A social history of the Thames River embankments, Stuart Oliver's article documents the critical intersection between the nature, the city, and culture. Interrogating the role of physical construction and social needs, this discussion of environmental destruction/reconstruction/conservation promises to delight as it informs readers about the nature of ecopolitics which has become one of the preeminent issues of our times.

"Rich Earth below the Sand" and the Origins of the Thames Embankments [printable version]

Stuart Oliver

<1> This essay explores the designing of the Thames embankments that were built between 1866 and 1874 for the Metropolitan Board of Works. In particular it concentrates on the origins of what might be called "the production of the conditions of production" of the embankments. By looking at the motivation of those advocating embanking as a means of exerting literal and figurative control over the river, and the ways in which society influenced such advocacy and determined its effectiveness, the essay explores modernity's construction of a regulated natural in the context of an analysis that is sensitive to the interweavings of society, politics, and the individual.

<2> The notion of the physical "construction" of a legitimate place for nature rose to its contemporary prominence mainly through the work of Neil Smith (1984) on capital's drive to produce a "second," processed nature. According to David Harvey's more recent reworking of those ideas (1996) all societies act to create around themselves a modified natural that is structured by the requirements of their own culture. The structure of this socialized nature acts to legitimize aspects of social structure, creating "ecological conditions and environmental niches" which promote the survival of those societies, and also act as "manifestations and instanciations 'in nature' of their particular social relations" (183).

<3> The approach developed by Smith and Harvey has, however, been challenged by the suggestion that the means of production forming the basis of the "second nature" hypothesis may very well themselves be the work of discursive cultural production. This suggestion, that nature is socially constructed through cultural discourse, implies that it is sociocultural formations that construct (both literally and figuratively) the dominant, regulated, form of the natural seen in modernity. Following Pile (1996) the "natural" discursively produced by modernity can therefore be seen to act as a hybrid mixture of real, imagined, and symbolic elements, that acted together to order the specific cultural forms created for nature in nineteenth-century London.

<4> The analysis I consequently intend to pursue here is based on the assumption that to understand the origins of projects such as the embanking of the Thames it is necessary to look at their sociocultural context. More specifically, this needs to be done with reference to the determining factors of society, the political culture, and the individual (Oliver 2002). In order to start to disentangle this knot of inter-related causes, I want to concentrate on the work of the individuals involved in the original design of the embankments, in particular on that of the two individuals credited by the Board of Works with having produced the original idea of the embankments: Frederick Trench and John Martin. This is not out of a misplaced faith in methodological individualism; rather it is to examine the specific relations created in that time and at that place between life and locale. It shows, through an examination of biographical material, how and why it was that in designing schemes to assuage the threats presented by the river, Trench and Martin both acted-out and caused to be projected onto the landscape of the Thames the socially constructed needs of their age.

The Nineteenth-Century Thames and its Embankments

<5> Most important among the intersecting developments that influenced the discursive frameworks created for nature in nineteenth-century London was the construction of a dominant belief that embankments were a necessary and "natural" way to manage the river. Once desired, the embankments were brought about by the construction of a hegemonic consensus for embanking within the political system. Once built, the embankments provided a technical solution to the threats that had been created by the untamed river, silencing the fears that its former wildness had allowed to escape. This belief had a real basis, in the contemporary condition of the Thames.

<6> The nineteenth-century Thames was affected by changes that came to be perceived as a profound environmental crisis, as the river increasingly became changed by the city through which it flowed. Most significantly, the Thames came to provide a depository for London's waste. The principal source of this polluting waste was human excrement, flushed in increasing quantities into the river as a result of the rapid replacement of cesspits (which had allowed the use of excrement as manure) by waterclosets (which discharged excrement into the watercourses flowing through the city). This increase in waste in the river was further compounded by a growth in industrial byproducts, most especially from the chemical processing industries. By the end of the 1820s commentators increasingly came to remark upon the scatterings of excrement left on the banks of the river at low tide, the choking of the river by faecal mudbanks (with their associated flora and fauna), and the stench of hydrogen sulphide from the decomposing load of the river.

