ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT • 13 MAY 1991Written beside the Thames.
Sweet London River was written in 1991, when Paul Cruse was living at The Circle, just behind Butler's Wharf near Tower Bridge.
The intention was specific: it was written as a possible submission to Poems on the Underground.
It wasn't selected. The handwritten sheet survived.
Not a view of London.
A place inside it.
Paul remembers writing the poem while sitting on a floating pier reached from the south bank of the Thames, around the Butler's Wharf and Tower Bridge area.
For years he thought the pier was called Cherry Pier. Looking back at the geography, he now suspects he may have got his bearings mixed up and that it was another nearby pier.
Archive note: the general location is remembered; the exact pier remains uncertain.
“Oh, River Thames, what you gonna bring in for me?”
The poem looks out across a working, changing London: river traffic, Chelsea Harbour, Docklands, Canary Wharf, St Katharine's Dock, sailboats, imported goods and money moving through the city.
Those references weren't assembled later as London imagery. They were around the writer as the poem was being made.
BRIDGE
LANDS
A river poem
for the Underground.
The hoped-for destination was beneath London: a poem written on the river, submitted in the hope that passengers might encounter it on the Underground.
That didn't happen. More than three decades later, the original manuscript can finally be seen — not as a successful competition entry, but as an artefact from the moment it was written.
The scenery already meant something.
St Katharine's Dock also had a personal association. Paul had intended to join the Cruising Association after returning from America in 1987, when its yacht club was there.
A missed Saturday post and an unexpected relationship changed that particular plan. He eventually became a member a few years later, while living in New Cross.
So the yachts and docks in Sweet London River weren't simply picturesque details. They belonged to a part of London with which he already had a connection.
13.5.91.
It didn't go Underground.
It didn't disappear either.
The page remained among the papers: folded, marked by time and still carrying the date it was written. Sometimes the thing that wasn't chosen becomes the better archive object.