From 'Thames - Sacred River' by Peter Ackroyd (a true psychogeographer):
" It is history, the river of history, along which most of the significant English events of the last two thousand years have taken place; but it is also the river as history.
The closer the Thames advances towards London, the more historical it becomes. That is its underlying nature. It has reflected the moving pageant of the ages. Its history is of course that of England or, rather, of the Britons and the Romans, the Saxons and the Danes and the Normans and the other migrating groups who decided to settle somewhere along its banks. Art and civilisation have flourished alongside it. Each generation has a different understanding of it., so that it has accumulated meaning over the centuries. In that process it has become a token of national character. The destiny of England is intimately linked with the destiny of the river. In mythic accounts it gives the island energy. It gives it fertility.
No one would deny the central importance of the Thames to London. It brought it trade, and in so doing lent beauty, squalor, wealth, misery and dignity to the city. London could never have existed without the Thames. That is why the river has always been central to English life, it can fairly claim to be the most historic (and certainly the most eventful) river in the world. You can learn more about the human condition in a voyage along the Thames than on any long journey over the oceans of the world. But water reflects. It has no form of its own. It has no meaning. So we may say the Thames is in essence a reflection of circumstances - a reflection of geology, or of economics.
(....) Time has a curious presence upon the river. The Thames does not live in human time. It lives in geological time."
