Jay Rothermel’s Reviews > Thames: Sacred River > Status Update

The Thames has variously been described as a grey, dirty, smutty, sooty, smoky river. These are not nineteenth-century epithets. It has always been thus. In the period of the Roman invasion and occupation it was first employed as the city’s public sewer; wooden pipes under the large complex of Roman buildings at Cannon Street prove that effluent was already pouring into the waters.