The chill light of a winter morning falls on Putney Bridge, riding a tide that rises beyond the capital city. Having cleared the urban core, the water’s mood changes dramatically as it swings hard to the south in a great ninety-degree bend. Could this be a memory of 20,000 years ago, when the glaciers of the last ice age advanced all the way down here and shunted the Thames to the south?

Coincidence or otherwise, the bottom of that arc sends it right into what in a single human lifetime has become the corner of the Greater London conurbation, where on meeting the water that falls from the English interior, the sovereignty of the tides finally ends.

But more than water comes and goes this way. For thousands of years before trains and motor vehicles the River was the prime means of travel for the people of its watershed. Far better after all to let the tides take you where you want to go than drag yourself and your belongings up and down the muddy, potholed, bandit-ridden land routes.

If you had the means and status for it, that is. Under English class hierarchy, this privilege of escape from the struggles of London was primarily the preserve of those on the highest levels of the social pyramid. Above all that meant the monarchy, whose palaces and hunting grounds duly colonised all the best floodplain they could grab off the common folk. In their wake came their obligatory orbiting constellations of nobles, clerics, sycophants and concubines, some of whose families still occupy these prize mansions and riverside villas. Theirs are the upriver domains of Richmond and Kingston, towns whose roots lie in the legends of English royalty, but the intervening distance was settled by the middle-class affluents on the next tiers down as they popped up through the thick foam of the industrial revolution, into the fresh river air, and followed the old nobility out that way. Entranced by the splendour of the riverscape, these escapees imagined up and passed down an Arcadian paradise of swans and ducks and herons, of comfortable housing whether ruddily historic or ostentatiously gentrified, of lazy promenades lined with elaborate lamp-posts and hanging flower baskets, along a riverside of leaves and willows everywhere managed and in places manicured.

Yet the question, the very English question, remains. Who is it for?

Before we embark, ongoing events should serve as a reminder that history is alive around us. Not two days after the previous section’s article there was a terrorist attack at one of its most prominent landmarks, London Bridge. The attacker stabbed two people dead in the hall of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers before being shot by police on the bridge, having been subdued by, among others, someone wielding a narwhal horn from the aforementioned institution. This violence fed into one of the dirtiest and bitterest general elections in this country’s living memory, in which, as has typically been the case, the old royal lairs on the path ahead were some of the most fiercely contested constituencies in the country. Past and future, local and global: all are present and inseparable.

It was not a regular election. The outcome has struck a whole new level of shock and despair into many people and looks likely, to say the least, to irreparably alter the destiny of Britain and England. But even in this extraordinary instance, the boroughs of Richmond Park, Twickenham, and Kingston and Surbiton defied both the national trend and that of London’s division into working-class Labour Party urban areas versus white and affluent Conservative Party sub-rural outskirts. This corner alone chose a third option and put in Liberal Democrat MPs with comfortable majorities: the sole phalanx of Lib-Dem amber on a map that has otherwise scattered it to particles.

Pinned between core and periphery; shaped by both upstream and downstream worlds but not entirely of either. Who are the people who live on the riverbend, and what makes them different?

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

End:Kingston Bridge (nearest station: Kingston)

Length: 20.9km/13 miles

Location: Greater London – Borough of Wandsworth, Borough of Richmond upon Thames, Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames

Topics: University Boat Race, Barnes, Hammersmith, Chiswick, Mortlake, the National Archives, Kew Gardens, Syon House/Abbey, Richmond, Isleworth, Twickenham, Teddington Lock

Here, unusually in this land, is a place whose name sounds like what it meant. The Barnes peninsula was named for its granary barns that supplied the manor of Mortlake, of which it was part till Barnes village grew in its own right.

These low-lying fields were more isolated than nearby Putney. As Barnes village abided on the west side of the peninsula, the farmlands and estate grounds on its east, named Barn Elms, seemed to preserve more of the river’s wild underlying character.

The riverbank out of Putney is lined with rowing clubs, which could be taken as a sign of a recreational turn in land use if you are prepared to stretch the definition of ‘recreational’. In English professional sports, especially those with a certain status in its elite public school establishment, competitive rowing can be observed to occupy a place further from recreational and closer to military, with a seeming purpose not so much in propelling one’s boat faster than other people’s as in turning hapless youngsters into ferocious, red-faced, iron-disciplined, burning-sinewed engines of destruction.

