Lockdown? What lockdown! I've dragged myself off TikTok for a few days to bring you the tale of Thorney Island, a secret of history now almost completely forgotten, about how a lot of the landmarks you know and love around Westminster actually started off life on an island in the Thames.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO TIP ME A HOT BEVERAGE, this is the place. This instead of a Patreon. Feel free to not do anything as well, I'll never know you even considered it.
- ko-fi.com/exploringlondon
Twitter: @AndrewJD
Thanks to Rebecca Smiley for lending her voice.
Some notes for those interested:
- There's a lot of debate about King Cnut, it seems very unlikely that the tide thing was on Thorney Island but it's interesting enough to mention. He definitely dragged his boats through South London but whether that counts as building a canal is I suppose debatable.
- Is it illegal to post videos of the House of Commons on KZfaq? In some senses it is, I know the BBC have been looking at this issue and how it may be changing. Definitely I am unable to license the video footage officially, so using it would leave me vulnerable, which is almost the same thing right? Right? right?
- The one thing that I think is plainly wrong is the dimensions of the island, Great College Street to Downing Street seems too small to me, especially on the southern end. The reality is presumably that the island was poorly defined, there being a lot of marshland, rivulets etc and the actual border or solid ground around it was probably a lot wider than described.
- The Tyburn tree is actually a bit of a distance away from the Tyburn itself, which I find odd and haven't quite gotten to the bottom of. Maps of the Tyburn are notoriously unreliable.
- I know the Tyburn outlet isn't actually the river inputting into the Thames but is an overflow valve from the sewer system, that's too pernickety a point to go into.
- About a third of the video was shot on a rainy day, and two thirds on a heatwave day, it's not in chronological order so spot the difference.