<7> More pressing than these aesthetic changes, given that much of London took its water supplies unfiltered from the Thames, was the advent from abroad of cholera. Although there was still no proven link between cholera and polluted water, an indirect relationship was widely assumed to exist, making the "filth" of the river an issue of considerable social concern. The first major nineteenth-century cholera outbreak affected London in 1832 and 1833, killing 7,000 people across the city. Between 1848 and 1849 the disease returned killing 14,000, and in 1854 killing a further 11,000. The fear of foul water, and the miasma it was perceived to threaten, was deepened still further by the crisis of the "Great Stink" of 1858, when the conditions created by a hot and dry summer forced the development of a political consensus that the river's condition was unsupportable.

<8> The Great Stink marked the point at which it became publicly accepted that the condition of the river had become intolerable in a civilized city. The solution to the constellation of threats perceived to be presented by the river was the network of intercepting sewers, partly set beneath riverside embankments, that were built by the Metropolitan Board of Works. The Board had been established in 1855 to co-ordinate the local authorities administering the suburbs of London. That it was successful in building the embankments is testimony to the Board's capacity to assemble a very modern vision of nature, for in building the embankments the Board engineered a permanent change in the river that reflected the perceived need to exile uncontrolled nature from the city beyond the boundary of firm embankments. According to the Board, the concept of the embankments had originally been developed by Frederick Trench and John Martin. The reason why it was those two men who were able to produce such successful designs can be seen through an examination of their lives.

Frederick Trench

<9> Frederick Trench, soldier, politician, and courtier, was a gifted amateur in architecture and the fine arts. He was born in 1775, the oldest of five children of Michael Frederick Trench and Anne Trench, at the family mansion, "Heywood," Ballinakill, Ireland [1]. As a young man he joined first the Guards then the Quartermaster General's staff, finally being made a general. An aide de camp to George IV and William IV, he served as a Tory MP between 1807 and 1847, and was eventually knighted. He died at Brighton in 1859.

Trench's character

<10> Particularly instructive in explaining Trench's subsequent involvement with the Thames embankments were his experiences on the British army's Walcheren expedition of 1809, recorded in the diary now held at the National Army Museum. The expedition, designed to capture Antwerp and garrison Walcheren Island, failed as a result of an inability to prosecute early military advantage that was combined with the debilitating effects of an epidemic of malaria and typhoid. It seems that Trench had envisaged his diary as a record of military glory, and he even went so far as to annotate its cover with the words "One Month of Glory!! Helas!" The foreignness of that "hélas," "alas," indicates the extent to which he presented such feelings of failure as alien even to himself -- a theme which finds echo in the fact that it was Italian that he used to confide in his diary his very first misgivings about the expedition, the fear that "our commanders are not sure what needs to be done" (26 July).

<11> Trench seems to have been a man whose experiences of power left him with considerable problems expressing emotions and, indeed, private feelings are almost entirely absent in the surviving letters to his father. His inhibited response to authority was also reflected in an insinuating deference that led him into his politically controversial relationship with George IV that the diarist Harriet Arbuthnot alleged to be inappropriately close, Trench having "[got] the King's ear & set him against every thing that is being done for him" (25 October 1821). But to whatever extent Trench's deference led him to inappropriate behaviour, his Toryism set very definite limits of principle to his engagement with power; he convincingly argued abhorrence for slavery, for example, and eventually followed Peel over the reform of the Corn Laws.

<12> Though Trench was deferential to authority he was also a man of valour. Perhaps no contradiction here: his relationship to authority may well have been integral in his desire to live out more than just one month of "Glory." While on Walcheren Trench made a number of espionage trips, passing himself off as a travelling merchant called "Ferdinand." Trench showed some signs of self-dramatisation, writing in his diary of Ferdinand as if a character in a novel, but it was at considerable personal risk that he carried out his work. Whatever the extent to which he suffered fear, he betrayed it very little. Even when he fell victim to the fever that killed four thousand of his army comrades on the expedition, he gave the event less than a whole sentence in his diary: "I have at last had an Attack of the Zeeland Fever with a short violent Swelling on the outside of the throat..." was all he wrote (1 September).

