaving the hungry tide to consume all that we’ve pulled from its depths.

Present

I head west, the offices of central London soon giving way to the redbrick mansions and pink magnolias along Chelsea Embankment, the tea-brown waters below spliced by a single clipper.

There was a time, according to author and biographer Peter Ackroyd, when so many boats filled the Thames that it was possible to travel from one bank to another simply by stepping from deck to deck. It’s said that thousands of people slept on the water, especially during the 1600s, when it was felt the river might offer some protection from fire and plague.

The Thames remains a sanctuary, not least for Molly Butt, one of the artists working on Eel Pie Island, a nine-acre teardrop of land that now plays host to an insulated community of creatives and self-declared eccentrics. I find it where Twickenham’s Georgian terraces back onto the river. After pausing to watch some rowers glide by, I stroll over the narrow footbridge onto the island, its banks wreathed by drooping willows. In the 18th and 19th centuries, crowds gathered here to sample pies filled with locally caught eels. Now privately owned, the island opens to the public for a couple of days each summer, when its artists welcome visitors into their studios.

I meet Molly in Eel Pie’s working boatyard, one of the last on the Thames. Though she’s tall as a pine, she’s dwarfed by the ruby-red pleasure barge hung above the slipway, its hull smooth and curved as a pecan. Inside her studio, every inch of space is filled with pots of paint, the air rich with the scent of bergamot and violet. The walls are a patchwork of finished and unfinished works: cubist canvases in which the landscape of Eel Pie Island has been obliterated into its constituent parts of meadow, concrete, sunlight and water. “The river has always been a part of my work,” she tells me, picking up a brush and dabbing at a patch of blue. “Because you can look at water in the same way as a painting: you have the surface of it and then what’s underneath.”

Eel Pie Island has long attracted those who lean into counterculture. For a time, a ballroom on the island hosted shows by everyone from The Rolling Stones to Pink Floyd and a young David Bowie. By the end of the 1960s, the adjoining hotel was home to around 100 radical anarchists, and by 1970 it was the largest hippie commune in the UK. “I think it was down to it being part of London but also ever so slightly removed,” Molly says, guiding me through a patch of woodland carpeted with the year’s first wild garlic. “It was always a bit wild and tucked away.”

For people like Molly, the river represents a sort of freedom, a sense of being untethered from the culture of the wider city. It’s the same for Natalie Hill and Inigo Lapwood. They’re the brains behind Theatreship, a non-profit performing arts venue in Canary Wharf, one of the city’s main financial districts. In a part of London that’s dedicated to the transactional, it’s a defiant outlier, hosting the Songs on the Water event, a free folk singaround in which people are invited to connect over traditional songs — all performed in the belly of a renovated cargo ship built in 1913.

I pay it a visit that evening, finding myself below its bundled sails just as a surge of
white-collared workers — tidal as the river itself — begin flowing below the district’s forest of glass towers. Wobbling over the gangplank, I slip into the ship’s amber-lit cabin and order myself a pint of inky porter, the bar’s shelves lined with enough booze to turn the Thames to punch. Around me, a gregarious crowd has gathered: moustachioed musicians, tailors, students, burger-flippers and besuited office workers all huddled around the same clutch of dark-wood tables. “There’s a real alchemy to port cities,” says Natalie from the opposite side of the bar, her hair woven into a plait. “This ship used to carry cargo from all over the world, bringing new things into London. Today, it’s not cargo but music, films and ideas.”

The singing gets underway with just one voice, that of Lileth Chinn. She performs from memory and without accompaniment, her refrain picked up by the other regulars until the entire cabin is resonating with a thick drone of harmonising voices. The song ends, only for a new one — a shanty — to rise from a Latin American man wearing a Five Guys T-shirt, then another from a silver-haired Irishman who, at the end of his second verse, pulls out a pennywhistle that had been concealed in his jacket pocket. 

