Tag: Thames Embankment

York Watergate - 1626 - Victoria Embankment!

UK: Beautiful London – the York Watergate Our Children Have Played Around! (7.7.2025)

The gate was originally the private riverside entrance to York House, a grand 17th-century mansion owned by the Duke of Buckingham. Think of it as a luxurious mooring point at the bottom of the duke’s garden.

York House itself stood on the Strand, which name literally means ‘shore of the river,’ and was considered one of the finest residences in London. At the time, much of the south side of the Strand was lined with palaces boasting direct access to the Thames.

That all changed with the construction of the Thames Embankment between 1864 and 1870, led by visionary engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette. The massive project reclaimed land from the river and shifted the shoreline dramatically forward.

You can find a memorial honouring Sir Joseph Bazalgette just a couple of minutes away from Embankment Gardens, by the Thames. He designed the Victoria, Albert and Chelsea Embankments, reclaiming a strip of land in front of Somerset House and York Watergate.

The Watergate was almost lost during this transformation – plans were even drawn up to move it to nearby Whitehall Gardens. But in the end, it was simply abandoned where it stood, left behind as a relic of a river that had retreated.

Continue reading

Emails: Dream Analysis – the Thames Embankment Cat (15.12.2020)

A dead cat may not be what it first appears to be. Hang on a minute – I said the cat wants me dead – not itself! Yes – but if we go down that path – then your cat kills not only yourself – but also my argument – holy water or not! How could a cat kill you? By dropping a bus of schoolchildren on your head. Is it a likely outcome? I doubt the cat could get the children to co-operate or indeed arrange for the bus to be raised into place in a manner that no one would recognise what is happening until it is ‘too late’. Louis wain could be of help here – but let’s face it – he could not do much to help himself past the continuous replication of ever more fragmented depiction of cats, as interested as they most obviously are. As a Physicist, I suspect Schrödinger’s Cat has something to do with a clash of civilisations. Is the cat ‘alive’ or ‘dead’? Does the Black-White cat want you alive-dead? Are you inhabiting a box – or observing a box? Is the box the bus – and more importantly – why is there no indication of appropriate ‘social distancing’? I also find it curious that there is no presence of ‘steps’ or ‘star-wells’. Having walked up and down the Thames Embankment more times than I care to count – no buses (or cats for that matter) frequent the banks upon which the mighty Thames doth lap… 

Continue reading