If I conjure up an image of Westminster, I think of politicians filing in and out of Parliament, of TV crews conducting interviews on College Green while the Palace of Westminster keeps watch over the Thames. I think of the Gothic towers of Westminster Abbey and the tombs of the great and good held within its ancient walls. I think of campaigners in Parliament Square jostling with tourists seeking that perfect snap of Big Ben. There’s an undeniable sense of history about the place, though most people wouldn’t know it was once the site of several notorious prisons, a Victorian school for pickpockets, or where a vibrant medieval brewing trade laid the foundations for one of the world’s largest drinks companies.
That’s something former Guardian journalist and illustrious On London contributor Victor Keegan aims to change with the third of his Lost London series of books. The first two focused on fairly broad swathes of central London, as illustrated by maps that are included at the end of this volume. A review of his first book, Victor Keegan’s Lost London, notes that “Keegan’s curiosity for London’s story is indeed burning; beyond deeply held, and genuinely felt.”
That’s also apparent in Thorney-London’s Forgotten Island, in which the author has assembled a vast amount of information about a much more concentrated part of the capital, one which many will never have heard of.
Thorney Island was an eyot – an island within the Thames – bordered in this case by its lost tributary the Tyburn, which became buried as the city developed.
It was an area of around 30 acres that is little memorialised now except, as the author tells us, on a sign on St Margaret’s Church (where Sir Walter Raleigh is buried) and by the Thorney Island Society, of which Keegan is a member, having first spotted a sign for their building on his daily walk to work at the offices of The Guardian, where he worked for some decades.
Today, we know this small piece of London as home to major public institutions including the Houses of Parliament, the Supreme Court and Westminster Abbey and while – as various chapters detail – these institutions have deep roots here, there are many other stories to uncover, which Keegan does with great enthusiasm.
While the claim made on the book’s cover that Thorney Island contains “The densest concentration of history in Europe” is something some areas of Rome, Istanbul or any number of cities might take issue with, Keegan makes a compelling case for his island. The range of topics he covers in 164 pages is immense, embracing culture, politics, royalty, religion and class among others, over a period from the first century AD up to the present day.
He takes care to remember voices often excluded from historical narratives, dedicating chapters to women who might have been candidates for burial in Poet’s Corner at the Abbey (none are buried there, though some have memorial plaques), and to the 18th Century Black writers and abolitionists Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, all of whom had links to Thorney Island.
I was particularly interested to learn about Margaret Cavendish, a 17th century writer, philosopher, scientist and proto-feminist who is buried in Westminster Abbey, and about the hospitals on Thorney Island that could be viewed as precursors of today’s National Health Service – two very diverse topics you might be surprised to find within the pages of one book, but not, it seems, if that book is about this very distinctive place.
For me, some of the most effective chapters come when Keegan zones in on one street or location and unpicks the various layers of history within it, as he does with Canon Row, which might easily be wandered past unnoticed. Yet, having been a home for aristocrats in the 16th Century and Sancho in the 18th, it later bore the roots of the V&A museum, a major catering college and the company that became British Gas.
Keegan’s tone throughout is warm and clubbable – as if you’ve pulled up a stool next to the history buff at the pub and settled in to listen. He’s clear in his introduction that this is “a journalist’s book following avenues that took my fancy rather than a historical narrative”. Nonetheless, I would have liked to have more sense of his authority on the topics – not least as a member of the Thorney Island Society, which works to preserve the history of the area – and more on his sources, beyond the two books cited at the end, along with Wikipedia, the limitations of which as an accurate source are well known. The acknowledgements mention various historians, archivists and librarians who helped in creating the book and I would have liked to know more about how he worked with them to bring the stories within it to light.
It is apparent from the repetitions that sometimes occur across chapters that the book was in part developed from stand-alone articles. That the 17th Century Czech artist Wenceslas Hollar (several of whose engravings appear in the book), died in poverty, is mentioned more than once. The reader’s interest in this relatively unknown character piqued, it might have benefited from a fuller development of his story across the various places he crops up. I read the book from beginning to end, but the repetitions could be overlooked if the book was picked up and read by individual chapter according to topics of most interest to the reader.
The page layouts in this hard-backed volume are slightly idiosyncratic, with text size that sometimes varies between chapters, though I got used to that as I dug into the book.
By the end, I had a new sense of the immense amount of history that happened in that 30-acre space and it was hard not to find infectious Keegan’s undying passion for relaying it. Next time I find myself emerging from Westminster tube station, I know I’ll be on the hunt for signs of Thorney’s buried history.
Buy Thorney: London’s Forgotten Island here. Elin Morgan is a writer and communications professional from east London. Follow her on Bluesky.
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