On the Record: 700 years of the Thames

Sarah Castagnetti: From frozen festivals to royal polar bears, from wartime recovery to medieval merchants... the River Thames has been the stage for some of Britain’s most extraordinary moments.

I’m Sarah Castagnetti, and I’m a Visual Collections Specialist here at The National Archives.

This is On the Record at The National Archives, uncovering the past through stories of everyday people.

Recently, I came across a stunning artwork in our collections - a vibrant poster from the 1951 Festival of Britain on the South Bank of the River Thames in London.

Created by J.D.M. Harvey, the image captures the energy and optimism of a nation emerging from the devastation of the Second World War. The colours practically leap off the page - bold reds, bright blues, and golden yellows - showing the Thames bustling with life, creativity, and hope.

But this festival was just one chapter in the Thames’ extraordinary story. Today, I’m joined by three specialists who’ll take us on a journey along this historic waterway, using documents from our collections that span over 700 years.

Jessica Nelson will tell us about the legendary Thames frost fairs - were they really as magical as we imagine?

Paul Dryburgh has uncovered medieval records of some very unusual Thames residents - including a polar bear that went swimming while chained up near the Tower of London.

And Ralph Thompson will share the dramatic story of a Dutch naval attack that brought warfare right to London’s doorstep.

Jessica, Paul, and Ralph, welcome to the studio.

Let’s dive into the Thames!

Jessica, let me start with you...

Jessica Nelson: Hello Sarah, it’s great to be here.

Sarah: The Thames frost fairs have captured imaginations for centuries - they even appeared in a Doctor Who episode! But what’s the reality behind the legend?

Jessica: I think inevitably, the reality isn't quite as magical as we might be led to believe by things like Doctor Who but it is still pretty spectacular. There's evidence for the Thames freezing solid for days, even weeks at a time, solid enough that people could, could walk across it, could skate, could have fun and games and various other kinds of activities took place, which is what in now we think of as these frost fairs. It wasn't something that happened every year. In order for these activities to happen, that it needed to be a very severe winter. The river would need to be frozen for weeks, potentially months, to build up the depth of the ice and the solidity of the ice for people to be able to safely walk across it. It's not like it didn't freeze on a Monday, and you could skate across it on a Tuesday. So this didn't happen very often. This is something that was happening perhaps every few years, maybe once a decade even, but certainly between the beginning of the 17th century and the beginning of the 19th century, we do have evidence of these kind of activities, which we are calling frost fairs.

Sarah: Okay, okay, wow. So you say we have evidence of these frost fairs. What sort of evidence do we have? What actually happened during these fairs?

Jessica: We've got various bits and pieces. We have quite a few letters being sent between various correspondents that have survived in our state papers collection. And the state papers is a really interesting collection here at the National Archives because it preserves things that we might now think of as personal letters, but because they were being sent between diplomats, they've ended up in the archive. So they've ended up in our government archive. Even though a lot of the nature of them is quite gossipy, quite fun, there's some real kind of hidden gems. So that's a really great place to start for finding out about this kind of thing. One letter that I've looked at was from a man called John Chamberlain, who was a typical London gentleman. And he was writing to a correspondent of his, Sir Dudley Carlton. And Carlton was a diplomat and later a Secretary of State, which is how we've ended up with this letter. He's writing at the beginning of January in 1608 the Thames is frozen solid. And he writes:

“Above Westminster, the Thames is quite frozen over. And the Archbishop came from Lambeth on 12th day over the ice to the court.”

So what he's talking about there is the 12th day of Christmas. So just after the Christmas Festival, the end of the Christmas Festival, and the Archbishop is able to cross from Lambeth Palace to the King's Court. He goes on to say:

“Many fantastical experiments are daily put in practice as certain youths burnt a gallon of wine upon the ice and made all the passengers partakers. But the best is of an honest woman, they say, had a great longing to have her husband get her with child upon the Thames.”

Sarah: Uh, oh.

Jessica: Absolutely. So it's a, it's a great kind of mix of what things which probably were happening. You know, you can absolutely imagine people sort of making mulled wine and that kind of thing on the Thames, and then obviously there's some kind of gossip mixed in as well. So it's really a really fun letter.

Sarah: Oh, that sounds great. That's really good. Yeah, are there other items of evidence from our collection that you found?

