The Time Traveler’s Information to London

Eel Pie Island has lengthy attracted those that lean into counterculture. For a time, a ballroom on the island hosted exhibits by everybody from The Rolling Stones to Pink Floyd and a younger David Bowie. By the tip of the Nineteen Sixties, the adjoining lodge was residence to round 100 radical anarchists, and by 1970 it was the biggest hippie commune within the UK. “I think it was down to it being part of London but also ever so slightly removed,” Molly says, guiding me via a patch of woodland carpeted with the yr’s first wild garlic. “It was always a bit wild and tucked away.”

For individuals like Molly, the river represents a type of freedom, a way of being untethered from the tradition of the broader metropolis. It’s the identical for Natalie Hill and Inigo Lapwood. They’re the brains behind Theatreship, a non-profit performing arts venue in Canary Wharf, one of many metropolis’s predominant monetary districts. In part of London that’s devoted to the transactional, it’s a defiant outlier, internet hosting the Songs on the Water occasion, a free folks singaround through which persons are invited to attach over conventional songs — all carried out within the stomach of a renovated cargo ship in-built 1913.

I pay it a go to that night, discovering myself under its bundled sails simply as a surge of
white-collared staff — tidal because the river itself — start flowing under the district’s forest of glass towers. Wobbling over the gangplank, I slip into the ship’s amber-lit cabin and order myself a pint of inky porter, the bar’s cabinets lined with sufficient booze to show the Thames to punch. Around me, a gregarious crowd has gathered: moustachioed musicians, tailors, college students, burger-flippers and besuited workplace staff all huddled across the identical clutch of dark-wood tables. “There’s a real alchemy to port cities,” says Natalie from the other facet of the bar, her hair woven right into a plait. “This ship used to carry cargo from all over the world, bringing new things into London. Today, it’s not cargo but music, films and ideas.”