Downstream

water-weeds, the shores flat
and meadow-like and the
water ‘clean and pure’. Boat
trips from Folly Bridge to
London were ‘very much the
thing to do,’ explains Oxford
historian Simon Wenham, ‘it
was known as “the Thames
trip”. Today the Boat House
Tavern houses the drags for
recovering bodies and the
resuscitation apparatus. I’ve
always wondered what the
latter would have been in