Downstream

industrialised, as docks were
built and warehouses lined its
banks, people still swam.
While history tells us that
princes, kings, earls and poets
swam in the Thames, as did
the privileged public school
boys of Westminster and
Eton, the students and dons of
Oxford University, what of
the average person? This has
always been our summer
bathing spot. Seventeenth-
century poet Robert Herrick