Jessica: Yes, absolutely. I came across a really splendid little poem, would you believe, written in. January 1634, so another really harsh winter, another really severe winter. And it's a poem which has been written by a gentleman called William Baker. It's in Latin. We call it Neo Latin, the Latin they were using in early modern England. And it was quite common in those days for people to kind of write their own poetry, particularly to celebrate an auspicious event. And obviously the Thames freezing over so that people could kind of walk across it and have these activities upon it, was considered quite auspicious. So this man, William Baker, has written a poem in Latin, in Latin hexameters, so sort of echoing Virgil, for example, and those sorts of classical authors. And we think he circulated this amongst his friends and a copy survives here, and there's at least one other copy in existence as well at the Bodleian Library. It sounds quite mad, but secondary education in those days was very much Latin based. There was an awful lot of study of classical authors, and there would have been a lot of emphasis on being able to write in Latin. So it's not quite so crazy as it sounds now for somebody to write a poem in Latin and share it with their friends, okay, I'm not going to, I'm not going to read the Latin. That wouldn't be helpful.

Sarah: Please don’t - my Latin is very rusty.

Jessica: A very great friend of mine is a very good Latinist, and he translated it for me, so I'm able to share some of it with you today. So a little bit of the translation goes:

“The lads fall upon the older women, the girls in among them fall upon the boys, and they drink on the way. It's not because of a desire for a tipple, but because of the novelty of their surroundings that they misbehave. For the enterprising fellow there supplies beer and things to smoke, but wine makes the going treacherous. The path is slippery, and the half cut punter is sent flying on his wobbly journey.”

And Baker goes on to talk about football matches and snowball fights and people building monsters out of snow, exactly the sorts of things -

Sarah: Has anything changed in 400 years?

Jessica: Nothing's changed. It's really snowy. People outdoors. They've drunk a bit too much, and then they're having a snowball fight. Nothing has changed since 1634!

Sarah: That's wonderful. Well, I don't know if you can really top that, but is there anything else you've got that provides evidence of these Frost Fairs?

Jessica: Yeah, we've got various other letters. So for example, we've got correspondence between the Duke of York and his son in law, the Prince of Orange, who was later William III, in January 1684, so that's the coldest English winter on record, and they're corresponding. And the Duke of York tells the Prince of Orange that the weather is so very sharp and the frost so hard that the river is quite frozen over, and many booths are built upon it between Lambeth and Westminster, where they can rest, meet and sell drink. Can really see a theme here, lots of people drinking on the ice. And a couple of weeks later, he writes again, saying that the Thames is still frozen over. It's now 15 days since it was quite frozen over, and he's also apologising. He hasn't been able to write as frequently as usual, because the letters aren't getting through, because the river is frozen, and that's preventing transit of mail.

And we also have reports in the Times newspaper. They're not held at the National Archives, but the Times has a has a wonderful archive of its own. And for example, in 1789 there's reports in the Thames about what we would call a frost fair going on, and this is between Putney and Fulham, and they're talking about the festivities and the gaiety and how they're roasting ox and things like this. And one of the things I think is really interesting about that report is they compare this frost fair to the Bartholomew fair and the Bartholomew fair, the Fair of St Bartholomew, was a really important summer fair that took place in London, one of the biggest summer fairs in London. So to compare this, this January frost fair to this enormous summer Bartholomew fair, just shows what a kind of big event it was, and how much everyone was getting out there and enjoying themselves.

Sarah: Gosh, yeah, that sounds amazing. I mean, if it was that cold in London, you wonder what it was like further north, don't you, but there was a darker side to these frozen celebrations. Wasn't there?

Jessica: Yes, there absolutely was. Sarah. So very poor weather, very hard weather, inevitably also causes hardship again, as it does now. And this was particularly the case obviously a few 100 years ago, where there was no central heating, people were much more reliant on burning fuel, and life generally, particularly for poorer people, was much more hand to mouth. So for example, I referred to the letter in 1684 written by the Duke of York to the Prince of Orange, where he's talking with some excitement about what's going on. But on the same day as that letter was written, The King Charles the second wrote to the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury and other churchmen, urging them to do more to help the poor and to get the churches within their parishes to do more to help the poor because of the hardship caused by the extreme weather. So within the same collection on the very same day, we can see two sides of the story. And then similarly, in the Times reports, I mentioned the report where they talk about the Bartholomew fair, and make that comparison. And a few paragraphs later, they talk about a poor man who was found dead in a field by city road in London. And they think that he's missed his way and then he's died because of the severity of the weather. So absolutely, food couldn't get through, potentially cargo and fuel couldn't get through. There were lots of people who made their living plying trade up and down, the Thames, carrying passengers, carrying cargo, so on and so forth. All of those people would really have suffered as a result of the extreme weather. So while some people were undoubtedly frolicking and having fun, and we can really see that in the in the primary sources, that's not something we've imagined, they really were enjoying themselves. But there was definitely a darker side to it, too.

