Downstream
grassy banks, although now it’s snowing so hard I can barely see a thing. Back in the 1890s this was ...
Jerome, ‘and come and mooch around the lock with their dogs, and flirt, and smoke, and watch the boats . . ...
ladies’ – as swimmers competed for four prizes offered by an Ilex club member for a three-quarter- mile hand ...
River races were also held a few miles upstream at Sunbury where in 1907 the Clapton Ladies held the ...
finishing the ‘hardy-fought race’ in just over eight minutes. As late as the 1970s families still spent s ...
Others swam a couple of miles further upstream, at Walton-on-Thames. ‘My grandfather, on leave from the navy, ...
A 1909 postcard of the swimming baths at Walton- on-Thames. In the 1940s families would picnic and swim near the bridge. He rec ...
family, who lived on a council estate in Hersham, had just enough money to get the bus to Walton Bridge for a p ...
clothes,’ explains Ray. ‘Modern folk may have to imagine this, the people were happy.’ He was then five years ...
swim already!” Frustrated, I wade out a little further and repeat my swim-by. Still no cries of praise. I ...
mind says, very clearly “so this is what death is, it is like this.” One final desperate thrash, everythin ...
mother is crying. She pulls herself together and snaps, “you stupid little bastard.” My mum lived to be eighty- s ...
meant you could get in. We did it to cool off and we weren’t the only ones, there were people sunbathing, peop ...
needs must when it was hot, especially the summer of I was around ten and a good swimmer, the current didn’ ...
people still swim there at Walton, parents would probably frown on it.’ I leave Molesey Lock thinking of t ...
spectators in bright blazers and coloured parasols watching life on the Thames, today wetsuited swimmers gather ...
mixed bathing pontoon in the 1920s. Kingston residents have fought for the right to bathe in the Thames and the ...
backs of houses and a fox curled up asleep on an old pillow, and when I get out at the station the wind is i ...
Turning left, I find myself in a market, which in today’s weather is dismal. A man shouts out the price of av ...
the Thames is the focus of an annual regatta now around 150 years old. More sinisterly, the river once also feat ...
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