Downstream

Lords. Downstream the view
is impressive, with the towers
of Westminster Abbey and
the Houses of Parliament, and
I think about the waterway
below me and the stories it
carries with it. This really is,
as former MP John Burns
declared in 1929, ‘liquid
history’; where naked aquatic
jockeys, poets and politicians
all stripped off to immerse
themselves. When Benjamin
Franklin took to the river in