‘The Tower’, they call the shortest of these buildings. Do they not get the feeling its name has been somewhat overtaken?

Upstream of Tower Bridge, the tidal Thames ebbs and flows through the current power centres of both the English nation and the larger constitutional vehicle it presently rides, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (a.k.a. ‘the Union’) – although that ride feels wobblier by the day.

Many people think of this country as a democracy, and one of the oldest in the world at that. Its civilised, courteous, tea-sipping national persona fuses in their minds with the landscape of its capital city’s riverside, where red buses link the likes of the Palace of Westminster, the Victoria Embankment and St. Paul’s Cathedral. It is in pride of place at the downstream culmination of this catalogue of modern wonders that stands the Tower of London, which draws in some three million awestruck visitors per year.

But there is a problem here.

The Tower was a Political prison, torture dungeon and killing field. Erected by William of Normandy as part of a network of castles to scare his conquered populace into submission, by the time the English nation consolidated under the Tudor dynasty (1509-1603) the main use of this fortress had shifted to confining, torturing, and oftentimes decapitating high-profile political dissidents and prisoners of war. Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey and William Laud were among the dozens who had their heads handed to them here, and even four hundred years later it was dragging German spies in front of its firing squads in both World Wars. Yet nowadays you can pay a hefty £24.70 per head – and keep the head – to go in and take carefree selfies on top of those corpses while marvelling at this architectural symbol of a country which, they would have you believe, has political freedom and human rights in its national DNA.

That story of democratic destiny has been incredibly powerful in the English self-consciousness. But as we follow the Thames right through the middle of its ancient nuclei – the City of London and the City of Westminster – the river will have a quite different story to show us: of a heritage packed, like everyone else’s, with greed, oppression, and violent struggle. A story in which for every piece of democracy these people have scrapped together, they have had to fight and die for it and could never be sure they wouldn’t lose it again at any moment – and in which its worst enemies have not been external threats, but the impulse for the abuse of power that has ever lurked in their own culture.

Power. Yes. That will be the Dark River’s melody today.

Start:Tower Bridge (nearest station: Tower Hill)

End:Putney Bridge (nearest stations: Putney Bridge, Vauxhall)

Length: 16km (10 miles)

Location: Greater London – Borough of Southwark, Borough of Lambeth, Borough of Wandsworth

Topics: Power versus democracy amongst the City of London merchants, Southwark bishops, Bankside and Lambeth recreationalists and the English Parliament in Westminster, then escaping through Vauxhall, Battersea, Wandsworth and Putney.

Today’s exploration is long. If you want to keep to the three main discussions, they are the City of London (immediately below), the story of Parliament(skip to ‘City of Westminster’), and the Putney Debates (skip to ‘Putney’ at the end.)

Here’s someone who knows a thing or two about power. Trajan, once a mighty Roman emperor (r.98-117 CE), now subsists on a zero-hours contract as a human signpost outside Tower Hill station. Look at this wall, he tells everyone. My power reached all the way up here once.

This is one of the last remaining traces of the original wall the Romans built around Londinium, which stood where the City of London stands now. ‘The City’ is not that large, and they even nickname it the ‘square mile’. That is the limit of what London meant until the most recent centuries, when its industrial population explosion and suburbanisation widened it to what is now called Greater London.

The essential point: the City of London is distinct from Greater London. Which makes a start to explaining why the Mayor of London, whose office faces the City across the river, is not in fact the mayor of it.

The office of the Mayor, currently held by Sadiq Khan, is a new one, created only in 2000. The Mayor is chosen every four years by popular election and heads the Greater London Authority (GLA). This is itself the latest in a short sequence of bodies that have governed Greater Londonsince its formation in the 1960s, which shows just how recent the concept is.

But the Old City is too ancient, powerful, and convinced of its own exclusive destiny to condescend to such trifles as democratic elections. It has its own leader – confusingly, the Lord Mayor of London – who is elected not by the people but by the City’s livery companies and whose office has existed since 1189. The livery companies are the City’s merchant guilds or trading associations, typically styled ‘The Worshipful Company of’ something or other and in some cases hundreds of years old. And in the costumes, rituals, closed double doors and archaic vocabulary of the ‘sheriffs’ and ‘aldermen’ of their City of London Corporation – their very own island of self-government and buttress against hostile waves of democracy from the little people outside – they are not afraid to show it.