Sarah: Jess, why do you think we don't see frost fairs anymore?

Jessica: There are a few reasons. The temperature between the early 17th and the early 19th century was slightly lower than normal. Some people have called it a kind of Little Ice Age, which isn't necessarily a very helpful term, because it makes us think that it was cold all the time, which it wasn't. There were also some quite hot summers, but there were certainly some unusually severe winters. But particularly in relation to the Thames, there were some big changes on the Thames in the 19th century. In particular, old London Bridge was demolished at the beginning of the 19th century. And old London Bridge was the mediaeval bridge, and it had lots of little arches across the river, and what they did was they served to slow down the flow of the river and also cause blockages. So for example, big blocks of ice could get stuck between the arches, and that would cause more ice to build up behind. And that was one of the things which really slowed down the flow and was enabled the Thames to freeze over. So when that bridge was demolished and replaced with a bridge which had fewer arches, in effect that made the Thames freedom freezing less likely. And then another similar innovation was the building of the Victoria embankment, which was begun in the 1860s and that narrowed the river, which caused it to flow more quickly. And there was also a lot of dredging at the time, and the deeper a river is, the less likely it is to freeze. So although the Thames did continue to freeze from time to time, there was not these events where it was freezing solid for weeks at a time to allow people to walk across it safely. And we still, we actually have some photographs in our wonderful series, copy one which, as you know, as a visual specialist, is a brilliant collection of all sorts of wonderful visual material. And we've got photographs from much later in the 19th century of people on the ice at Twickenham, where the Thames is frozen solid, but that's also higher up the Thames, where the river is narrower and therefore more likely to freeze in the first place. And you know, and this is, this is more unusual event, and it's people out on the people out on the snow and the ice, when it's not the kind of the big frost fair that we that we're thinking of.

Sarah: Oh, wow. That's fascinating. So when was the last major frost fair?

Jessica: 1814, so right at the beginning of the 19th century.

Sarah: It's fascinating how infrastructure changes ended this centuries old tradition. Thanks, Jess.

Jessica: Thanks, Sarah, really nice to talk to you.

Sarah: You too. Okay, Paul, I'm going to come to you now. I want to go much further back in time to hear about some very exotic Thames residents. You've found evidence of a polar bear swimming in the Thames in the 13th century. How does that show up in our records?

Paul: Well, I mean, we're really lucky, Sarah, that at The National Archives, we have the records of English royal government going back as far as Domesday Book. And from about 1200 they start making copies of all the documents that they're producing that go out to citizen subjects on various sort of rolls. And one of the rolls they produce is called the liberate rolls. So the Chancery, which is the king's writing office, it records documents that are going out, which are payments to Royal officers or people getting money, whatever it might be. And in 1251, two, there is a payment, sorry. There's an order sorry to the sheriffs of London. And the sheriffs of London are told to allow the keeper of the king's White Bear. Now we assume that's a polar bear. I mean, what other bear would it be? I'm guessing that was kind of sent to him, apparently, from the King of Norway, and it was now based on the Tower of London. So obviously the keeper had to, you know, find food for it, find its upkeep, that kind of thing, making sure he was cleaned out, whatever. And as part of the that same order, the keeper was allowed to buy a muzzle and an iron chain which would hold the bear while it was sort of out of the water. But he also was allowed to buy a long cord which would allow the bear to swim in the Thames and go fishing. So you can imagine people walking on the riverbank near the tower, and they see this white bear fishing, coming up with fish and hauling itself out. Or when it happened to be out of the water, they could look at it as you would do a modern zoo, I guess.

Sarah: Yeah, oh my goodness, that's amazing. I mean, you mentioned that perhaps it was a gift from the King of Norway. How do you think this polar bear got to London?

