Thames

I am an eclectic and disorganised reader who usually has several books on the go. Currently one of the ones I'm savouring is Peter Chasseaud's Thames, The London River.

Thames is a minature version of the text of a large-format privately-produced artists book laid out with maps and phographic images. I bought the little one (for about £12) because the handsome and heavy one costs about £600, but I'm really enjoying the one I have. It's a poetic progression from the river's estuary to its source, a description threaded through with historical, nautical, architectural, literary and artistic references, a litany of evocative placenames. Here are a few lines:

Rounding the Isle of Dogs, run south into Blackwall Reach,
under the astromomers' Polaris alignments.
a quiverful of zero longitudes cut the snaking umbilical
down the west side of the Greenwich peninsula, west into Greenwich Reach
close-hauled again, beat northward, past Deptford, Millwall and Rotherhithe into Limehouse Reach.

At the back of the book Peter Chasseaud lists the shoals, deeps and reaches of the Thames and they sent me running to my box of maps to find the names of the ones off the East Anglian coast.

And they too please me enormously:

Cockle Gatway
Hemsby Hole
Caister Shoal
North Scroby
Middle Scroby
Yarmouth Road
Middle Cross Sand
South Cross Sand
Corton Sand
Gorleston Road
Barley Picle
Lowestoft North Road
Lowestoft South Road
Pakefield Road
Newcombe Sand
Stanford Channel
Holm Sand

Peter Chasseaud can be contacted at peter@parvenupress.freeserve.co.uk