Perhaps I carry some bias here, having encountered that rowing juggernaut years ago in the course of exploring more peaceable boat-racing cultures on this river (punting, if you must know – maybe more on that further upstream). Either way, it is one of the pinnacles of that rowing culture that does most to fix the following stretch of the Thames in English imagination.

In February 1829, a letter made its way from a college of the University of Cambridge to the University of Oxford, challenging the latter to a rowing race ‘at or near London, each in an eight-oared boat during the ensuing Easter vacation’. This race was held far upriver near Henley, but when they gave it a second go in 1836 they brought it here to London. In no time ‘The Boat Race’had grown into an annual tradition, held every year since the 1850s except during the world wars.

Because this was and is a sexist country, all these race crews were men. Sports and elite academia both tend to be bastions of misogyny in such societies, likely due to men’s fear that any reminder of women’s strength or intellect, respectively, would re-awaken women’s power to annihilate those patriarchal power structures by demolishing the fragile lies on which they are built. A women’s race began only in 1927, more than a hundred years after the men’s, held in Oxford with crowds of people on the riverbank jeering their offence at the idea of women rowing. Not until 1964 did the women’s race stabilise as an annual event, and it was only in this decade – yes, that’s right – that it came here to the same course as the men’s, although the two are still held as separate races.

The Boat Race quickly became a fixture of the English cultural calendar. Every year it brings excited crowds onto the riverbanks ahead, where they pack the pubs and cram onto the bridges to cheer for the racers as they pass, while millions more follow it on television or the radio. Both universities take the race seriously as a reflection of their increasingly interrogated prestige and set their teams preparing months in advance, so both have had their share of victories, though as of this year Cambridge is slightly ahead in both men’s and women’s races.

At the end of the rowing base arrives the Beverley Brook, a Thames tributary from the green fields of Merton to the south. With it a significant threshold is crossed, for this is the start of the towpath. It is the first point on this route where the paved or cobbled urban riverside gives way to a dirt track.

Despite towpaths’ popularity with joggers and dog-walkers today, they were built so people or animals could haul boats along before the advent of industrial engines. They are a common feature along England’s canals, where they were specifically designed for horses, but since these functions were made obsolete by road, rail and air travel towpaths have largely survived by turning into recreational walking or cycling tracks.

And indeed, it is people out for just that sort of casual exercise who seem to populate the Barn Elms towpath today. On top of that, their strolling is of a class register distinct from people downriver. In general they are whiter, older, in less of a hurry, and converse in Received Pronunciation about their relatives’ conformity to bourgeois norms like the nuclear family, education ladder and pretend monogamy. On a brighter note, there are lots of pleasant dog encounters to be had too.

Hidden over that grassy brow is possibly the Barnes peninsula’s richest treasure. Where formerly languished some obsolete reservoirs now spreads the London Wetland Centre, whose hundred acres of wetland habitat are the new home for a thriving community of feathery creatures. It was opened only in 2000 but the organisation which runs it, the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, was founded in the 1940s (by Peter Scott, son of Captain Robert Scott of Antarctica fame) and has long campaigned for the protection of these critically important wetland environments.

These green and pleasant lands contrast with a more muddled mix on the north bank. Through the old Middlesex settlements of Fulham, Hammersmith, Chiswick and Brentford, the entitled landowners and middle-class city escapees jostled with millers, brewers and boat-builders who approached the water out of industrial and commercial interest, if usually with smaller spheres of influence than the City big beasts. The result is a patchy mosaic of prosperity and poverty that continues as the regeneration brigade makes its move on those that did not make it into the new millennium.

The appearance of Hammersmith Bridge in 1827, the Thames’s first suspension bridge, finally flung the noose of civilisation round Barnes’s neck. But like so many of the downstream bridges it began to buckle under traffic, especially once the Boat Race got popular and over ten thousand people at a time crowded upon it to watch. So they replaced it in 1887 with the current structure, another Joseph Bazalgette design, but while admittedly attractive – not to mention strong enough to survive three IRA bombings – it did not match the other new bridges’ success at handling modern traffic loads. After years of on-and-off closures it is now shut to vehicles indefinitely while they work out what to do.

