The Romance of London's River by James J Jones
 
From Preface:
 
The tide, pressing westward from the North Sea, rises along the winding reaches of the Thames. It mounts in the wide and windy spaces of Sea Reach, where sea and river meet; it flows between the twin watch-towers of Gravesend and Tilbury into the narrowed solitude of Long Reach; it passes Gallions and the unkempt, industrious and tortuous banks of dockland; it closes round the keels of ships ashore by the wharves of the Pool, and laps the buttresses of London Bridge, and aspires beside the constabulary dignity of the Embankment, and reaches a few feet higher towards Big Ben; it rises in the disciplined neatness of the western reaches and halts at last, reluctantly, at the lock gate of Teddington. This book attempts to capture the look and the life of that long tideway as it is to-day.
 
Age has not withered, but rather enlarged, its intinite variety. On its waters and along its shores are rich treasures of character and scene. Where else, on tle same day, could you see red-funnelled Cunarders, and an absurd little craft whose engine is a battered motor-cat, and a place called Condemned Hole? Where else could you find luters on the mud, and barge boneyards in the creeks, and philosophers living in a silent and moribund fleet, and a fair-ground roaring and blaring on a pastoral bank ?
 
With over 100 illustrations by Frank H Mason.