The Thames: Sacred River Part 1: The Mirror of History

The Thames has been a highway, a frontier and an attack route; it has been a playground and a sewer, a source of water and a source of power. Every stretch has its own character, atmosphere and stories.

Thames: Sacred River explores the river from source to sea. Peter Ackroyd, bestselling author of London: The Biography, tells the story of the river and the people who have lived on and by it over the centuries. In part one, The Mirror of History, he explores the river's geology, early history and mythology with fascinating facts and anecdotes.

Peter Ackroyd is an award-winning historian, biographer, novelist, poet and broadcaster. He is the author of the acclaimed non-fiction bestsellers London: The Biography and Thames: Sacred River as well as biographies of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Charles Dickens, William Blake, Wilkie Collins, Thomas More and, most recently, Charlie Chaplin. He has won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Royal Society of Literature's William Heinemann Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the South Bank Prize for Literature. He holds a CBE for services to literature.