Print a copy of Katherine Baxter's illustrated map

SOUTH OF THE RIVER. North of the river. Bankside. South Bank. From The Wind in the Willows to estuary English, the Thames runs through our language, literature and history with a riptide pull on our imagination.

It is both metaphor and matter; a symbol of national life, language and character; “from Greenwich to Windsor, from Tower to Abbey, from Port of London to Runnymede”, as Peter Ackroyd puts it in his meandering but magnificent tribute to our capital river.

More ancient, more resonant and more intriguing than the monarchy to whose history it is intimately tied, the Thames is a gift to a writer like Ackroyd. As Toad told Ratty, the river chatters on like “a babbling procession of the best stories in the world”. It is a metaphor “for continuity, intimacy and transitoriness, for art and history and poetry itself” (that was Ackroyd, not Toad). It can even be “a symbol of eternity”. Nothing ambitious there, then.

Ackroyd’s previous works of nonfiction include his dazzling “biography” of London as well as Albion: the Origins of the English Imagination and Thameside lives from Shakespeare to Thomas More. In Sacred River, he reveals himself as a Father Thames for our times, and the river itself as the deepest vein flowing in the body politic of British culture and history.

In this dense and sumptuously designed book, the river is both midwife and shroud-bearer to the continuing story of the nation’s life; a richly diverse metaphor with which to explore our relationship with our history, prehistory and sense of identity.

As the narrative flows along, as majestic as a Tudor barge, the Thameside scenery it takes in becomes its strength and justification: kings and traitors, stevedores and lock-keepers, murderers and suicides populate the bustling, life-giving but ultimately dark and troubling river.

This is a big book. Even so, it does not always feel big enough for the ambition of a drama that moves between the alluvial floodplains under the National Gallery to the preparations for a barrier against 22nd-century floods, with scenestealers from Julius Caesar to Jack the Ripper.

Ackroyd arranges his river neither chronologically, nor along the obvious route of the river itself – from source to sea. Instead, Sacred Riverpools like small eddies of interest to be explored at low tide: 45 chapters in all, some only a few pages long, that vary in subject matter from the inevitable, such as literary Thames, artistic Thames and Thames bridges (mainly the London ones) to the more arcane: swans, trees and even dreams.

Ackroyd acknowledges that he has avoided the obvious way to structure his work – he even includes an “alternative topography” at the back, a 50-page book-within-a-book that takes us in traditional form from Kemble in Gloucestershire to Canvey Island – as good a place as any to say the Thames is no longer a river – freeing himself up to play with the waters, their myths and secrets as the mood takes him. It is perfect for messing about on the river.

It has to be said that, of the light and shade in life, Ackroyd has a distinct preference for the tragedy and bleakness associated with the river – “the river is haunted, it draws people in”. Ackroyd has plenty to say, much of it taking us on unexpected meanders and all piloted with his deft, amused and comfortable prose. Thames: Sacred River smells authentically of the water, of an author who has walked the towpath and knows not only the impressive statistics – 2,000 cubic feet of water per second in Central London – but also the Turner water-colours of the Thames itself, from aquamarines through murian browns to, within living memory, a pestilential black.

Ackroyd is particularly good on pestilence and filth. Sewage, he delights in telling us – “a sludgy compromise between the animal, mineral and vegetable kingdoms . . . black as ink” – floated six inches thick at Teddington Lock. No wonder pleasure-cruising died out.

Nor should we congratulate ourselves on our cleaned-up river. Between 2001 and 2004, 240 million cubic metres of raw sewage entered the river, usually as a a result of all-too-frequent “freak” weather conditions. It is possibly deliberate that Ackroyd places this stomach-heaving chapter next to his meditation on Thames food.

Thames: Sacred River is celebratory but elegiac, which may be the natural way with rivers that run fast and dappling, then turn sluggish. But as always with Ackroyd, a London landmark in his own right, it is not just the subject that sets this book apart but also the compelling new perspectives that he brings; it is like seeing an old relative reimagined as a naked youth, a boy, a baby – shocking, embarrassing, heartbreaking and heartwarming by turns. You’ll never see those familiar waters again without a smile, a shudder or a Pooh-sticks pause to watch eternity slip by in grey waters.

Ian Kelly’s life of Giacomo Casanova will be published by Hodder next year

THAMES: SACRED RIVER by Peter Ackroyd

Chatto & Windus, £25; 490pp

Buy the book here for £22.50 (free p&p)

Illustration by Katherine Baxter at www.folioart.co.uk

Limited-edition prints will soon be available at www.folioboutique.com

River ripples

WHERE TO WALK

The river is 215 miles long, and you can walk 184 of those miles on the Thames Path National Trail.

At an average distance of 15 miles (24km) a day, the trail would be completed in 14 days.

For more information see The Thames Path National Trail Guide by David Sharp (Aurum, £14) or visit nationaltrail.co.uk/ ThamesPath

WHAT TO READ

Originally intended as a study of the Thames, Jerome K. Jerome’s 1889 classic Three Men in a Boat describes the shenanigans of three hapless friends (and their dog) on the river.

In William Morris’s News from Nowhere a Victorian socialist wakes up in a 21st-century Utopian socialist future and takes a trip up the Thames, appraising the wonders of the new England.

The Thames plays a symbolic role in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, where “messing about in boats” stands for all that is good and innocent.

The third section of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land alludes to another side of the river: no longer the “sweet Thames” of Tudor times, it is the “dull canal” of the Victorian Great Stink.

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