Different strokes, different folks

Downstream: A History and Celebration of Swimming the River Thames by Caitlin Davies (Aurum, £16.99)

Downstream is a history of swimmers in the Thames from its source to the sea. Caitlin Davies begins in Wellington boots in a field in Gloucestershire and finishes flung against a stone obelisk in the estuary east of Southend. Carved with the words “God Preserve the City of London”, the “Crowstone” was erected in 1842 and marks the boundary of the Port of London Authority.

That day Davies — a novelist who has also written about the ponds at Hampstead — is swimming with the Crowstone Redcaps, one of many new clubs formed in a decade that has seen an astonishing revival in river swimming. More than 400 swimmers race the 14km from Henley to Marlow each August — for me, the best river race in Britain — and architect Chris Romer-Lee’s project for a floating lido at Blackfriars is morphing from the fanciful into the suddenly possible; watch this space for his crowd-funding campaign.

And that’s Davies’s point: we’ve splashed in the Thames from Charles I in his nightshirt to the children’s beach made in the 1930s by tipping 200 tonnes of Essex sand on to the shore beside Tower Bridge. That beach was closed in 1971, when the river was declared “chemically dead” and Brian Gover, now a guide at the Museum of Docklands, recalls shooting rats with an air rifle while a dead cow floated on the tide. At the time police toured schools to tell boys not to swim. “But we did. There was nowhere else to play,” says Gover.

The delight of the book is the stories of swimming clubs such as the Otter Club in Shiplake — whose members raced from 1888 until the 1970s and is now back up in numbers to 375 — pieced together from newspapers in town archives and trophies treasured by champions’ grandchildren (and the occasional knitted woollen swimming costume in the attic). The most handsome relic is on King’s Meadow at Reading: a cast-iron colonnade built for women— only in 1903. Romer-Lee’s river water lido is, unwittingly, a revival of the Charing Cross Floating Baths, a crystal palace built in 1875 at a cost of £23,000. Why the revival?

The Thames is clean again. For Tom Kean, co-founder of the Henley Swim, it’s the availability of cheap, effective wetsuits. For Davies — a novice swimmer, she admits — it’s a quest to immerse ourselves in wild nature. She writes much more quickly than she swims — and the chapters detailing her own experiences wriggle with more ‘I’s than eels in the newly clean river — but she’s an excellent listener. The conversation that lingers is on board a Port of London Authority vessel: that little wooden hut on a pier at Wapping is a mortuary where 30 drowned bodies are examined each year. In the 1870s it was five times as many but what hasn’t changed is the nature of the river itself. You’ll bob up three times, and your corpse won’t float.

In 2012 the PLA prohibited swimming below Putney Bridge, to the ire of so-called “wild swimmers” such as Matthew Parris (whose illegal swim across the river was silly and, worse, very easy). Having swum 105 miles from Oxford to Putney over eight-and-a-half days in September, I’m now on the side of the authorities. Nothing is as powerful a sensation as swimming on the tide under the city’s bridges. The buildings glittering on the shore seem flimsy beside the strength and changelessness of a river which will chill you, drown you and neither remember nor care.

Christopher Woodward is director of the Garden Museum and swam from Oxford to London to raise funds to display John Tradescant’s collection of curiosities

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