A love affair with the Thames
by Steve Xoh

I recently decided to walk from Fulham to my studio in Kingston along the Thames towpath. It took me just under four hours to cover nearly 23km. As I hadn’t planned to do this and didn’t have the appropriate footwear, I had blisters for two days afterwards. I’d never normally consider such a walk, especially with the plethora of tubes, trains and buses available in London that get me home much quicker. But despite the cold and the rain, the thing that made the idea of this walk utterly irresistible was the river.

I never intended to live by the Thames. I had been house-sitting for almost a year and was getting ready to go and live on Ocracoke Island for a month when I was told I needed to vacate my current house-sit. It was very thoughtful that my landlord gave me two months’ notice but, as I was about to leave the UK for four weeks, it meant I had to find somewhere to live urgently. In the end, I took the first flat I could find in the area that was within my budget and, on the day I returned from Ocracoke, picked up the keys and have lived there ever since.

It’s strange thinking that, even though I knew the River Thames was nearby, I had never imagined it becoming such an important part of my new neighbourhood. Over the weeks and months of getting used to living in the area, I spent more and more time by the river. It became a place that I would go to when I felt I needed soothing, holding or simply to be close to nature. In the summer of 2023, the grassy banks between Surbiton and Kingston became my studio. At least once or twice a week, I would head there with a rug, some pens and some paints and just sit and make stuff. Much of the time I would paint sticks and give them, for free, to any passers-by who wanted one. I discovered that this was a wonderful way of meeting local people and starting to feel part of the community. As well as getting to know individuals, I made some connections that led to collaborations and securing a regular stall at the local farmers’ market. Many of the people I met by the river went on to become patrons of my studio, helping me transition to an indoor space to make art.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Thames. Even though I have lived in and around London for a very long time, I never get bored of it. Over the years I have done a number of long Thames walks, the longest being in the summer of 2025 when I walked 58,000 steps from Surbiton to Tower Bridge. On this recent walk I realised that what fascinates and engages me so much on these adventures is the sense that the river is telling a story as I make my way along its banks. Each stretch of the towpath between bridges becomes a distinct chapter that brings both continuity and novelty to the story. The stretch between Southwark Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge is about cosmopolitan art and culture and the chasm between elitist art and street art. Between Waterloo and Westminster the story is of soil buried beneath layers of concrete laid over generations, now nurturing the growth of commerce and the anonymous bustle of city life. The story between Kew and Richmond is of green spaces, trees, and urban wildlife finding space to breathe as the city continues to spread and grow in every direction.

Even along the same stretch of path, the Thames tells a subtly different story on each walk. The ever-changing tide reveals or conceals storylines, exposing different layers of the river’s past. The recognisable form of the Thames was likely carved during the Anglian Glaciation around 450,000 years ago, and there is evidence of human settlement along its banks dating back as far as 10,000 years, which means these stories are simultaneously modern, old, and ancient.

I am always a little disappointed that the southern towpath ends at Surbiton, but that in itself is an interesting part of the story. This area is known as Seething Wells, a name that arose from a gradual corruption of Siden Wells, an area marked on 18th-century maps as being the site of a medicinal spring. The towpath likely became inaccessible when a Victorian waterworks was built in the 1850s. The newly constructed Lambeth Waterworks Company’s site at Seething Wells was part of public health reforms that moved London’s water supply upstream from the polluted tidal Thames, amid growing concern about cholera in the city. (Seething Wells played an important role in Dr John Snow’s research, which helped demonstrate that cholera was spread through contaminated water.)

The waterworks were eventually closed in the 1980s, but the vast and strangely beautiful empty filter beds remain. They now tell a new story of an ongoing battle between those who want to preserve them as a haven for riverside wildlife and those who want to concrete over the site to build a huge complex of offices. It is this current chapter of the Thames’s story that moved me to create my little “Creatures of Seething” tile trail along the towpath, to invite people to bring to mind the diversity of wildlife that calls this place their home. My own piece of marginalia in the storybook of the river Thames.