This is a winter scene, and the three boats being worked on here are ... furthest from the camera, the very elderly double skiff that had been attached to the boathouse since earliest times, here undergoing its first ever major restoration from a tar covered workboat state. The nearer boat is a half outrigged double sculling gig built by Searles of Lambeth ... just visible between them is the huff of a punt ...
Behind the skiff is a long workbench. To the left is the sliding door leading onto the river, with its associated glass windows, broad for working light and frosted so that the workers would not be distracted by the stream outside. For much of the winter the river was wont to advance up the sloping boathouse floor towards the top door, covering the lengths of railway line cast neatly into the concrete to enable boats to be moved single handed. These lengths of line had come from the local narrow gauge railway serving the adjacent waterworks. Retreat for us was impossible as the top half of the boathouse had already been converted to offices. The river was therefore held at bay by a flood board made from the old work bench displaced from the top end, the edge of which was distinctly graffitied with the name 'Joseph Tribe' - the Tribes being a well known Hampton family though not much heard of since the nineteenth century. The boathouse was kept dry for the most part by an electric pump in a sump by the door. At one time the boathouse cat became pruriently, suspiciously, interested in the workings of this pump. Eventually an inspection revealed the source of this interest - a large toad which had taken up residence in the bottom of the sump and lived there, growing round, fat, and content ...
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All before you, in this world, is smoke and shadows.