<13> Trench's career was, indeed, calculated to earn the respect of sovereign and country. As the elder son, it was he who best represented the father's wishes for advancement, to live out the investment made in giving him his father's second name of Frederick. Indeed, something of the striving child remains in the accounts of his encounters with royalty. Describing a meeting with George IV at Newmarket racecourse in 1825 Trench reported to his father that "he said I deserved the Gratitude of the Nation & of all Men of good Taste" (BL Add MS 53816, fol. 36v) and that he told the King "I Hoped within a Year of the Introduction of our Bill, He should gallop from one end to the other of our Quay" (37r). His candidly illuminating fantasy of the King galloping unrestricted along the embankment, unfettered as a racecourse jockey, demonstrates the extent to which Trench gloried in fantasies of power, and manoeuvred to gain attention and praise from authority. The "Gratitude of the Nation" was something that he practised very hard, at great personal cost and risk, to earn.

Trench and the Natural World

<14> Trench's inner history is now lost, of course, but echoes of his relationship with the natural world may be traced in some of the fragments of his life still available to us. His relationship with the natural world seems to have been pretty much in the same pattern, that of the enlightened gentleman, which his father had practised at Heywood. Although Heywood was surrounded by the "waste" of considerable areas of unreclaimed bogs, the design of the estate created by Trench's father was widely recognised by contemporaries as a model country-house landscape. Trench himself was an enthusiastic and moderately talented artist, and surviving works in the style of Claude show he envisaged Heywood as the ideal of contented Tory pastoralism.

<15> Especially important to Trench's later attitudes to the Thames were his experiences on Walcheren where, much more than at Heywood, he was subjected to the dangers of the marsh. The "Zeeland Fever" proved not just a threat to him personally, but also to his dreams of "Glory": "I forsee nothing but disease if we Remain & defeat if we advance" he lamented (26 August). Initially Trench had written with enthusiasm about the countryside of Walcheren, observing that "every Field is surrounded by Dykes & Every good Dyke is a Road" (2 August). Between the dykes his sensibilities noted fertile farms and a prosperous, orderly people with approval. But these opinions began to change when Trench ventured out into the marshlands; he was ordered to take part in two reconnaissance expeditions to the tidal mudflats, which had a profound effect upon his subsequent understanding of marshes.

<16> After his first expedition, to the Oosterschelde estuary, Trench was optimistic that it would be possible to cross its mudflats to besiege Bergen op Zoom. These mudflats, which he called the "drownd Land" after their Dutch name, were by no means useless for military purposes and "at low Water" were "an Hard Land" (7 August). Trench's second expedition, to the Westerschelde estuary, showed him different and more considerable dangers. With evident wonder he recounted a discovery of hidden treasures in the mudflats where "there appeard to be a rich Earth a few Inches below the Sand." But this promise was combined with sinister threat, he reported: "The drownd Land is on the Surface generally Sand in the Higher Parts firm & hard; in the other & near the Shore, wet & more loose...so as to be difficult for Infantry and impracticable for Cavalry" (16 August). Not only cavalry, but boats too: Dutch gunboats, he recorded, were left stranded in the mud, abandoned and burnt-out by their crews after being deceived by the retreating tides.

<17> The marshes presented themselves to Trench as threatening in their unpredictable ambiguity. Neither firm nor soft, neither land nor water -- the mudflats represented possibilities that could be promised as well as threatened. Trench took up the need to control this bafflingly ambiguous nature of the wetlands in his later campaigns at Westminster.

Trench at Westminster

<18> Trench's father Michael had earnt the reputation of a gentleman of taste, but Trench's connections enabled him to perform a similar role with London his stage, rather than Heywood. His proposal for a Thames embankment was a part of his ideas for improving London influenced by the work of John Nash.

<19> Apparently following Nash's ideas, Trench first suggested an embankment on the river as part of a grand monumental centre for the city (Trench, 1827). The embankment was planned to run from Whitehall to Blackfriars Bridge, and to consist of a treelined promenade and road 24 metres wide supported above the river on arches; in the middle of the embankment was to be a statue of George IV (on horseback) and at The Savoy there would be terraced houses and fountains. The bill that Trench presented to Parliament for the embankment's construction was successfully passed, but after two of his key backers died the scheme's impetus was lost.