Their own clutch of skyscrapers is new, an outcome of the unshackling of the financial sector in the 1980s which has replaced England’s real economy. Nonetheless it was not out of character for some in the City to embrace that new opportunity. The language of their governance structures speaks for itself: the Old City has always been the domain of merchants and traders willing to do whatever it takes to turn a profit, and it is this that has secured its constant dominance since its revival under King Alfred in the ninth century.

Through the river, the merchants connected England to the outside world. They brought other people’s stuff in and got rich selling it. That made them powerful. It made whoever could control or count on their support powerful too. So whether it was Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Tudors, or later political heavyweights with either imperialist or democratic visions, the City was too precious and useful an asset for them to ignore, let alone confront. Whatever rulers or ideas held sway over England in a given time, the City was happy to exploit to serve its own interests, yet just as swift to brandish its clout if it felt they threatened them.

The story of the docklands was a perfect example. In earlier centuries the City merchants wrestled ferociously with successive royal governments to produce the Legal Quays system. These quays – all of course along the City’s own riverbank – were the only places cargo ships were allowed to unload, so of course all their delicious import taxes got funnelled straight into the hands of the Corporation’s customs officials. Naturally they swarmed with corruption and bitterly resisted the rise of the docks until the clogging of the river with ships left no real choice. Enraged by the dock monopolies’ destruction of business at their Legal Quays, they nonetheless waited patiently for those monopolies to expire then scrambled for everything that fell through the big dock companies’ arms, in some cases creating new docks of their own. And when the whole dock system came crashing down in the late twentieth century to be swept up by the free-market revolution, those who now sit atop these new Towers of London, the Gherkins and Walkie-Talkies, were ready to bite their own chunks off it too by leaping into the new ranks of financiers and property speculators atop England’s undead modernity.

Now whether one defines democracy narrowly as the ballot box or broadly as a system where people have political power over their own lives, there is a mounting sense that the English and British democratic project is in serious trouble. What, in this crisis, is the significance of the City of London’s power?

Perhaps its vote in the 2016 Cameron referendum – 75.3% to Remain, 24.7% to Leave – reflects its ambiguity. Most merchants dislike uncertainty and enjoy having access to other people’s markets, and there is no doubt that these Brexiting times have left a great many of them anxious and frustrated. Yet as in the docklands, others among their number salivate at the prospect of upheaval: the disaster capitalistbankers, speculators, free-market ideologues and merchants of death who see in every calamity the chance to make huge gains out of others’ shock and misery and, it is feared, await the chance to do just that if Brexit goes through. Their values and outcomes – deregulation, tax avoidance, rock-bottom health and environmental standards, exploitative and insecure work, and so on – are very straightforwardly anti-democratic: the whole point is to carve power over people’s lives away from them by corroding their health and rights. And that is to say nothing of the City’s behaviour in bringing about the Brexit crisis in the first place, whether by causing the 2007-8 financial crisis, or by rescuing itself with public money then continuing to siphon the nation’s wealth as austerity policies ripped the majority population into poverty.

In pain and rage, and often with little left to lose, that population rails against the City merchants. It accuses them, not without basis, of wrecking English democracy in any meaningful sense, but what that sense is differs depending on the values and identities of the accusers. In the hands of the nationalists, it becomes a charge that the merchants are rootless elites with no higher loyalty to their nation. From this there rises a tin-pot notion of democracy as the brute power of a (real or perceived) majority, identifying along tribal or ethnic lines and enforceable through violent masculinism, whence former Prime Minister Theresa May’s infamous ‘citizens of nowhere’ speech. 

It is this populist debasement of democracy, with its shades of the path to twentieth-century fascism, that has found expression through the Brexit movement, imperilling the English democratic experiment in a paradoxical double assault with the disaster capitalists in hatred of whom it emerged but in whose prophecies of rapturous upheaval it identifies a common destiny.

Which casts a certain irony upon the HMS Belfast moored across the river.

This navy cruiser, launched in 1938, went on many adventures in World War II before settling here as an iconic museum ship. It embodies what is without question the most prominent tale in the popular storybook of English democracy: its triumphant fight in 1939-45 against the external threat from Nazi racist authoritarianism. That the Nazis were a threat – an unspeakably heinous one – is in no doubt; but they were never the only threat, nor even the most dangerous. The storytellers’ mistake has been to locate the threat too heavily in the external part, and not enough in the racist authoritarianism part which has just as long been present in English hearts too. The worst enemies of English democracy have always been in England – and here, right beside this old warrior, are targets it might want scrutinise for creating the poverty and alienation that nurtures those.

