The Ghosts of Shadwell Stair

One of our isolating walks takes in the lowtide Thames shore, between Narrow Street, Ratcliffe and Shadwell Stairs, all ancient piers for ferrymen, forever carrying EastEnders across the stygian waters of the Limehouse Hole.

I exercise my glaucoma, searching for 18/19thC clay pipes, discarded like latter-day commuter’s fag-ends, while WonderA gambols with a family of scruffy swans, now the only sailors on this eerily quiet river.
Ghosts abound...
Sir Martin Frobisher, the swashbuckling Elizabethan navigator, set off from these shores on his failed attempts to discover the North West Passage, as did fellow explorers of the Americas, John Davis, Henry Hudson and, reputedly the Mayflower Settlers.
Later, a young magpie-eyed Dickens frolicked on this foreshore with his godfather, Sailmaker Christopher Huffam, regurgitating memories to great effect throughout his literary life.
Later still, in 1918 Wilfred Owen published a dark, ghostly eulogy to his beloved East End, ‘Shadwell Stair’.

...and each pipe bowl found is washed, admired and kept as a cherished memory of all those who walked the river shore down the years.