The Thames Ferrymen

Stand at Bankside today and you’ll be jostled by tourists photographing the Tate, couples queuing for the Globe, and joggers with expensive earbuds who, if they could, would probably jog straight across the river. What almost no one remembers is that for centuries, the only way to cross at this stretch of the Thames was by boat. Before bridges were thrown like steel ribbons over the water, there were the ferrymen — tough, weather-chiselled men with hands as knotted as their ropes, ferrying Londoners across the tide.

The Thames in the Middle Ages was less a backdrop and more a highway. The mud-brown water carried everything: timber, coal, gossip, plague. London Bridge existed, yes, but it was a bottleneck, snarled with houses and shops, a medieval traffic jam of carts and pedestrians. To move between the north and south banks, ordinary Londoners relied on watermen who plied their trade from Bankside stairs.

Life on the Stairs

These “stairs” weren’t decorative — they were the slippery stone steps that dropped directly into the river. Names survive: Blackfriars Stairs, Paul’s Wharf, Horseferry Stairs, and on the south side, Bankside Stairs. From dawn until midnight, the watermen lingered there like cab drivers at a rank, calling out for custom. Imagine it: you want to get from St Paul’s to the theatres or bear gardens of Southwark. You climb down mossy steps, hail a boatman, and for a penny or two he’ll row you across, sometimes against a furious tide.

The ferrymen were not quaint characters in striped shirts; they were workers, often gruff, sometimes drunk, but indispensable. The city leaned on them as much as it leans on buses or the Tube today. Their wherries — narrow, clinker-built boats — were designed to dart between barges, dodge the wash of passing craft, and survive the Thames’s notorious crosscurrents.

The Company of Watermen

By the late 16th century, the trade was enormous. There were an estimated 3,000 watermen operating on the Thames, and in 1555 they organised into the Company of Watermen, later the Company of Watermen and Lightermen (lightermen hauled cargo). This was part trade union, part protection racket. Apprenticeships lasted seven years, with boys learning every eddy and shoal. They memorised the “stations” where fares were likely. They also learned that a poor row could mean drowning not just your passenger but yourself.

The river could be cruel. In 1633, Pepys recorded a wherry capsizing in rough weather, with all souls lost. And yet the watermen rowed on, day after day, a brotherhood bound by tide and danger.

Ferrymen and the Theatre

Bankside was a particularly lively spot. The south bank was the Vegas of Elizabethan London: bear-baiting arenas, taverns spilling ale, brothels glowing red. Shakespeare’s plays drew crowds, but so did the prospect of cheap entertainment forbidden in the City proper. To get there, you needed a ferryman. They were the unofficial ushers of London’s nightlife, rowing gallants and apprentices across to see Hamlet before rowing them back, tipsy and quoting lines.

Some watermen even fancied themselves literary rivals. John Taylor, a ferryman-poet known as the “Water Poet,” wrote pamphlets and poems mocking the new bridges that threatened his trade. Taylor once rowed to Scotland to prove a point and wrote about the ordeal in characteristically salty verse. His words give us one of the few first-hand voices of the watermen — proud, belligerent, and convinced of their own necessity.

Bridges: The Beginning of the End

The ferrymen’s sense of threat wasn’t paranoia. Westminster Bridge opened in 1750, and the watermen railed against it like taxi drivers against Uber. They lobbied Parliament, claiming their ancient rights were being eroded. Some staged violent protests. Others resorted to underhand tactics: frightening passengers with tales of collapsing spans, or deliberately capsizing near the piers to show the danger of bridges.

But progress was relentless. More bridges followed: Blackfriars in 1769, Waterloo in 1817, Southwark in 1819. Each one hacked away at their monopoly. By the Victorian era, the watermen were an endangered species, their role diminished to ferrying odd passengers or cargo. Where once they were the lifeblood of London’s transport, they became picturesque relics, painted in watercolours by sentimental artists.

The Ferryman’s Seat

And yet, if you know where to look, traces of them remain. Walk along Bankside today, past the glassy offices and restaurants, and stop by The Real Greek. Tucked against the riverside wall is a curious survival: the Ferryman’s Seat. It’s nothing grand — a simple stone bench, carved into the wall itself, eroded and smoothed by centuries of use. But it is one of London’s oldest pieces of street furniture, and perhaps the only one that remembers the ferrymen.

This was where a waterman would sit, waiting for his next fare, gazing across the current for a raised hand or a figure picking their way down the steps. Thousands of backsides must have polished that stone, thousands of muttered curses, shouts for custom, and snatches of gossip must have risen from it. Today, it is passed daily by office workers who barely notice it, a relic that looks almost like a broken bit of wall — but it is a seat, a throne of labour, the last physical ghost of the watermen of Bankside.

Class and River Democracy

For centuries, the ferrymen had provided a rare kind of equality. Wealthy men might ride in private barges, gilded and crewed by liveried oarsmen, but most Londoners — fishmongers, butchers, clerks, servants — relied on the same wherries. The ferryman’s boat was one of the few places where class divisions blurred, if only for a few minutes. For the length of the crossing, everyone was at the mercy of the same tide, the same gruff boatman’s skill.

The Echo Today

Stand by the Millennium Bridge and picture, beneath its wobbling tourists, the vanished swarm of wherries. Picture the watermen shouting, haggling, boasting of their speed. Picture the apprentices, biceps roped with muscle, hauling their oars like weapons. The city was a chorus of bells and cries, but the rhythm of London’s life beat most strongly in the stroke of ferrymen’s oars.

They weren’t saints. Pepys complains of rude watermen. Others were accused of drunkenness, theft, or worse. Yet in plague years, some were the only ones brave enough to ferry the sick to boats moored midstream, a grim service that saved others from infection. Their story is one of contradictions: rough but essential, anonymous but unforgettable if you squint hard enough at the river’s memory.

Today, a ghostly version of their trade lingers. The Uber Boats and Thames Clippers trace their wake, though these are sleek commuter catamarans, not the grunting muscle of one man and his oars. The river is no longer crowded with ferrymen bellowing for custom, but with office workers sipping lattes while Wi-Fi hums. Progress, yes, but with a price. We’ve forgotten the intimacy of being ferried across the water by human strength, the closeness of tide, sweat, and current.

If London is guilty of anything, it is amnesia. We erase the workers who built its rhythms. The ferrymen are a case in point: thousands of men whose labour bound north and south, now barely remembered. Next time you cross Millennium Bridge or Blackfriars, pause and look down. Imagine calling for a boat in the fog, stepping into a rocking wherry, the ferryman’s gruff voice cursing the tide. Imagine trusting your life, for a penny or two, to a stranger’s oars.

And if you pass the stone bench by The Real Greek, stop and touch it. It’s cold, worn, and unspectacular — but it is the ferryman’s seat, the last witness to a vanished London. Sit there a while, and if the traffic quiets and the tide slaps just right, you might hear the echo of oars, the splash of water, the bark of a boatman calling: “Oars, sir? Wherry, sir?”

The Thames keeps its secrets, but the seat reminds us: the ghosts are still there, waiting by Bankside.

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