<20> He revived his scheme fourteen years later (Trench, 1841). The new plan proposed an embankment like his original one, this time on the left bank of the Thames from Hungerford to London Bridge. The plan also proposed the fashionable addition of a railway running the length of the embankment -- in his first version of the plan it was set below a terraced walkway, but he subsequently suggested it should ride over the walkway on arches. Trench also suggested that a main intercepting sewer could be enclosed in the reclaimed land, alongside the railway. Despite its optimistic promising of spectacular financial returns, this scheme failed to gain the consideration of Parliament.

<21> Trench's second scheme attempted, unsuccessfully, to convince the public of the need for an embankment that was founded in his desires for an engineered control of the Thames. This approach was fundamentally different from his earlier proposal for an embankment, which had been principally designed to improve the townscape. Such a change had its origins in what comparison demonstrates as a remarkable series of parallels between the Walcheren marshlands in his diary of 1809 and the Thames in 1841.

<22> It seems that Trench's changed understanding of the river was based on his reconstructed understanding of the Thames as a manifestation of the "Evils," the worst aspects, of the uncontrolled nature he had seen in the Westerschelde. By 1841, with worsening pollution and cholera a haunting threat, the Thames was threateningly treacherous: "where we used to have Five Feet Water...it is now all filled up with Mud" -- just like the Westerschelde mudflats over which he had earlier written there had been "no Water of more than a few Inches Depth." As on the Westerschelde, the Thames mudflats acted to "impede navigation" in 1841 and on them, just as had been the enemy gunboats, "the Backs of Barges are frequently broken." For Trench the Thames of 1841 had become a focus for the generation of the miasmic illnesses on which he had blamed defeat at Walcheren, with "Banks... covered with Vegetation, which, being manured by the sluggish Filth from the Sewers, present the strange spectacle of a rich green Crop."

<23> Trench's solution to the now-threatening nature of the Thames was to embank the river, allowing the water to cover the mudbanks and to scour away the semi-liquid "sluggish Filth" from the sewers. His embankment would have allowed free movement of traffic on the new roadway like on the well-drained, sandy roads of the Walcheren dykes; and the "drownd land" of the Thames mudflats, like the "rich Earth" under the Westerschelde sands, to be brought back to profitable life. The result would be to create such a fertile site for the generation of capital that "a Million [pounds] of Surplus might be obtained" -- truly an acceptable "rich green Crop" from the "rich Earth" of the riverbed.

<24> Trench's approach to the Thames in 1841 places it as a source of disorder within the city, the rank "richness" of its crop as a symbol of un-naturalness, of an uncivilized fecundity, and successful prosecution of the embankment would have ensured Trench the "Gratitude of the Nation" by bringing a disordered nature under disciplined control. The embankment was presented as a replacement of the "drownd" natural by living civility: unproductive replaced by productive, dishonour by "Glory." The Thames represented for Trench a fundamental challenge to those ethical principles of ordered propriety to which his whole public life had been committed, and by replacing unpredictable nature with disciplined culture Trench might have both produced a fitting monument to his taste and publicly revenged himself on the "Evils" that had cheated him in 1809.

John Martin

<25> John Martin was born in 1789 in Hexham, Northumberland, and died on the Isle of Man in 1854. He was one of twelve children of Fenwick and Isabella Martin [2]; Isabella was directly descended from the martyr Nicholas Ridley and brought to the family a strong Protestant tradition; Fenwick was an unsettled and irregularly employed man who brought it considerable poverty. Having shown early promise in art, Martin was initially apprentised as a heraldic painter. His first pictures were successfully exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1812, and after his 1821 painting "Belshazzar's Feast" his work became phenomenally popular. From the 1820s, in a strategy part-philanthropic and part-entrepreneurial, Martin spent most of his time on a variety of engineering projects such as the embanking of the Thames.

