page_title: Watermen's stairs
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Watermen's stairs / History
caption_attribution_description: The construction of the Victoria Embankment in London, England. This section in the foreground is near the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple. Somerset House is in the background. The bridge is the old version of Waterloo Bridge.
context_page_description: Watermen's stairs were semipermanent structures that formed part of a complex transport network of public stairs, causeways and alleys in use from the 14th century to access the waters of the tidal River Thames in England. They were used by watermen, who taxied passengers across and along the river in London.
  Stairs were used at high tide, and causeways were used at low tide, built down to the littoral water level from street level, their location being memorised during a waterman's apprenticeship. Stairs were recognised by custom and practice as safe plying places to pick up and put down passengers and were a valuable aid to rescue if anyone was unfortunate enough to fall into the river, as they were often built adjacent to a public house.
context_section_description: In the 16th century Henry VIII of England, after watching Royal Waterman in a risky manoeuvre shoot the rapids created by the twenty small arches of Old London Bridge, decided to clean up the navigation of the Thames. Wooden structures and water-wheels built out into the river over centuries were removed and the central part of London's Thames retreated behind a semi permanent series of walls that lined the sloping foreshore to the river, along these shallow walls, stairs were built down to the water. Two to six-storey houses and shops were built along the shoreline.
  Alleyways leading down to the Thames became the only practical way to cross over the river via boat as Old London Bridge was frequently blocked. Wharves and later rudimentary docks began to be used to offload goods but most ships simply moored in lines in the middle of the river and their cargo was rowed to shore and carried up shoreline stairs. Some of the Thames original shoreline did remain free from the construction of houses or walls. The access to the river was via, shore, gaps between houses used to launch boats. Samuel Pepys in his diaries of 1665 mentions making landfall at Dukes Shore for example before wading up the beach to Narrow Street. As late as the 1850s nearly all new bridges were built with stairs at both ends, and generally on both sides.
  The Embankment which artificially engineered the Thames' natural course in the 1860s left buildings that had been located on the gently sloping incline to the river some distance from the water's edge.
  The growth of steamboats in the 1850s allowed boats to dock at specially constructed steamboat piers. Grab chains were built into the now steeply embanked high walls of the central Pool of the river Thames as an aide to rescue but access to the busiest central areas was geared towards mass transit by the 1890s. Later with the increased use of the Hackney carriage, London's stairs gradually fell into disuse or were simply built over and the abrupt collapse of traffic in the up river docks on the central tidal Thames in the 1960s effectively ended their use as transit points within London's transport network.
caption: Thames Embankment, 1865
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