Downstream

while children may now be
urged to swim indoors and
many of the old bathing
places have gone, the art of
river swimming continues in
the form of three women who
swim every week in the
darkness through Abingdon.
We have tried out different
ways to swim the Thames at
Oxford, from one-off races in
1840 to four-day endurance
swims fifty years later. In
Victorian times ‘ladies’ were