The park was beautiful, with open lawns framed by tall trees and pools of water reflecting the city skyline. In fact, the park was so pretty that several painters had set up easels on the grass. They held their paints in one hand and brushes in the other, and they painted on small canvases while looking out over the park. People walking through the park kept going up to look over the painters' shoulders to see what sort of scenes they were painting, but the artists didn't seem to mind. Calm and pleasant, they seemed to become part of the landscape themselves.
The River Thames flows right through the city of London. Many bridges criss-cross over the river, connecting the two halves of the city. Looking down from a bridge, I could see that the water was brown and murky, but it otherwise looked pretty clean. That wasn't always the case, though. Starting in the early modern period (17th and 18th centuries), people dumped trash in the Thames. By the 19th century, people dumped sewage into the river, and chemicals from factories ran into the water, too. In the 1850s, the river smelled so bad that the government in nearby buildings had to shut down! In the last century, however, factories have moved away from London and sewage treatment has improved. The River Thames has much better water quality, and though I didn't see any fish down in its depths, the river supposedly has wildlife again.