Martin's Character

<26> John Martin's entry in the Dictionary of National Biography refers to a "touch of insanity in the family," and the readily available facts relating to the unusual nature of his brothers seem to have been linked to his family's dynamics and history. Particularly important in this respect is the damaged capacity for sociability shown to various degrees of extremity by the three brothers, William, Jonathan, and John, which was combined with an exaggerated need for violent self assertion and opposition to authority.

<27> Most notoriously, Jonathan Martin (1782-1838) was, on a number of occasions during his life, confined to mental asylums for reasons of public safety. From his youth troubled by disturbing dreams, Jonathan became a religious visionary, threatened to shoot the Bishop of Durham, and was later responsible for burning down York Minster. William Martin (1772-1851) produced a series of inventions, some useful, most absurd. William's scientific work was characterized by arrogance and aggressive bombast; a man given to walking the streets of Newcastle wearing a breastplate made of tortoiseshell, he seemed compelled to seek attention.

<28> Just as Jonathan appears to have repressed horrors that came back to haunt him as visions, so too did John. In his childhood Martin was afraid of the dark, of ghosts and hobgoblins, and his fear of attack by the threatening unknown later came to surface in his art. Martin's politics, and his capacity for unrelenting feuds, placed him in a state of permanent oppositionalism. A political radical, as a youth he rebelled against his guildmaster and later (after what he considered slights) he became the Royal Academy's partisan opponent, preferring to exhibit with the Society of British Artists -- which he eventually left in acrimony too. Unsurprisingly, in the dealings with Parliamentary authority that his engineering projects brought him, Martin displayed a sense of aggrieved anger, and subsequently claimed he had been cheated of a deserved recognition for his work.

<29> The evidence still available suggests that Martin was deeply unhappy, and he seems to have been particularly lonely. As a child he would wander alone in the countryside: "These rambles were solitary," recalled his son Leopold (1889, I, 1) "for he found no sympathetic companion." His childhood loneliness seems to have left the mature Martin needily relying on others for emotional support. Leopold, with barely concealed resentment, remarked that "Evenings at Home with the Martin family derived largely their gaiety and cheerfulness from my dear mother and sisters" (II, 1).

<30> Martin's artistic works give further evidence of an inner life of lonely turmoil. Most of his successful works were based on mythical themes -- above all, scenes of punishment from the Old Testament. His work indicates a rich vein of terror and anger on which he could draw when producing his work. Martin's first great success at the Royal Academy, "Sadak in search of the Waters of Oblivion," showed the tiny figure of Sadak alone and lost in an overwhelmingly rugged wilderness -- and it is not hard here to see the child engaged in a desperate attempt to find oblivion in his solitary rambles. Similarly, the pamphlet that Martin wrote for the exhibition of "Belshazzar's Feast" demonstrates the extent to which he was prepared to imagine the most painful of emotions, the "horror and distress" of Belshazzar's court in gloating detail.

<31> Martin's capacity for anger was closely linked to his narcissism, a quality developed from the early days when, according to his biographers, his family began to recognise his talent. According to Leopold, despite his political radicalism, royal patronage meant a great deal to Martin, and when Martin wrote his pamphlet on "Belshazzar's Feast," praising his own work as a "great effort of genius," it was under the pseudonym of "John Bull," that personification of collective Englishness. When this narcissism was threatened, Martin would erupt in anger: "to oppose or dissent is to anger and offend him" lamented his friend Ralph Thomas (quoted in Pendered, 1923, 214) and even competitive games could lead him to passionate rages, Leopold revealed.

<32> Linked to Martin's narcissism was a pronounced streak of obsessiveness. The "vigorous nature" that Leopold described manifested itself in a stubborn drive to attack obstacles again and again. This behaviour not only characterized Martin's approach to intellectual problems and to institutions, but also affected his friendships -- witness Ralph Thomas' complaint that "Yesterday I took tea with Martin... but I left by six, having been bored to a dead headache by the old story of Patent Rope Cable, Stink keys and Sewers, etc." Martin's stubborn need to exert his controlling authority, evident even in his relationships with friends such as Thomas, also had a profound influence in his relationship with the natural world.