Paul: I think that's it. Mean, I think the so from about 1200 King John, he founds a menagerie at the Tower of London. So I've got a bit of a royal zoo for himself his children, for visitors. And he keeps exotic animals. Really would have been exotic animals, lions, tigers, monkeys, that kind of thing. And so Henry III, his son, carries on that tradition. And so Henry, as well as having a polar bear, he actually gets, he receives from the King of France, Louis. We can later become St Louis an elephant. We assume it's an African elephant. And so in 1254 Louis gifts this to Henry while they're both in France. So Louis's coming back from the crusade. Henry's coming back from Gascony, where he's been on campaign.

And so Henry has the job of getting this elephant across the channel back to London, and then 1255 early in 1255 there's another letter record on the Liberate rolls again to the sheriffs of London, and it commands them to, basically, to make a building without delay at the tower for the king's elephant. And it specifies it has to be 40 feet long by 20 feet wide. And they are to see that it is quotes made of such fashion, of such strength, as to be fit and necessary for other uses when required. Now, there is another roll that the royal Exchequer produces that year. It's called the pipe roll. It's kind of the final annual audited account of the king's financial offices, and it recalls that in that year, 22 pounds and 20 pence have been spent on the elephant house. Now we haven't got precise calculations, but the National Archives, we've got this currency converter, and the earliest year can convert from is 1270 and in 1270, £22.20 would have been the equivalent to £16,000. It would have allowed the king to buy 29 horses, or it would have paid for 2,205 days of a skilled labourers, time, which, of course, would have been well enough to build an elephant house.

So Henry spent an awful lot of money on this, this gift, this exotic gift. Now we think that the gift got into Louis from the French King's hand because he'd been on crusade in what he's now, sort of Egypt, Syria, that kind of area he'd been captured. But then he kind of helped the Emirs of Egypt with their campaigns in Syria, and they gifted it to him. He managed to get it back all the way from, you know, the Levant, all the way to France. And then he gifts it to Henry as this kind of, you know, strange they were brother in law. So kind of this, I guess. And obviously, Henry was interested in animals. Now, there's a quote from Matthew Paris, so he's this very famous monastic chronicler in the 13th century based at St Albans, but he knew a lot about what was going on in London. He tells us that the elephant was 10 years old and 10 feet high, so quite a young elephant. How he knew that? I don't know. He then says, about the same time too. Says he's 1255, an elephant was sent to England by the French king as a present to the King of England. We believe that this was the only elephant ever seen in England, or even in the countries on this side of the Alps. Wherefore, the people flocked together to see the novel sight. I mean, you can just imagine, again, you've not seen anything like that in London before. You might be seeing exotic goods, but you're not gonna be seeing exotic animals unless you happen to be a member of the royal family and you've been to the menagerie now, sadly, unfortunately, we do have, we don't know what happens to polar bear, but we do know what happens to the elephant.

So unfortunately, sad, sad times, Valentine's Day, 1257, the poor, the poor chap dies. However, the previous year, so we had the previous year. We do know that over £24, nearly £25, was spent on its upkeep, which is, you know, touching 2,500 days of a labour is like for one animal. Wow, and Henry, at this time, is spending an awful lot of his cash, his time and attention on building Westminster Abbey, this big mausoleum, for his favourite saint, Edward the Confessor, putting in tens of thousands into that. But to give that elephant in London really is, it tells you how interesting he was and how, you know how exotic animals must have really status thing. Oh, yeah, it's definitely a status thing. Yeah, look what I can command kind of thing. You know, I'm bringing exotic beasts that you only see in bestiaries. You know, obviously your mediaeval bestiary combines real animals with mythical creatures.

Sarah: OK, wow, goodness me, Paul, what do these animals say about the Thames as a gateway to the world?

Paul: Well, I mean, obviously these are exotic animals, then being brought in from overseas, and Thames, I think we all the Thames is kind of the mouth way the gateway into England. And London is obviously the big melting pot. It's the capital, and it's where there's an awful lot of trade goes on. And, you know, we have records of the Port of London all the way into the 13th century, all the way going into the modern era. And there are in the 14th century, somebody very famous, Geoffrey Chaucer, the poet. He's actually controller of customs at the customs house in London, and we've got a great set of his accounts, one of which tells us even more about. The kind of people, in this case, who were coming into London, the kind of multicultural society London would have been at, sort of towards the end of the 14th century, around the time the peasants revolt, around the time, actually, when Dick Whittington was actual Mayor of London, slightly, slightly before then. But so on one of the ships, we have a reference to somebody called “African Peter”. In Latin it’s De Affrikano Petro. Doesn't give us any more details than that. He's paying customs on a shipment of, I think, probably wool that is being brought into London. And he's one of, you know, dozens of merchants on this particular ship who've loaded stuff. And they're from all over the, you know, all over Europe, from Flanders, from France, from Germany, Denmark, wherever and African Peter actually appears that, I think around this time, my colleague Euan [Roger] has calculated that he appears at 18 ships in around this sort of 1380 period, and their ships of merchants from, again, all across northern Europe. Some will be potentially from France, even from further afield. So Italy, you know, Germany, the Baltic countries, that kind of thing.

