Merman of The Thames started from the idea of a story featuring the Fourth Doctor, Leela, and some historical character or other. Having scrolled through famous people of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century, I fixed on Samuel Pepys as a likely person for The Doctor to have interacted with at some point in his life.

Now, I have never really been big on Pepys. At school the sections of his famous diary relating to the Great Fire of London were primary source materials, which is an aspect of history that always gripped me – seeing things from the eyes of one who was there. But I really didn’t know much more about him than that until I started to research for this story. I then started to look for details of his home. That didn’t prove easy. He moved around a lot, depending on his personal fortune and political favour. At one point in his life, when he was accused of Papism, his address had been the Tower of London. He lived for some time in Chatham when he was involved in the Admiralty, and I looked up Chatham extensively, but it was hard to get much information about the 17th century city.

Pepys’ most famous home was in Seething Lane, London. That was where he was living at the time of the Great Fire of London. I was leaning towards that location when I found Buckingham Street, a house that Pepys rented from a friend after the fall from grace that led to the Tower. The house still stands, though modernised, and has a blue plaque recognising that he lived there.

I was then looking at Buckingham Street on Google Earth street view, and asked myself ‘what’s that’ about the striking feature at the end of the street. It turned out to be the York Watergate, the last remaining feature of York Palace which once stood on the site of Buckingham Street, Villiers Street and Duke Street. All the grand houses along the Thames had water gates because being rowed up and down the river by water men was the executive way to travel. Remember images of Queen Elizabeth in elaborate boats in the various films of her life. The practice was still common in Pepys’ era. As a complete aside, researching water gates in London on the internet is hampered slightly by the fact that Watergate has come to mean a hotel in Washington DC synonymous with political corruption.

The York Watergate is rather fascinating because it is now landlocked with the Thames Embankment Gardens lying between it and the river. It forms the entrance to a landscaped parkland. The Embankment project dates from the late 19th century when it was proposed in order to claim back dry land from the marshes, make the river more easily navigable, and generally clean up the neighbourhood. In 1683, the steps went right down into the water. The best picture of it is from the 1850s, showing the Watergate at Somerset House and Blackfriars bridge in the distance as well as a busy dock on the other side of the river full of tall ships and tenders.

The Watergate led, inevitably from the vague idea of a story about Samuel Pepys and The Doctor, to one about muddy secrets in the Thames. An alien monster killing the unwary was the obvious next step. Bearing in mind Vampires of Venice had just aired on TV, I wanted to avoid too much comparison, but fish-like creatures that devour people are a little generic.

Using the Victorian painting of the York Watergate as reference, my story was going to take The Doctor and Leela down the Thames to Blackfriars Bridge. On research, however, I found that it wasn’t built until 1769.

But, even better than the bridge, I found that the River Fleet joins the Thames where the Bridge now is. Everyone, of course, knows that the Fleet once flowed freely through London, but was covered over and turned into little more than a sewer outlet. Fleet Street, home of the newspaper industry, was built across part of its route. In Doctor Who history, of course, The Doctor and Leela explored the covered over Fleet in Talons of Weng Chiang. This time they get to see it in its former glory.

I had never thought before about where the Fleet comes from. Perhaps this is no surprise to Londoners, but I was interested to find that it used to flow through Hampstead Heath. The main reason it has so little water in it now is that the Highgate Ponds, a series of reservoirs used for outdoor bathing and other water sports, were constructed, taking away most of the flow.

Well, I now know a lot more about London, Samuel Pepys and the Thames than I used to know. How about you?

Incidentally, Pepys WAS a dirty old man who liked having his way with maids. He was in line for a broken arm from Leela without The Doctor’s eye on him.

http://www.pepysdiary.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pepys
http://www.urban75.org/london/york-watergate.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/York_House,_Strand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Embankment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackfriars_Bridge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Fleet
http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/Fleet/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highgate_Ponds