2006 News
- News Archive
Lost Highway Rediscovered
Research by Stuart Oliver, Senior
Lecturer in Human Geography at St Mary's College, Twickenham, has been
uncovering London's "lost highway" - abandoned sections of the River Thames.
The research, due to be published by the Royal Geographical Society in 2007, examines the ways in which the Thames was turned into a major industrial highway from the seventeenth century until it mostly fell into disuse in the nineteenth century.
Stuart explains: "The Thames was a very important route for bringing goods and people to and from London and other riverside towns. From the sixteenth century onwards there were attempts to make the river more easily navigable and my research looks at what was done.
"Most interesting has been when I uncovered the site of the old Swift Ditch near Abingdon. This strange, narrow branch of the Thames seems to have been the original route of the river. In the tenth century a trench was dug from it to Abingdon, and that eventually came to form the main channel of the river. The Swift Ditch was reopened in 1624 as part of an attempt to make the Thames navigable to Oxford and a lock was built there by 1638 to regulate the river. But the Swift Ditch was too narrow and was abandoned in 1790.
"The Swift Ditch and its lock are still there, hidden in some woods along a quiet footpath. You can also still see the old ferry stations used to take the horse teams across the river at that point. Looking at these lost places and the highways that connected them helps us understand what made the geography of today's world. We're taking our third-year undergraduates there later this year so that they can see this quiet but important scene."
Stuart Oliver is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and lectures in Geography, Cultural Studies, and Tourism at St Mary's.
