Downstream

holidaying by the Thames,
even within the City. In July
1946 it reopened with new
ladders, taken from the SS
Rawalpindi, and that year
Pathé News filmed ‘Tower
Bridge Pleasure Beach’, with
‘800 feet of beach right in the
heart of London’. There was
‘plenty of good, soft sand’, to
‘build fairy castles’ or to laze
on, with deckchairs ‘for mum
to snooze in and dad to read
the paper in’. But it had been