The City of London sits entirely on the north bank, which has generated a lasting dynamic on the lower Thames: the dominance of north over south.

Yet London’s site was chosen because it was the lowest point on the river the Romans could ford it. And till 1750 London Bridge was the only place you could ford it because our friends the City merchants had a vested interest in resolutely opposing new bridges, lest they cause any of the revenues of its tolls, ferries and bridge-side businesses to fall away from their single open maw.

And so a secondary settlement grew up round the south end of the bridge. Southwark– the ‘south work’ – is thus one of the oldest pieces of the Greater London conurbation. Indeed, the very fact it came into existence as the ‘other’ London, consisting of several liberties outside the City’s jurisdiction, makes it an inviting place to look for alternative expressions of power.

Like this, for instance.

Southwark Crown Court is one of several Crown Courts in London, which occupy a rung about halfway up the English judicial system. Justice systems represent a significant plank of power in their own right in the stories of most nations, and those that aspire to democracy generally find it important that they be fair, transparent, and uninfluenced by other centres of power, particularly the political establishment: all people, no matter how powerful, should be equal before it. But in practice this perfect rule of law is never absolutely achieved. Laws and their arbitration grow from and are influenced by political forces and cultural values, especially oppressive and anti-democratic ones like race, gender and class. The result has been a tension between brave ideals and shameful realities, and a perpetual struggle between them for control of the justice system’s power.

How far that system in England has promoted or frustrated democratic outcomes is too vast a subject to delve deep into here. At the least, it is mercurial. It has often been ruthlessly oppressive: as a random sample of the courts’ political abuses, consider their role in Enclosure and the ‘Bloody Code’; the Bloody Assizes show trials of the 1680s (yes, that’s a lot of blood); and as a vehicle of homophobic prejudice in persecuting Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing. On the other hand, the courts have come far enough that they certainly have the power to hold powerful figures to account when they want to, as just this year when the Supreme Court overturned Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliament. On the last public opinion divided down the political lines of the Brexit confrontation, with some in Johnson’s government claiming angrily that the court had overstepped its remit and making sinister mutters about reforming it. In the present English crisis, we see well how the place of the courts is yet one more form of power under contestation.

The justice of Baroness Hale, who sank Boris’s prorogation, is clearly a very different thing from the justice of Lord Jeffreys of Bloody Assizes fame. Power is not static. It changes – like the river, it ebbs, flows, and swirls. And next door to the court, a familiar pattern of shifting power-tides returns in the form of Hay’s Galleria. It used to be Hay’s Wharf, which in the heyday of imperial plunder became one of London’s principal landing sites for imported tea along with the other dry foodstuffs that got it nicknamed ‘London’s Larder’. But since closing in 1970 it has been redone into offices, shops and flats.

The rentier class sweeps everything away, and like the Tower of London, once-mighty powers tremble in the shadows of its upstarts. In the centre of Southwark is evidence of another old power gone by.

The Christian church once wielded very real clout in this land. In medieval times the Bishop of Winchester was effectively the king’s chancellor, giving the twelfth-century Winchester Palace high status indeed. Southwark Cathedralwas preceded by a prestigious monastery, perhaps like many in this country a centre not only of worship but of scholarship and fabulous wealth.

In the period these were built the Church was already established as a locus of spiritual authority in England, but in practice this meant regular involvement in its political and economic affairs too. This meant trouble, because the Church meant the Roman Catholic church, meaning in turn that an external power – the Pope in Rome and his bishops – wielded authority in the same territory as the English king. When they didn't get on, the crown-versus-church power struggle became one of the most defining dynamics in early English politics, with the drama of King Henry II and Archbishop Thomas Becket perhaps its most representative episode.