We hear tunes from all corners of the UK and Ireland; songs of gamekeepers and postmen, shipwrights and doomed sailors. There’s something clairvoyant about the whole experience, as though in lending our voices to these songs, we’re summoning the people who penned them. “Many of the sea songs we sing here were once written to unite people from different backgrounds in shared labour,” Inigo tells me later. “Just like those working songs, the river reminds us that this city was built on collective effort and shared spaces.  The river is part of the inheritance of everyone in London, and we all have a collective entitlement to it.”

Future

The following day, I cycle east into the former docklands around Wapping, peddling below plane trees and old warehouses painted with adverts for whale oil. It’s thirsty work and I soon find myself in the Prospect of Whitby pub, initially built in the 16th century and once so insalubrious it was nicknamed the Devil’s Tavern. It’s dark and low beamed, every nook and cranny festooned with storm lanterns and pieces of rigging. 

I find a table overlooking Executioner’s Dock — a patch of silver-lipped water where pirates once met their end — and take a moment to watch the river trundling along its course. The Thames has long been the site of daydreams, and has prompted artists and writers to imagine strange future worlds. Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley looked out onto the river in the 19th century and imagined a London in which the city had dissolved into a web of reed-lined islets. It’s apt, then, that the Thames should play host to a creative project that may well outlive the capital — Longplayer,  a 1,000-year-long musical composition that began playing on 31 December 1999 and, if all goes to plan, should reach the end of its first cycle in 2999.

I find its official home in the unlikeliest of places: a honey-brick lighthouse tucked away in Poplar’s Trinity Buoy Wharf, an arts and culture hub where repurposed shipping containers look out over the funnels of old steamships. Like the O2 Arena just across the water, Longplayer was prompted by the coming of the new millennium, a period that saw its creator Jem Finer contemplating the vastness of a 1,000-year timespan. In response, he decided to make six recordings of himself playing different brass singing bowls, the kind used by Buddhist monks. He then looped the pieces, setting them at different speeds and configuring them so they’d only sync-up again in exactly one millennium.

“That’s what was interesting to us: thinking about how to convey a sense of that kind of time,” says Jem’s long-term collaborator Ansuman Biswas when I meet him in the lighthouse’s lantern room — a bulb of latticed glass where the music’s interlacing overtones promptly turn my mind to jelly. “I guess you could create a sculpture, but music is really the purest art form to express questions of time, because it happens in time. It needs time in order to flow.”

Ansuman is just one of the trustees charged with ensuring this leviathan of a composition survives at least its first 1,000-year cycle. Dressed in a set of dark-blue overalls, the Longplayer Trust’s standard uniform, he guides me down the spiral staircase and into the main hall, where we find racks of singing bowls laid out in concentric circles, a symbolic representation of the music. I stand in the centre of it all, letting the sound seep into me.

For something so shapeless, the music has a powerful grip, the overlapping harmonics of each bowl forging music that seems to be always starting afresh. Like the Thames itself, it never holds the same shape twice, and its lifespan prompts me to reconsider my own place in time. “A big part of what you’re experiencing when you listen to the piece is the length of it,” Ansuman says, joining me in the centre. “You’re being asked to imagine that it started possibly before you were born and that it will end after you’re dead.”

Outside, the sun is dipping low, the Thames throwing out ripples of lavender as the tide swells. Just before we say goodbye, I take the opportunity to ask Ansuman something that’s been bugging me since I arrived: if he were to look out from the lantern room in exactly 974 years, what would he see? “A forest,” he says without hesitation. “But mine isn’t a dystopia. It’s a beautiful, vibrant ecosystem.”

As I follow the river back west, I can’t help but imagine Ansuman’s forest covering the city around me, patches of oak, beech and lime spreading outwards until they’ve consumed every inch of grey. The skyscrapers have shrunk to worn out stumps, tiny compared to the great arc of water sweeping through the London Basin, its depths bleeding into a mosaic of lagoons strung with pink lotus flowers and marigolds. It’s funny, but I can almost picture a hippo swimming by.