![]() Malaria was commonplace in the Thames marshes, including London, and was called " ague" or "marsh fever". Opium poppies were cultivated in the marshes ( Marianne North Gallery) (See below, The advancing head of tide).ĭuring the Roman occupation the first embankation took place: building a quayside in the London Bridge area (see City of London, below). More recent research suggests that in Londinium the tide was not large, and at one time non-existent. "Notwithstanding that the waterway of the Thames is very irregular, it is clear that it has kept its present line of flow the same, within narrow limits, since it first became estuarine". Further, the central bed of the Thames was in much the same position as it is today. They used it to argue for the etymology "London" ← Llyndin (= "lake fort"). Victorian historians had a theory that the Roman-era Thames practically had no banks, but instead spread out into a vast lagoon at high tide. Of only three Roman ships found in London, one was dug up on the site of Guy's Hospital. Some of those creeks may have been navigable. Where, probably, it was shallow enough to be forded. Even Elizabethan maps show the river, at Westminster particularly, considerably wider than it is now the river must have been both wider and shallower before embanking took place. ġ746 map: even comparatively recently, the Thames is noticeably broader Thus much of today's urban London is built on reclaimed marshland. The salt marsh and reed-bed plants which colonised these soils, and the creeks which bisected the marshes, were exploited by human beings for millennia before the marshes were embanked and cut off from tidal influence - for grazing, fishing and fowling and the cutting of reeds and rushes for thatch and flooring - while mudflats around the outer estuary were home to a seasonal salt-making industry. (It was still so even in the Victorian era, though by then the river was restrained at high tides by earthen banks.) According to James A. Below, the river flowed to the sea through broad marshes, touching firm ground at just a few points. the "Square Mile") is built on that gravel. The original site of London may have been chosen because it was the first place where a broad tract of dry land - chiefly gravel - came down to the stream the modern City of London (i.e. The natural Thames near Roman Londinium was a river flowing through marshland, at some point infested with malarial mosquitos (next section). 5.3.2 The wall as a flood defence, or otherwise.5.3.1 The medieval wall and Lambeth Marsh.3 Building the walls: incentives and methods.Some London streets originated as tracks running along the wall and yet today, are not even in sight of the river. Much of present-day London is recovered marshland, and considerable parts lie below high water mark. The deepening of the Thames made it navigable by larger ships that could travel further inland: an unforeseen result was the growth of the world's largest port. Other political consequences were said to be two clauses in Magna Carta, and one of the declared causes of the English Civil War. It has been argued that land reclamation in the Thames contributed to the decay of the feudal system. Formerly, it could not be believed that the Thames was embanked by local people so the works were attributed to "the Romans". Today, over 200 miles of walls line the river's banks from Teddington down to its mouth in the North Sea they defend a tidal flood plain where 1.25 million people work and live. The Victorian civil engineering works in central London, usually called "the Embankment", are just a small part of the process. Mostly it was achieved by farmers reclaiming marshland and building protective embankments or, in London, frontagers pushing out into the stream to get more riverfront property. With small beginnings in Roman Londinium, it was pursued more vigorously in the Middle Ages. The Embanking of the tidal Thames is the historical process by which the lower River Thames, at one time a broad, shallow waterway winding through malarious marshlands, has been transformed into a deep, narrow tidal canal. Cattle grazing below high water, Isle of Dogs, 1792 ( Robert Dodd, detail: National Maritime Museum) ![]()
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