Lockdown eases: time to get back in the boat

DON’T tell everyone, but the Thames Clippers are back.

These nippy London catamarans were withdrawn from service at the beginning of the lockdown but went quietly back into operation at the start of the week.

They’re a godsend for the city’s urban amblers, easing the strain by extending the range of potential idle walks from the Royal Arsenal at the thick end of the river to Putney at the thin.

I opted for an early boat to Greenwich, an old stomping ground, in the company of just two fellow passengers who in any case jumped off at Canary Wharf.

At weekends when we were still in our teens, we would invariably head down to Greenwich and the Cutty Sark – the pub, silly, not the ship!

The Georgian building on Ballast Quay, beyond the old travelling crane jetty that juts out over the river, used to be called the Union Tavern. Then, it was the watering hole for foreign seamen, bargees and workers at the local wharves in an era when London was the world’s largest port.

It had a bit of a dodgy reputation in those days. Even our mate’s nautical dad, a former naval rating, merchant seaman and lighterman, said he always gave the place a wide berth.

By our time in the early ‘60s, when the pub had been renamed after the tea clipper put into permanent dry dock just west of the naval college, it was deemed safe.

But you still sometimes got a flavour of the old days. One evening a coaster from Holland moored at the river wall in front of the pub. The noisy crew jumped over, headed for the bar and proceeded to get happily plastered without ever losing a grip on their Dutch-accented cockney.

It’s maybe not the kind of Greenwich experience you can look forward to these days.

David Abulafia, historian of the oceans, was on the radio today, musing on the revolution that has happened to the world’s ports since the advent of containerisation.

With modern ports such as Felixstowe now more machine than human, he said, there’s no longer the wharfside jostle and swap of cultures you used get in places like riverside London.

Greenwich still gets its fair share of foreign tourists, although not so much in recent months, hence the near empty catamaran. They mostly come for the palace and the park, the naval museum and the observatory. Favourite is a selfy with one leg either side of the Greenwich meridian.

For us, Greenwich and Ballast Quay were where the rest of the world started: the Pool of London behind us and, ahead, Asia, South America, Africa, the Caribbean, or wherever else the ships we saw had come from.

Some nights we would leg it through the narrow foot tunnel to the Isle of Dogs and The Waterman’s Arms. The broadcaster Daniel Farson bought the place in 1962 with money left by his American war correspondent dad, Negley Farson.

Farson senior once took young Dan on assignment to Germany where he got his head patted by Hitler.

When he moved east, some of his Soho set followed. And glamourous young people from beyond the West End would turn up for a wild night of bopping and jiving in darkest Poplar. Dan tried to turn the place into an old-fashioned music hall, but the money ran out.

In a way, like Ballast Quay opposite, it was a place where, for us, the rest of the world started.