This post has come about through a peculiar collection of oddities. Some grand, some strange, but all somehow contriving to link together in the most unexpected of ways. One discovery leads to another, and before long you find yourself following a thread you never knew existed. A sort of linked oddity, if you like.

And it began one cool, clear spring morning in Bishopsgate, where the lanes and streets still held the darkness from the night, but above and reflected in the puddles, the sky was clear and pale blue. I was standing at the top of New Street, looking up at the enormous walls of the old East India Company warehouses. Around me the City was beginning its working day. The usual crowd of workers pushed along the pavements, talking earnestly into Bluetooth earphones, supping determinedly on freshly roasted coffee, summoned towards the towering steel and glass buildings of finance that loom above the old Georgian brickwork. I stood a little to one side, affording them space to pass, somewhat mesmerised by the enormity of the old warehouses.

Although long since redeveloped into the usual modern caper of gyms, desk space and bars, the buildings retain a monumental sense of prestige, affluence and power. Once these buildings contained the wealth of the greatest empire the world had known. Tea, coffee, spices, rum, cotton, sugar and tobacco came up Commercial Street from the river to be stored here. But among these riches was something I hadn’t expected. Ostrich feathers. And believe it or not, for a time, these feathers were some of the most valuable things in the world.

By the late Victorian period the fashionable world had developed an almost insatiable appetite for feathers. Ladies hats sprouted them in extraordinary profusion. They appeared on dresses and fans, bobbed above theatre audiences and drawing rooms, and travelled around the fashionable capitals of Europe upon the heads of the wealthy. The ostrich feather was the great prize: long, soft, easy shaped, extravagant and, importantly, gorgeously outlandish.

At the very zenith of their popularity, ostrich feathers could command astonishing prices. Much of the supply came from South Africa, where, from the 1860s, farmers around the Cape began commercially breeding ostriches for their plumage. It was a bizarre development: one of Africa’s great wild birds, farmed to keep fashionable women in London, Paris and New York suitably well-feathered. Fortunes were made, the trade was worth around £20 million a year, and London became one of the great centres of the world feather trade. Even the Titanic went down carrying a consignment of ostrich feathers reportedly valued at £20,000. Imagine for a moment, that freezing, terrifying night, among all the expensive treasured possessions that descended into the depths of the north Atlantic, were thousands of incredibly expensive feathers.

And then, with remarkable suddenness, the great feather boom collapsed. The First World War changed everything. The extravagant fashions of the Victorian and Edwardian world began to look like remnants of another age. Tastes changed, people wanted to move on, to reinvent their lives, and the fortunes built upon feathers disappeared. Standing there that morning looking at those enormous warehouse walls, another question occurred to me. Why did feathers need quite so much protection?

To answer that, you have to leave Bishopsgate and go down to the river.

For centuries London’s international trade arrived upon the Thames. Indeed, the city itself owed much of its existence and wealth to the river. Ships loaded with goods crowded into the Pool of London, the stretch below London Bridge. Sailing ships, barges, cutters and lighters pressed against wharves and jetties, their masts rising like extraordinary forests of timber and rope. Congestion was almost beyond imagining. A popular story claimed that one might cross parts of the Thames simply by stepping from one boat to the next. Whether anybody actually attempted this is another matter. What is certain is that the river was phenomenally busy. Much of the cargo had to be unloaded from ships lying midstream into smaller boats and lighters, carried through this bewildering floating city, landed at the wharves and finally taken into the warehouses. At almost every stage there was an opportunity for something to disappear. And wherever there are enormous quantities of valuable goods and remarkably little supervision, Londoners have always shown a certain talent for the ancient human art of pilfering.

Those working the river, lightermen, labourers, porters and stevedores, occupied a world in which the distinction between wages, perks and outright theft could sometimes become rather blurred. A little tea or coffee here, a few handfuls of tobacco there, a packet or two of sugar. Barrels of wine, rum and whiskey were expertly relieved of their contents. Small boats slipped alongside ships in the dead of the night. Stolen goods moved silently through the taverns, cellars and receiving houses along the river.

In London there was always a way, and along the shorefront, from the tavern owners to the customs man, everyone seemed to be on the make.

By the late 1700s, theft on the Thames had reached something approaching biblical proportions. The great river had become a thieves’ paradise.

Into this floating den of crime stepped Patrick Colquhoun, a tough nonsense Scottish merchant born on the River Clyde, who studied the Thames underworld with an almost obsessive thoroughness. Who stole? How did they steal? Who bought the goods? How much was disappearing? His conclusions were startling. Colquhoun reckoned that of thirty seven-thousand men employed on the Thames, eleven thousand were either thieves or receivers of stolen property. That’s nearly one in three. It was estimated that by the late 1790s goods worth £500,000 were being ‘lost’ each year. The West India merchants considered themselves fortunate if only half their cargo saw the inside of a warehouse. Colquhoun, in his research, gave some of the characters involved magnificent names.

River pirates – the most dangerous: organised gangs who robbed vessels and lighters. They were frequently armed, and were the closest thing to literal Thames pirates. Night plunderers – maller gangs, often watermen, who robbed loaded vessels at night. Sometimes colluding with watchmen, they could remove substantial quantities of cargo under cover of darkness. Heavy horsemen – they didn’t use horses, these thieves specialised on the West India ships, looking for the most expensive plunder. Copemen – the receivers and dealers in stolen goods. The names alone conjure a lost foggy old river world of thieves, watchmen, and receivers.

London had always dealt severely with piracy. For centuries the state made a spectacle of what happened to pirates and those caught stealing on the river. Convicted pirates were taken down to the docks and hanged beside the Thames, sometimes their bodies washed over by the tide. There they remained. The corpses were left to rot. Anyone sailing towards London would have passed these grim warnings on their way upriver. They weren’t just hanging pirates of the Caribbean, they were also hanging the pirates of Bermondsey as well. But the gallows never seemed to solve the problem.

And so, in 1798, a rather different experiment began at Wapping: the Marine Police. Instead of merely catching thieves after the event, men would patrol the river and protect the cargo while it was still being unloaded. Some of those recruited to police this criminal world knew it rather intimately. Men familiar with the river, its hiding places and its tricks were suddenly being employed to prevent the very crimes some had once committed themselves. The poacher had become the gamekeeper. Set a thief to catch a thief. It seemed an appropriately London sort of solution.

The Marine Police establishment at Wapping, which incidentally is still there, preceded Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police by more than thirty years and became one of the earliest police forces in Britain. But even Colquhoun and his river police could not solve the fundamental problem. There were simply too many ships, too much cargo and too many opportunities. London’s trade was growing faster than the river could accommodate.

And so came the great docks. Vast enclosed basins were cut into the riverside, surrounded by walls, gates and warehouses. Ships could be brought inside, cargo unloaded under supervision and valuable goods spirited away into secure storage. But the docks is another story.

Which brings us, rather unexpectedly, back to Bishopsgate, and that cool spring morning. Back to gazing at those enormous brick walls. Back to the East India warehouses. And, of all things, back to those ostrich feathers.

London history can be wonderfully peculiar. One thing leads to another, and then another.

An ostrich feather to a pirate. A linked oddity.