Photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews grew up close to the Thames, but knew little about the human traditions that regularly take place along there. This led her to embark on a fve-year project documenting the river, where she discovered the diverse rituals that continue to persevere – despite the changing London landscape.
Text: DaisySchofeld
THE THAMES – THE LONGEST RIVER IN ENGLAND – has been a hub of human activity for generations, with connected structures, such as navigations, bridges and watermills and prehistoric burial mounds, dating back as far as Pre-Roman times. Nowadays, it’s more famous for events like the Henley Royal Regatta and the Boat Race. But less documented are those rituals which take place outside of the London bubble.
Photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews, who grew up near the Thames before relocating to Hastings five years ago, set out to capture the more hidden aspects of the river. While she would cross it every day via the Hammersmith bridge, she says that in her younger years, she knew very little about what went on there.
“Often, we assume that we have an intimate knowledge of the areas we live in, just because of the amount of time we spend there,” she says. “But actually, due to the patterns of our day-to-day life, we ignore the places closest to us.”
It was a desire to get to know her surroundings that prompted Dewe Mathews to embark on a five-year project documenting the river – from its source in rural Gloucester, to its mouth in the Thames estuary near Southend-on-Sea. The result is Thames Log, a book, published by Loose Joints, that captures the diverse rituals that continue to persevere along it.
While the photographer was fairly familiar with the parts of the river in London, it was the areas that fell outside of the city that intrigued her. “It wasn’t one specific journey,” she remembers. “It was five years of going back and forth to different areas and making sure I covered different stretches.”
The idea for the series arrived almost by accident, when Dewe Mathews stumbled across a photograph from 1883 of someone being baptised in the Thames. “I’d thought, ‘Oh, isn’t it a shame this doesn’t happen anymore, because, they’re because they’re really extraordinary spectacles.’”
However, as she began to explore the Thames further, she discovered that baptisms did still take place on the river – along with many other elaborate ceremonies – which she was able to photograph as part of the project. “That’s often my way into a project,” she says. “It’s a photograph of something from history t