Martin and the Natural World

<33> Martin's character was a profound influence on the way he related to the natural world. His perceptions of nature as a repository of a pure goodness was very much the dominant Romantic one and "with him" reported Leopold "no sermon could be more elevating than those to be found in the open fields" (X, 1).

<34> Martin's conception of nature, linked as it was to his moral and religious precepts of purity, was also evident in the concentration of his engineering schemes on constructing a purified nature. Particularly important in this respect was the segregation of excrement from water, and the role of manure as reclaimed "waste" -- a segregation allowing the wholesome and profitable to grow from the corrupt and polluted. This belief in manure as excrement-redeemed was demonstrated before the 1838 Select Committee on Metropolis Improvements where Martin, advocating a greater use of manure in England, rhetorically demanded "Do not the Chinese, the Japanese, the Tuscans, Flemings and the French most scrupulously save every particle of manure...? Does it not then show the most shameful ignorance, that a country, boasting itself second to none, should not merely cast away its real wealth...?" (Parliamentary Papers, 1838, Q 1887.)

<35> While Martin's fascination with excrement led him to perceive manure in positive terms, what remained as unexploitable waste was to be cast out, as his fascination with stink keys and backed-up sewage makes clear. The transgressive effects of odour, with its risks of miasmic disease, were consequently a source of special concern for him. Leopold recorded how Martin's friend Thomas Alcock, noted for his wax models, had made fruit so realistic that Martin complained about the smells he imagined coming from them. Likewise, Thomas reported Martin as having been unable to sleep because of turning over ideas on "something new as to sewage backing, etc." (quoted in Pendered, 1923, 214). Most tellingly, explaining to the Select Committee on Sewers the threat from miasmatic smells, Martin recalled: "while walking in the country a short time since with my sons, we perceived a very disagreeable smell, but could not discover from what it proceeded; we continued our walk for about a mile further in the same direction, when we reached a small field on which manure had been spread" (Parliamentary Papers, 1834, Q 2340). Not only did Martin dwell at night on the suppression of odours -- he was also, literally, attracted to them.

<36> The concern with purity and segregation was evident in Martin's proposal for providing clean water and dedicated sewers for London. In 1832 he suggested that sewers should run on either side of the Thames in an embankment, with London supplied by clean water taken from the Thames above its tidal limit at Teddington. In 1834 he appeared before the Select Committee on Sewers proposed an intercepting sewage system for London that would contain the smell from sewage and use excrement for manure (Parliamentary Papers, 1834). Martin seems to have envisaged his embankments as practical but ornamental aid to this segregation: running underneath the embankment would be a main sewer; at ground level the embankment would be occupied by wharves, above which, supported on columns, would be two further terraces -- the middle terrace for public passage, the upper terrace for commercial warehousing. Martin, then, envisaged the embankment as the very model of a place of ordered demarcation between the cultural and the natural.

<37> The reasons for Martin's involvement in embanking and the engineering of purity are by no means simple ones, though they may well represent the manifestation of a segregating discipline internalized in his strict childhood. He came from what was clearly a highly damaging background, and his fears as a child may well reflect some degree of mistreatment. John seemed the least harmed of the three famous brothers, but he was still prevented from taking an ordinary place in life, compelled to impress his extraordinariness in his work. From a strict Protestant background, living in a Romantic epoch, he translated the issues of purity and naturalness into his work, where they surfaced in the issues of punishment of spiritual corruption and suppression of sanitary corruption.

<38> For Martin the Thames was made un-natural by its function as a sewer, its god-given purity soiled by desegregation, and his engineering of its cleansing was designed to produce effects that would be both practical and spiritual. The polluted Thames, like the miasmic open sewers, was in need of salvation through the application of technology -- to allow the proper uses of excrement for manure, thereby returning the role of nature to that of a fit subject for contemplation. The realisation of the "real wealth" of nations by agrarian capital was indissoluble from his desire to separate the polluted from the pure, to construct a prosperous and pure world.

