The secret shore that shaped the city
7.00pm Thursday 28th August 2025
The Horse Hospital
Colonade
London
WC1N 1JD
Admission: Tickets £13.50 inc. in advance only HERE
Guide and chronicler of lost London topographies, David Sweetland walks us step by step down the forgotten history of the Thames Stairs, Water Gates and Landing places. From Execution Dock to Traitor’s Gate, these routes cut into river banks, walls, and wharves, once thronged with life, and with a constant flow of sailors, travellers, merchants, convicts, and even corpses.
Those very embankments are a triumph of grim necessity. Beneath their promenades and behind their massive walls, lies a hidden revolution—Joseph Bazalgette’s great interceptor sewers, built in response to the cholera plagues and the infamous Great Stink. Historian of science. Laurence Scales investigates what was there before - and beyond - these marvels of empire engineering, and asks how they have fared in the centuries since their conception.
Laurence suggests a new take on the great engineer’s radical vision, and on the Victorian politics and civil engineering prowess that remade the river’s shore and the city's sanitation.
David explores the beginnings and endings of these ghostly descents to the river’s edge. Where were they? Who used them? And why have so many disappeared? And he reveals surprising locations where some can still be glimpsed, even after the construction of the great embankments swallowed them or moved the rivers’ edge.
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DAVID SWEETLAND is a London guide and author of one of London’s best-loved historical blogs: 'A London Inheritance’, a unique resource inspired by the photographs of the city taken by his father from 1946 through to 1954.
Formerly in the engineering profession, LAURENCE SCALES is a London guide and historian of science. He is an avid collector of the colourful and often neglected characters who made the extraordinary technological and scientific history of London.
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Our home, THE HORSE HOSPITAL, is a unique Grade II listed not for profit, independent arts venue within the only existing unspoilt example of a two-floor, purpose-built stable with public access in London.
Built in 1797 by James Burton. the shell is constructed with London Stocks whilst the interior features a mock cobbled re-inforced concrete floor and ramps with slats to prevent the horses from slipping. Each floor has 5 cast iron pillars and several original iron tethering rings.