The Thames Walk: Echoes of Music and Memory
How can a tranquil walk along the banks of a river feel as vivid and delightful as a lesson in music history? How can a solitary, silent, and serene stroll—one which no textbook could inscribe upon the soul, no manual engrave in the memory, nor any lecture awaken in the consciousness—transport one across the ages, on a magical journey from one’s own world to one long since past? Would you believe me if I said that a long walk I recently took along the Thames, from Hammersmith Bridge to Barnes Railway Bridge, became just such a lesson for me?
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| "Crossing the historic Hammersmith Bridge—dreaming of bygone centuries" (© Emre ARACI) |
Crossing the historic Hammersmith Bridge—its steel cables and pale green paintwork recalling a flowery, ornamental version of a miniature Bosphorus Bridge, illuminated by gas lanterns and dating from the 1880s—I found myself dreaming of bygone centuries. As I imagined the reflections of horse-drawn carriages and double-decker omnibuses shimmering upon the river’s ebbing waters, my mind’s eye conjured an even earlier scene: a flotilla of royal barges gliding along these waters long before this bridge ever spanned them.
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| The River Thames and Westminster Bridge, 1747, by Canaletto (Yale Center for British Art) |
On the evening of Wednesday, 17 July 1717, a ceremonial fleet, headed by a gilded state barge with fluttering banners, travelled from Whitehall to Chelsea, borne by the Thames’s current without oars. Although this flotilla never reached as far west as Hammersmith, I stood at the river’s edge as though awaiting its arrival. Perhaps you have already guessed: I was attempting to hear, in the watery echoes of that royal expedition, the strains of Handel’s Water Music, which first mingled with the legend of the Thames on that very occasion, much as one might seek lost melodies within a Canaletto painting.
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| Handel performing for King George I in Edouard Hamman’s painting Water Music |
That flotilla, which I imagined proceeding at a far more languid pace than the racing crews—who, passing me with rhythmic strokes, brought to mind the teams of Oxford and Cambridge—was conceived as a singular feat of royal public relations. George I, who had ascended the British throne in 1714 despite barely speaking the language, was a great admirer of Handel’s music, and it was unthinkable that anyone other than Handel would compose the music for this river pageant. Yet what would have seemed even more astonishing, as chronicled by The Daily Courant, was that an orchestra of some fifty musicians, under Handel’s own direction, performed aboard a second barge that accompanied the King’s own vessel. It was not the newspaper columns that would preserve this moment in history, but rather Handel’s music and genius.
So moved was the King by Handel’s composition that he commanded its performance three times over the course of the evening, both on the outward and return journeys between Whitehall and Chelsea. Londoners flocked to the Thames to witness this spectacle, so much so that, according to contemporary accounts, the river was virtually obscured by a mass of boats and barges.
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| Mahomet, Turkish servant to King George I (Godfrey Kneller, National Portrait Gallery) |
As the familiar themes of Water Music played within my mind at the foot of Hammersmith Bridge, these reflections came to me as delightful, unexpected gifts. Only days before, I had stood at London’s Foundling Museum, gazing upon Handel’s original handwritten will. The Foundling Hospital, founded in 1739 by the philanthropist Thomas Coram, was a sanctuary for abandoned and orphaned children, and Handel was among its generous benefactors. He even conducted a performance of Messiah there in the hospital chapel on 1 May 1750, donating the proceeds in their entirety. This tradition of annual charity concerts continued even after his death in 1759, and the original ticket from that 1750 concert survives today in the archives of the British Museum.
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| Ticket for the Messiah Oratorio Concert at the Foundling Hospital, 1750 (British Museum) |
The ticket's design, adorned with the arms of the Foundling Hospital—including two stars, a crescent moon, and the statue of Artemis of Ephesus—caught my eye. So too did an amusing note beneath Handel’s name, requesting that gentlemen refrain from bringing their swords and ladies from wearing large hooped skirts to the concert. Smiling at this glimpse of a bygone etiquette, I found myself wondering what future generations might find amusing in our own customs. Time alters everything, yet despite the changing fashions, the human spirit that once thrilled to Handel’s music still responds to it today—and that thought alone was enough to comfort me.
Time slips away, as the river before me, yet the artist, though powerless to hold its course, may with their craft catch a glimmer of it and offer it to eternity.
Speaking of time, should your own path lead you to London, be sure to visit the Foundling Museum, where you may see Handel’s German-made silver pocket watch and the magnificent Gerald Coke Handel Collection.
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| The Dove is reputedly where James Thomson penned Rule, Britannia! (photo © Emre ARACI) |
Continuing westward along the Thames Path from Hammersmith Bridge, I arrived at The Dove, a Grade II listed pub, once frequented by the likes of Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, and Dylan Thomas. Originally established in the early eighteenth century as a coffee house—part of the wave that brought the coffee culture of Ottoman lands to London—it was, in its time, a gathering place for writers and poets. As I sipped my coffee, evoking that earlier era, a framed sheet of music and newspaper clipping on the wall caught my attention: the sheet music to Rule, Britannia!, the patriotic anthem composed by Thomas Arne. Legend has it that James Thomson, the Scottish poet who wrote its lyrics—and who, like myself, once studied at the University of Edinburgh—may have penned them within these very walls. It seems, I had unknowingly passed Thomson’s figure many times on the Scott Monument in Edinburgh without recognising him.