This contest came to a spectacular and violent end in the 1530s under the Tudor dynasty, when Henry VIII crushed the monasteries, seized control of the Church in England for himself, and permanently threw the authority of the Pope out of England. But because he did it out of his own personal interest in fucking Anne Boleyn and seizing the monasteries’ riches rather than for any higher constitutional vision, his death saddled England with a further century and a half of immiserating struggles, atrocious persecutions, and finally a messy civil war before the religious strife he unleashed resolved into anything resembling a peaceful settlement. Southwark Priory experienced this for itself, expropriated by Henry VIII then used for trials under his daughter, Queen Mary, in which religious dissidents were condemned to be burned alive. The Priory eventually became the Protestant cathedral it is now and has been rebuilt often over the years.

The monarch, currently Elizabeth II, remains head of England’s Protestant state church to this day. Though its power over people’s lives diminished from those turbulent centuries on, that has not stopped religious power asserting itself through other means. The centuries of seething anti-Catholic prejudice that followed, in continuity with longer-term anti-Semitism and modern Islamophobia; the dissenters and refugees unsatisfied with the eventual shape of Protestant England who quit England for Northern Ireland or America, and from there went on to cause all kinds of monumental trouble for their land of origin; such things have mattered a great deal in shaping this country’s fate, and even now one ignores them to one’s peril. Spiritual power can reach and move people from directions that more material forms of power have no access to, especially in an age when the latter is doing so much to discredit itself. It must be accounted for and channelled in healthy directions if democracy is what this nation seeks.

Look behind Southwark Cathedral and it appears these people have form in ironic ship placements. As the HMS Belfast blasts loyalty to nation in the faces of City bankers’ loyalty to their own pockets, another vessel challenges Southwark’s installations of spirit with an installation of matter.

Other people’s matter, for the most part.

Francis Drake was a privateer, that is to say a pirate and private soldier, and one of the most illustrious in the period those became popular under Henry VIII’s daughter Elizabeth I. The government made use of these people to attack Spanish ships and rob them of the treasures they themselves had plundered off the indigenous South and Central Americans (whose civilisations the Spanish had spent that century butchering) because relying on privateers rather than official forces made it easier for the government to disavow responsibility. Aboard the Golden Hind, Drake circumnavigated the world in a career which developed English fortunes, knowledge and global connections that proved crucial for the colonial empire they would go on to assemble. And indeed, it was out of precisely such piracy that grew the City’s corporate big beasts who would do the assembling, like the Atlantic slave traders and the East India Company.

Such was the power of the Bishops of Winchester that they set about some land reclamation next door to their Southwark lair. The strip they took off the river is now known as Bankside, but they might not have been impressed by its later fate. It became a land of recreation, and not all of it salubrious: bear-baiting, playhouses, and most famously the theatre, just as it was raised to its revolutionary flourish by William Shakespeare.

Arts, games and sports are political. The political authorities dreaded them as potential incubators of subversion, as did the religious authorities who found them morally corrupting. But ironically they came here in the first place thanks in part to the Bishops of Winchester, who by securing this area outside the jurisdiction of the City made it the perfect place to do things you couldn’t in places that pretended to respectability.

Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, resurrected in 1997, holds pride of place here. Beyond its function it is a monument to one of the titans of the dramatic arts, and the one person who has probably had the greatest individual impact on the English language.

Shakespeare and his work were critically immersed in the political atmosphere of his time. His plays rampage around the English historical consciousness when not single-handedly creating it, openly dissecting sensitive religious and sexual topics while carry razor-sharp yet profound and sometimes ambiguously complex political messages. Their resonances in the ominous years of the Tudor-Stuart transition remain no less potent today, and so rich is the mountain of timeless archetypes crystallised and deconstructed in his work that a surprising amount of mystery still surrounds the person behind it.

Here we see a completely different kind of power: not the coercive hard powerof political armies and pirates (be they privateers or financiers), but an attractive soft power, first articulated by political scientist Joseph Nye, that moves hearts and minds through persuasion, emotive impact and charismatic appeal. Soft does not necessary mean good, still less democratic – it includes advertising and what is now called fake news – but its heartier forms have been formidably important to England’s power in the world, with the likes of Shakespeare, the Beatles, Manchester United and the BBC World Service doing far more in this country’s favour than was ever accomplished by its gunboats and bombers.

English hard power has largely collapsed with its empire and industrial base, driving their present crisis in the longer term. If they emerge from it, it could be expected that any attempt to rebuild their international profile will instead have to leverage their soft power assets like these to become loved in the world, rather than feared or (as seems largely the present case) pitied. Lessons from countries like Japan and Costa Rica, though by no means flawless, could be worth heeding in that circumstance.