Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 10/The Thames Embankment
THE THAMES EMBANKMENT.
At last the hopes and wishes of our poets and painters are about to be fulfilled; and the “Silent Highway” is in course of being terraced in a manner worthy of the mighty commerce it bears upon its bosom. It certainly is only another testimony to the slowness of our Anglo-Saxon nature, that such a splendid stream, running through the richest city in the world, should be allowed to ramble at its own pleasure over an immense amount of shore, converting it, at low-water, into a fetid mudbank of thousands of acres in extent, which, under the influence of the summer sun, gives out exhalations of the most unhealthy character. And it will be observed, on looking at the map, that this unhealthy swelling of the stream takes place just in the very centre of the metropolis, where land is or will be the dearest. The centre of London lies between Waterloo and Hungerford Bridges, where the aneurismal swelling of the river, at high-tide, is full a third as wide again as it is either at London or Vauxhall Bridges. If the shore is shabby, the warehouses that line it are miserable in the extreme. In the vicinity of London Bridge the giant proportions of British commerce are stamped upon the noble warehouses that flank the stream; but from Blackfriars Bridge westward the river is lined by nothing better than a succession of tumble-down wharfs and petty boat-houses, and these, in all probability, would have held their ground for another century, had it not been for the necessity of making the low-level sewer and for the revolution the railways have worked in every department of metropolitan traffic. The value of waterside premises would have been too great twenty years ago to have permitted the embankment of the river: the coal-trade would have been irre- Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/620 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/621 Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/622