Rule, Britannia! was first performed on 1 August 1740 in the gardens of Cliveden, alongside the Thames, as part of Arne’s masque Alfred, later transformed into an oratorio and an opera. Once again, the river wove its connections across time and space. Arne himself too had lived in Handel’s London, even travelling to Oxford in 1733 at the age of twenty-three to hear Handel’s oratorio, Athalia. I would later come to acquire an old postcard of Rule, Britannia!, bearing in a neat Edwardian hand a quotation often attributed to Edward Wallis Hoch, Governor of Kansas from 1905 to 1909:
"There is so much good, in the worst of us, and so much bad, in the best of us, that it ill beseems, any one of us, to find any fault; in the rest of us".
It struck me as a charming reflection on human nature, much in the spirit of Thomson’s own era, when poetry strove to unite patriotic feeling with a profound sense of moral universality. Such threads, woven lightly across time and place, offer a most agreeable history lesson for the twenty-first-century romantic.
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| "I would later come to acquire an old postcard of Rule, Britannia!" (© Emre ARACI) |
Stepping out from The Dove into the sunshine, I turned the pages of my imagined music history book once more, passing historic eighteenth-century houses and fragrant gardens, adorned with wisteria and roses tumbling over red-brick walls, until I reached St Nicholas Church, Chiswick. There, quite unexpectedly, I came upon the grave of William Hogarth, hailed as the father of English painting. Hogarth, a contemporary and acquaintance of Handel, had supported the Foundling Hospital through the donation of his paintings and served on its board of governors. According to the British Museum, he even designed that very ticket for the 1750 performance of Messiah.
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| Grave of William Hogarth at St Nicholas Church, Chiswick (photo © Emre ARACI) |
A small map by his tomb led me to his nearby country house, nestled amidst hidden gardens now hemmed in by busy roads. Hogarth purchased this charming retreat in 1749, describing it as his "little country box by the Thames", and it remained his refuge until his death in 1764. In the garden, an ancient mulberry tree—three centuries old—seemed almost to reach out in welcome.
Inside the house, I found his 1741 engraving The Enraged Musician, depicting a hapless violinist striving to practise amidst the clamour of London’s street noise—a reminder that, despite the passing centuries, the tribulations of musicians remain ever the same.
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| Hogarth’s House, Thomas Matthews Rooke, 1896 |
During my visit, I also came across an evocative painting of Hogarth’s House, captured in 1896 by the English artist Thomas Matthews Rooke (1842–1942). Rooke, an associate of the later Pre-Raphaelite circle and a careful chronicler of historic architecture, portrayed Hogarth’s modest country retreat with a tender eye for its timeworn textures and secluded charm. His painting, suffused with the soft melancholy of a vanishing age, preserves not merely the building’s weathered bricks and rambling gardens, but something of the spirit of Hogarth himself—a spirit of independence, observation, and genial satire. In Rooke’s vision, Hogarth’s House stands not merely as a relic of the past but as a living witness to the quiet continuity of English artistic life, nestled still by the flow of the timeless Thames.
Alas, as closing time approached, I had to take my leave of that charming house and its gardens. Walking past Dukes Meadows and reaching Barnes Railway Bridge, I crossed the river once more, where two final surprises awaited me. On the wall of a delightful eighteenth-century house at 14 The Terrace, I saw a blue plaque commemorating Dame Ninette de Valois, founder of The Royal Ballet, who lived there from 1962 to 1982. What the plaque did not mention, however, was that she also founded Turkish ballet. I had not known she had lived here until this very walk.
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| 14 The Terrace, Barnes, where Ninette de Valois lived (photo © Emre ARACI) |
Only two doors down, another blue plaque honoured Gustav Holst, composer of The Planets Suite, who lived at No. 10 from 1908 to 1913. In the unsettled months following the Great War, Holst travelled to Constantinople, not in a military capacity but as a civilian musical organiser attached to the YMCA, tasked with providing musical activities for the British troops stationed there during the Allied occupation of the city. In a letter to his wife Isobel, dated May 1919, he described the wonder he felt upon witnessing a celestial vision above the Sea of Marmara: "On May 3rd I saw the moon and Venus in conjunction shining over the sea of Marmora. It was perfectly beautiful, and on looking at my book I found that they were both on Imogen’s ascendant! She ought to be flourishing!". Even amid distant skies and foreign seas, their daughter Imogen was clearly in his thoughts, a quiet thread linking home and horizon.
Holst understood with profound clarity the human mind’s struggle to grasp the vastness unveiled by science, and where rational inquiry faltered, he turned to the realm of the spirit, offering the enchantment of his music as a kind of answer to humanity.
Perhaps, in the small miracles revealed by that afternoon’s discoveries—crossing the historic Hammersmith Bridge, pausing at The Dove where the verses of Rule, Britannia! once found their voice, visiting Hogarth’s charming country house and his resting place, and passing the former homes of Ninette de Valois and Gustav Holst—I too caught something of that message: that this quiet walk along the Thames had become, in its own way, the most precious music history lesson of all.
© Emre Aracı 2025. All rights reserved.
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