England's premium commodity at that time is wool. It's the great wool country. It trades an awful lot of wool to particularly the Flemish towns in what is now Belgium, where they make fine cloth. And there was, you know, an awful lot of merchants interested in that. And of course, those merchants can bring in exotic goods, spices, yeah, animals, inks, dyes as part of that trading culture, yeah? And so a lot of that thing that the material that they're bringing in, in in return for wool, is coming from, you know, the Far East, Middle East, I see, Central Europe, you know, there's a silver mines in Hungary, that kind of thing.

Sarah: Amazing. You're painting a really vivid picture of what this was like, Paul. But, I mean, what do you think it might have sounded like?

Paul: Well, I guess the London soundscape pretty much then as it is. Now it's a multicultural city. There'll be lots of languages being spoken. Obviously, you know, actually the language at court wouldn't have been English. Potentially, might have been French, but obviously the language of the ordinary Englishman, whatever you want, is still gonna be English, the Latin spoken in churches. But there would have been people coming in from Spain, France, Italy, Germany, who would have brought their own languages, dialects to different parts of London. Different communities had their own areas within the City of London, where they all could congregated together a little bit like, you know, some communities still do now, yeah, and, you know, obviously the city itself is much smaller contained area. But if you're spreading out from that, there would have been lots of, lots of languages spoken, a real noise, real bustle. I mean, there is, there are some very famous accounts of particularly, because obviously, late fourteenth century, talking about Geoffrey Chaucer, is a time of plague in London. The London civic authorities put a lot of effort into trying to clean up the streets. Then, you know, public orders go out about, you know, cleaning animal dung from the roadways, blocking up water courses, trying to, you know, not having people, not chucking their wee and poo out of windows. I don't want to say, though!

Sarah: That was great. Paul, so the Thames has been London's connection to the world for centuries, hasn't it? Thank you very much.

Paul: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Sarah: You're welcome. Okay, Ralph, I'd like to turn to you now, if I can now, we're going to go forward in time, just like Doctor Who jumping into his TARDIS. We're going to go to 1667, can you tell us what happened on the Thames in that year?

Ralph: Okay, so this was the year of the famous or infamous Dutch raid on the Medway during the second Anglo Dutch trade war. So in June of that year, the Dutch Grand Admiral, Admiral de Ruyter launched the raid on the Medway at the mouth of the River Thames. After capturing the Fort Worth sheerness, the Dutch fleet, which included English Republicans opposed to the newly restored Stuart regime went on to break through the massive chain protecting the entrance to the Medway and ultimately the dockyards, and on the 13th attacked the laid up English fleet. Daring raid actually remains one of the largest disasters in the history of the Royal Navy and its predecessors, right?

Sarah: So, Ralph, I hear that there's a map from 1667, that shows the Thames as far as London during the conflict. Is that right?

Ralph: Yeah, absolutely. It's an extracted map which was taken from state papers domestic. Charles second, yeah, so it actually, it's in Dutch. The whole text is Dutch. It's actually a Dutch map, and it depicts, there's two fleets. There's a northerly fleet, which is actually in the terms of. Estuary itself under Admiral van Ghent. But the main fleet, raiding fleet under the Reuter, as I say, this is all at the mouth of the Thames heads. Its aim is to go to dockyards. And you know, this serious threat to London itself. So they sell past the Isle of Grain. They go past Gillingham, so they burn the dockyards. There they go past Upnor Fort, and they go all the way to Chatham. This map actually reflects all these minor disasters, and there's little cartouches to celebrate this.

Sarah: So Ralph, what would you say is the lasting legacy of this conflict?