Hammersmith itself is thought to have been an old Anglo-Saxon fishing village, with its name suggesting a notable blacksmith or forge. Its main draw was that its ground was gravelly rather than marshy, making it attractive both for the monied escapees’ villas and for small-scale riverside industries. Some of these also made use of a tributary long vanished into the local sewers, whose name, which survives in Stamford Brook station on the District Line – from ‘stony ford’ – likewise whispers of stabler earth here. Today Hammersmith is a jumble of offices, shopping centres, arts venues and pockets of architectural heritage, anchored around its service as a major transport junction.

There then appears the first of several small river islands that string the meanders ahead. The locals call them aits or eyots, a very old term with the same Old English root as the word island which this area – perhaps in a sign of its own insularity? – has somehow preserved separately.

The first of these, Chiswick Eyot, shields the district of Chiswick from view. Like Hammersmith it has long served as a transport hub, being on both the river and the west road, and grew as a community with a complex economy of its own. As well as the fishing and boating there was farming: they cultivated willows (‘osiers’) on the Eyot for making baskets and furniture, and the barley grown here was said to be particularly good, which in turn made Chiswick a prominent beer-brewing centre. This status consummated in industrial times when it produced Fuller, Smith and Turner, better known as Fuller’s, who still run pubs up and down the country on the output of their famous Griffin Brewery.

Only then, down the peninsula’s west flank, do you come to Barnes itself. The village is old, at least twelfth-century, and was relatively remote and agrarian till they opened Hammersmith Bridge, followed in the 1840s by a railway link. Its farmers and gardeners could now more easily sell stuff across the river, while London’s escape middle class found in it a fresh place of refuge. Steadily suburbanised, they have nonetheless made efforts to preserve the old village’s picturesque heart with its green and pond.

The centre of Barnes is still quite small, and its riverside soon blends into Mortlake. This was the dominant manor in the area stretching south into what is now Richmond, but the riverside village itself was limited to a single street, while the rest – now a London commuter suburb – was predominantly rural. It might have stayed a nondescript fishing settlement – its name implies a stream (lacu) with salmon (mort) in it in Old English – had not King James I financed the creation of a major tapestry works here in 1619, staffed mostly by skilled Flemish weavers from what is now Belgium.

Most of Mortlake’s development took it away from the river, where its main landmark is another big brewery. Unlike Fuller’s in Chiswick, Mortlake’s Stag Brewery changed hands several times and was finally closed down after 2010.

Mortlake effectively ends at Chiswick Bridge, which also overlooks the finish line of the University Boat Race. The Ship pub, which sits in the shadow of the brewery and is hundreds of years old, has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of that when once each year its premises and riverfront swell into a heaving mass of triumphant inebriation.

Here the Thames turns south. In so doing it defined this corner of land for the people who first named it Kew, or Kayho as it used to be: a hōh, or spur of land, described for its key (quay) or cæg(key shape).

Kew emerged much like its neighbouring districts out of the royal leisured interest in escaping London by river, but then took a turn in completely its own direction as its gardens sprouted exotic plants and drew in specialist botanical researchers. While it charted a unique path of its own round the outside of the river bend, the east side remained a little more isolated. The large Mortlake Cemetery appeared here to catch Hammersmith’s overspill, as did a sewage treatment plant.

Then, in 1977, Kew’s eastern backyard was joined by a major public institution, the most important of all as far as history is concerned. The National Archives, formerly the Public Record Office, moved here when its old home on Chancery Lane in the City began to run out of space. This is the official public archive of England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own), and looks after an enormous treasure trove of documents going back more than one thousand years: government papers, legal records, maps and plans, statistics, correspondences, wills and other materials, a great deal of which anyone can browse online and make bookings to come view the originals.

Some of England’s fabled national treasures are kept in this collection, including the Domesday Bookand one of the four 1297 re-issues of the Magna Carta. But perhaps richer still are its fragments from a millennium’s worth of lives lived up, down and across English society, into which even a random sample can give startling and remarkable insights. Indeed, a large number of people who come here are private individuals investigating their own family histories.