The Thames Embankment and the disciplining of nature in modernity

Abstract

The embanking of the Thames was an emblematic stage in the construction of modernity's discourse of ‘the natural’, re‐engineering the river as a concrete framing of nature between the embankment walls and a representational framing of the natural within an engineering ideology. The legitimacy of embanking's control was, therefore, about both physical mechanisms and a particular discourse of the natural, but the Thames embankments did not merely reflect modernity's discourse ‐ they actively helped mould it. The creation of a discourse of embanking was slow and hesitant, the product of the interplay between the subsidiary discourses of urban improvement and sanitarianism, and an opposing discourse of tradition. When built, the embankments acted as a fixed, ordered boundary between the cultured nature of the drained, commodified land, and the regulated liveliness of the river. They acted literally and figuratively to sever culture from a nature that was enclosed and tamed by embankment walls.