The House by the Thames by Gillian Tindall

Author:Gillian Tindall
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446496077
Publisher: Random House

Chapter VIII

ALL MODERN CONVENIENCES

EDWARD PERRONET SELLS, born just before the French Revolution, grew to manhood while Britain was at war with Napoleon. The unregulated, unpoliced, oil-and moon-lit London of Georgian days was his heritage, with fields and hedgerows within easy reach. He married in his twenties, a young woman with another Huguenot name, which suggests a network of inherited relationships. His own eldest son first saw the light in the propitious year of the battle of Waterloo.

He was to have eight or possibly nine more children, mostly boys, all of whom thrived. In the fullness of time several of these younger sons were despatched into the Victorian respectability of Holy Orders. (One assumes that their grandfather’s remarks, made not many years before, on the unchristian wealth of Anglican bishops, were carefully ignored.) Two of these young clergymen eventually went to minister to souls, and incidentally to acquire large tracts of land, in Australia, when it was ceasing to be a penal settlement and becoming a desirable colonial destination, thanks to the new steamships.

Edward Perronet knew Southwark when it was a hub of the coaching business, its high street lined with inns. He was in middle life when the first railway line appeared, and lived to see this expand to a vast, countrywide network. The trains’ new speed seemed both to cause and symbolise the past’s unprecedented rapid retreat. The coach-routes, and all the paraphernalia that had attached to them, vanished like ghosts of a remote era. The villages round London were transformed not just into suburbs but into dense urban districts, unrecognisable from Edward Perronet’s youth.

He retired from the family business in 1852, the year after he and his fellow coal-merchants had exhibited a huge block of Welsh anthracite at the Great Exhibition, that celebration of Britain’s breath-taking industrial and commercial dominance. He set up house in the comfort of suburban Bristol, where he probably had business connections through the Welsh coal-trade. He lived on for more than twenty years, dying in 1873 in a world now revolutionised by clean water, piped gas, antiseptics, anaesthesia, cheap public transport, the telegraph … No generation, before or since, has known such changes in physical habitat.

In 1815, when Edward Perronet Sells II was born, Rennie’s long-planned Strand Bridge was well under construction. It ran ruler-straight from the side of Somerset House, across the river at the bend and through the plantations of Lambeth to St George’s Circus. In honour of the victory over Napoleon Bonaparte it was renamed ‘Waterloo Bridge’ when it was opened two years later, thus inadvertently bestowing the name of an obscure village near Brussels on the future site of an international railway station and on an entire, rather drab quarter of London.

Another bridge, a cast-iron one further up river by the hamlet of Vauxhall, had been inaugurated the previous year: it too was designed to open up to building further countryside south of the river. The other iron bridge, however, Southwark Bridge, which dates from the same period, was intended rather to cut a carriage-route through the tortuous lanes behind Bankside.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.