Ralph: It made a major psychological impact throughout England, with London in particular, feeling especially vulnerable, just a year after the Great Fire of London, and previous to that, the plague. And however, for a second time, the Dutch had been able to land substantial forces in Britain and were able to do substantial damage, particularly to Chatham docks. The Raid did, together with the English financial crisis of that period speed up negotiations. So all this, together with the costs of the war and of the Great Plague and the extravagant spending of Charles' Second Court produced a rebellious atmosphere in London. The chancellor, the Earl of Clarendon, ordered that the English envoys at Breda actually speed up peace negotiations, as Charles felt an open revolt, as this trade commercial war was particularly unpopular with large sections of society.

Sarah: Oh, I see, wow. So Ralph, you've also uncovered a more personal tense tragedy. Can you tell us about Prince Henry?

Ralph: Yes, so I found a document from our estate papers, domestic James, the first series in SP 14, which is dated November the seventh, 1612, and it relates to the death of the Prince of Wales. So it's circumstance, a circumstantial account by Sir Charles Cornwallis, who was Henry's household treasurer of the owners, and death of Prince Henry from typhoid fever after swimming in the river Thames. And so this series of documents I've actually just begun with the covering letter, and these include the post mortem examination and lying in state funeral of Henry. Henry himself was the oldest son of an heir apparent of King James the First and Queen Anne of Denmark. Prince Henry was widely seen as a bright and promising heir to the English, Irish and Scottish thrones. However, at the age of 18, he predeceased his father by some 13 years, dying of suspected typhoid fever as a result of swimming in the Thames.

Sarah: Apart from swimming, what else do the records tell us about how he spent his time? It can actually

Ralph: demonstrate what you know, a sportsman he was, you know, he really was what we'd say, an extreme sportsman had an obvious interest in the military arts, but also dancing, tennis, hunting and Hawking. He also played golf, which was a Scots game, and imported into England with with James the First accession, probably most more significant, though, in 1607 Henry sought permission to learn to swim, but the eyes of Suffolk and Shrewsbury wrote to his tutor, Adam Newton, that swimming was, quote, quite a dangerous thing that their own sons might practice like feathers as light as things have nought, but not suitable for the print for princes as things of great weight and consequence.

Sarah: What is it that the records can tell us about his death?

Ralph: Although Henry was a keen sportsman, however, his health was never robust. Henry died from typhoid fever on the sixth of November, 1612, after swimming the Thames near Whitehall Palace during the celebrations that led up to the wedding of his sister Elizabeth, the future winter queen of Bohemia, he'd become overheated after playing real tennis at the palace and went for a swim in the chilly autumnal waters to cool off. The diagnosis can be made with reasonable certainty from written records as the post mortem examination, which was ordered to be carried out in order to dispel rumours of poisoning.

Sarah: Oh, gosh. What about his legacy?

Ralph: Well, after Henry's death, his younger brother Charles was the chief mourner at the funeral, which King James, who detested funerals, refused to attend. The body lay in state at St James's Palace for four weeks on the seventh of December, over 1000 people walked in the mile long cortege to Westminster Abbey. Prince Henry's death was widely regarded as a tragedy for the nation, and few heirs to the English throne have been as widely and deeply mourned as Prince Henry, possibly, the nation wouldn't have faced Civil War If Henry had lived.

Sarah: Well, that's a really moving story. Thank you, Ralph.

Three very different Thames stories, but they all show how central this river has been to London life. From medieval global trade to royal recreation to wartime drama.

And that brings us back to where we started - the 1951 Festival of Britain. After surviving the Blitz, Londoners gathered on the South Bank to celebrate creativity, innovation, and hope for the future. The festival showcased not just British achievement, but also contributions from refugees and others who had fled other parts of Europe, displaced by conflict - those who made Britain their home during and after the war.

The aesthetic was revolutionary - new materials, new ways of thinking about design and architecture. That mid-century modern look is still popular today. But the festival also marked a complex moment - celebrating Britain’s past while the empire was beginning to break up, looking forward while reflecting on what that past really meant.

The Thames continues to flow through London’s story. From medieval markets to modern art installations, from frost fairs to the London Eye, it remains the city’s beating heart.

Chloe Lee: Thanks for listening to On the Record from The National Archives. To find out more about The National Archives, follow the link from the episode description in your podcast listening app. Visit nationalarchives.gov.uk to subscribe to On the Record at The National Archives so you don’t miss new episodes, which are released throughout the year.

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