The Need for Embanking

<39> During the early nineteenth-century the Thames became recognized as responsible for a literal and representational soiling of London. The disciplined personalities of Trench and Martin, in their search to impose order on the disordered nature represented by the river, found support and success within contemporary politics and (by their proposals to contain the transgressive river by the segregating embankment) helped enable a purification of the city. This purification was effected by the exclusion of the polluted natural realm from culture, with the segregation naturalized in metaphor and made concrete in engineering.

<40> Trench and Martin became involved in this reworking of nature for very personal reasons. For both of them the symbolic realm of their inner lives was one dominated by notions of obedience and control. For Trench the embankment would have instilled discipline into the unruly river that his experiences in Walcheren led him to loathe, to establish the civilized society that his Tory upbringing had led him to desire. For Martin the embankment would have reworked the emblematic pure landscape of Romanticism by segregating and purifying a tainted nature. The two perceived the Thames as "wanting" embanking for very different reasons -- Trench because nature was polluting the city, Martin because the city was polluting nature -- but they could agree on an embankment as a means of expelling transgressive nature beyond a controlling frontier.

<41> So successful did the belief in the need for embanking become that opposition to it by the 1860s focused merely on the practicalities of implementing the scheme, rather than on its principles. Consequently when the Board of Works began building the embankments there was scarcely any opposition to the notion that the Thames "wanted" embanking. This triumph of the notion of embanking was because the embankments had been so effectively represented as a necessary part of the literal and metaphorical cleansing of the city. Trench and Martin had played particularly important roles in the construction of this triumph. Their ideas were publicly perceived as desirable, and worthy of support because they reflected the needs of a society that was becoming increasingly disciplined -- and increasingly needful of creating segregated discipline around itself. The order for which they struggled within themselves was projected onto the landscape by embanking, made (as it subsequently was, literally) concrete. The seductive payoff for this discipline was its promise to release the "real wealth" of nations, the "Rich Earth below the Sand" of the Thames' faecal mudflats. From shameful waste would come glorious profit.

Notes

[1] Details of Trench's life are given in Stephen and Lee (1917, XIX, 1116). Further (and more reliable) particulars about his family can be found in Cooke-Trench (1897). [^]

[2] A brief summary of Martin's life can be found in Stephen and Lee (1917, XII, 1167-1169). There are a number of biographies of Martin, of which Balston (1947) is probably the best, but Pendered (1923) is also interesting. [^]

Works Cited

Arbuthnot, Mrs. The Journal of Mrs. Arbuthnot, 1820-1832. London: Macmillan and Co, 1950.

Balston, T. John Martin 1789-1854: His Life and Works. London: Gerald Duckworth, 1947.

British Library: BL Add MSS 38380 fol. 171, and 53816 fols 9-38.

Cooke-Trench, T. R. F. A Memoir of the Trench Family. London: Privately Printed, 1897.

Harvey, D. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

Martin, L. C. "Reminiscences of John Martin, K. L." Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 5 January to 20 April 1889.

National Army Museum: NAM 6807/261.

Oliver, S. "Chains on the River": The Thames Embankments and the Construction of Nature (RGS Historical Geography Research Group Publication, number 37), 2002.

Parliamentary Papers Report from the Select Committee Appointed to Inquire into the State of the Law Respecting Sewers in and near the Metropolis. Parliamentary Papers: XV, 584, 187, 1834.

Parliamentary Papers Second Report from the Select Committee on Metropolis Improvements. Parliamentary Papers; XVI, 661, 9, 1838.

Pendered, M. L. John Martin, Painter: His Life and Times. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1923.

Pile, S. The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity. London: Routledge, 1996.

Smith, N. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984.

Stephen, L. and Lee, S. (eds) The Dictionary of National Biography: From the Earliest Times to 1900. London: Oxford University Press, 1917.

Trench, F. Collection of Papers Relating to the Thames Quay; with Hints for Some Further Improvements in the Metropolis. London: Carpenter and Son, 1827.

Trench, F. Letter from Sir Frederick Trench to The Viscount Duncannon, First Commissioner of Woods and Forests, etc. etc. London: John Olliver, 1841.