The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London by Judith Flanders Page A

the post office. As a young clerk he walked from St John’s Wood to his office behind St Paul’s: later, as he rose in the hierarchy, the combination of his increased salary, his income from playwriting, and also the fact that he was living with his mother, enabled him ‘in the summer, [to] come on horseback through the parks’. Even then, he didn’t ride all the way, paying exorbitant City livery rates. Instead he left his horse in Westminster and continued on into the City by boat.
    For centuries, the Thames had been the ‘silent highway’, the major artery into London and the principal east–west transport route from one side of London to the other. At the start of the nineteenth century, it was possible to cross the river within London at only three fixed points: by London Bridge (where a crossing in some form or another had existed since Roman times), by Blackfriars Bridge (built 1769) and by Westminster Bridge (1750). There were also two wooden bridges over the river at Battersea (1771–2) and Kew (1784–9), but both were then on the very edges of London. By the time Victoria came to the throne in 1837, five new bridges had opened – Vauxhall (1816), Waterloo (1817), Southwark (1819), Hammersmith (1827,the first suspension bridge in London) and the new London Bridge (1831, sixty yards upriver from the old location). These were later followed by Hungerford (1845), Chelsea (1851–8), Lambeth (1862), Albert and Wandsworth Bridges (both 1873) and Tower Bridge (1894), trebling the number of crossings between one end of the century and the other.
    Because of the lack of crossings at the start of the nineteenth century, about 3,000 wherries and small boats were regularly available for hire to carry passengers across the river. Even in the 1830s the shore was still lined with watermen calling out, ‘Sculls, sir! Sculls!’ In Sketches by Boz , Mr Percy Noakes, who lives in Gray’s Inn Square, plans to ‘walk leisurely to Strandlane, and have a boat to the Custom-house’, while as late as 1840, the evil Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop is rowed from where he lives at Tower Hill to his wharf on the south side of the river.
    From 1815, when the Margery , the first Thames steamer, ran from Wapping Old Stairs to Gravesend, steamers had been used for excursion travel, and to take passengers downriver. By the early 1830s, the steamers had also become commuting boats within London, ferrying passengers between the Old Swan Pier at London Bridge and Westminster Pier in the West End, stopping along the south bank of the river at the bridges as well as at some of the many private wharves, quays and river stairs in between. (One map in 1827 showed sixty-seven sets of river stairs in the nine miles between Battersea and Chelsea in the west, and the Isle of Dogs in the east.)
    Old Swan Stairs or the Old Swan Pier (the name varied; it was roughly where Cannon Street railway bridge is now) was one of the busiest landing places, the embarkation point for steamers to France and Belgium as well as the river steamers. Yet for decades it was just a rickety under-dock, reached by wooden stairs so steep they were almost ladders. Even in the 1840s, by which time it had been renamed the London Bridge Steam Wharf and had a high dock made of stone, its wooden gangway still led down to a small floating dock. Old London Bridge had been a notoriously dangerous spot on the river. The eighteen piers under the bridge, widened over the centuries to support the ageing and increasingly heavy structure, had become so large that they held back the tidal flow and created a five-foot difference in water levels between the two sides. Passengers disembarked at the OldSwan Stairs and walked the few hundred yards to Billingsgate Stairs before re-embarking, leaving the boatmen to shoot the rapids without them. After the new London Bridge opened in 1831, for many years the steamers’ routes continued to mimic the old pattern: three steamer companies ran