by Lara Maiklem
Sewage and industrial waste continued to pour into the river and bomb damage to London’s sewage system during the Second World War made matters even worse. Eventually, in 1957, the Natural History Museum declared the Thames ‘biologically dead’ and surveys concluded that there were no fish between Kew and Gravesend. A campaign to clean up the Thames began in the 1960s and by the end of the 1970s the river was considered to be ‘rehabilitated’. It is now cleaner than it has been in living memory and supports over 125 species of fish. The Estuary is the largest spawning ground for sole in England, oysters have returned and even lobsters live in its muddied waters. Further inland the river is home to long black leeches and freshwater mussels. At the tidal head, spiny sticklebacks, red-throated in the breeding season, flit about in the shallows and perch spawn in the shade of the willows that clutch the banks. At Hammersmith I once watched a little miller’s thumb fish, his oversized head pointing into the gentle current, guarding a batch of eggs in the gravel beneath him. If I’m lucky, on a bright sunny day when the water in the shallows is clear, a baby flatfish might flip and float over my boots.
Some today hail the Thames as the cleanest urban river in the world, but it still carries dangerous microbes. Most of those who row on the river have at some point suffered from a bout of ‘Thames tummy’. I have myself, and I know of several other mudlarks who have been brought down, even hospitalised, by mysterious illnesses. Sewage spills bring with them all sorts of other nasty foreshore finds too. The retreating tide leaves behind a fine mesh of wet wipes, sanitary towels and condoms, and multicoloured strandlines filled with thousands of plastic cotton-bud sticks, tampon applicators, disposable plastic contact lens cases and plastic teeth-cleaning sticks. Pretty much anything that fits down a toilet will find its way onto the foreshore after a sewage spill: plastic bath toys, combs, disposable razors, toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste. And the same goes for medical waste – colostomy bags, cannulas, plastic saline containers, drip bags, syringes, drug packaging and once even a hospital wristband with a name, date of birth and hospital number written on it in blue ink.
I sometimes wonder if the sewers spill out some of the most personal possessions I find too: glasses, hearing aids and, rather shockingly, a prosthetic eye that I spotted winking back at me from the mud. It is a work of art. The small cup-shaped piece of glass was tailor-made for its owner, and the hazel iris and tiny blood vessels that spider across the white are hauntingly realistic. I didn’t hesitate in taking the eye home with me, but I can’t touch the false teeth and dental plates I find. There’s something creepily intimate and a bit dirty about them, even those from the 1950s or earlier, with salmon-pink gums made of vulcanite rubber and bright white porcelain teeth.
Worst of all, though, are the congealed yellow-grey blobs that I sometimes find lurking inconspicuously among the gravel after a sewage spill. They are putrid pieces of a ‘fatberg’. The fatbergs that grow in London’s sewers can become immense. The largest to date, discovered beneath the streets of Whitechapel, was longer than Tower Bridge and thought to weigh as much as eleven double-decker buses. They are made up of fat, dumped down kitchen and restaurant drains, which congeals into lumps and clings to the sewer walls. As it gets larger it attracts more fat, which acts as a binding agent for the organic material in sewage. Wet wipes, toilet paper, hypodermic needles and sanitary products become embedded in the stinking mass as it grows and grows, gradually turning as hard as concrete until it blocks the sewer or breaks up and washes away in foul-smelling greasy lumps.
Sewage-spilled rubbish is usually worse on early-morning tides in central London, before the river busies up and the wake of passing boats starts to wash it away. The rubbish that flows out with the Thames also varies with the seasons. Christmas trees, stripped of their festive finery, float down the river in January; champagne bottles litter the foreshore after New Year, especially near the bridges; and tennis balls bob out to the Estuary by the score during Wimbledon. More coffee cups litter the foreshore in the winter and plastic bottles and food packaging increase in the summer. This is now the most common type of rubbish washing up on the foreshore.
Rubbish tends to be larger to the east of the city, where the river flows through more remote and run-down areas: bicycles, motorcycles, car tyres and shopping trolleys. Most of this sinks slowly where it’s dumped, but I’ve also seen fridges and car bumpers floating away into the distance. Some things look as though they have been there for years; others look new, freshly jettisoned and abandoned. Perhaps it’s easier to get heavy objects to the river’s edge without being seen in this part of London.
The river sorts rubbish like an obsessional old man. It gathers plastic bottles, food packaging and polystyrene in inlets and in the corners of its walls, and strews cotton-bud sticks, straws and plastic bottle tops in long thin strandlines. Towards the Estuary, it collects all manner of floating debris in huge multicoloured banks, storing it high up on the foreshore, often on the outside of its bends, out of reach of all but the highest spring tides. There are sink spots on the bends too, on the inside where the river slows and drops its invisible load: the wet wipes and plastic bags that tumble unseen below its surface. It fills the bags with silt so that they sink and turns the wet wipes into a thick spongy blanket. In Hammersmith there are now so many wet wipes in the river that they have formed a small island. I first noticed it several years ago when I stepped on what looked like a hump of brown rags and realised to my horror that it was a mass of filthy wipes. The last time I visited, the island was much larger. It had trapped tree branches that were snaring even more passing trash. A duck was sitting happily on this filthy reef and it occurred to me that our rubbish is actually changing the geography of the river.
Work is under way on a giant twenty-four-foot-wide, sixteen-mile-long ‘Super Sewer’, most of which will run deep beneath the Thames between Hammersmith and Limehouse. It will eventually store London’s sewage and transfer it to updated treatment plants east of the city, making sewage spills a thing of the past. Large floating objects are dealt with by the PLA’s driftwood craft and there are sixteen passive driftwood collectors. These are giant floating cages that are moored at strategically chosen points where the currents carry the most debris. They swing on a single mooring on each tide to gape into the flow of water, trapping rubbish from the top four feet of the river in the back of the cage. Each cage can collect up to forty tons of rubbish a year and much of their harvest is taken downstream for disposal. The city’s domestic refuse also travels east in huge rubbish barges, filling up at four central riverside collection points, including one at Cannon Street, where they sit, tawny with rust, creaking and booming as they slowly rise and fall on the tide. They travel downstream on the ebb tide, pulled by tug to an incinerator at Belvedere, just east of the Thames Barrier at Woolwich. The city’s rubbish is burned at a temperature of at least 850 degrees Celsius and the heat is used to generate electricity. The by-product, ash, is loaded back into barges and taken by river further east to Tilbury where it is converted into building aggregate to build and repair the roads in the city that consumes the electricity.
But this approach to London’s waste is relatively new. When I first started visiting the river, the rubbish barges that slid east on the high tide were destined for the aptly named Mucking Marshes landfill site on the Essex (north) side of the river, thirty-two miles downstream from Cannon Street, on the edge of the Thames Estuary. This is where London has been hauling its rubbish since the late nineteenth century. Before then, there was less rubbish and less need to dispose of it in such a way. It was pretty much the same type of waste it had been for centuries – ash from fires, pottery, bones and shells. Private contractors paid for the privilege of sorting through it for anything they could resell and most of what was left was burned. But by 1890 all that had changed. Mass production meant cheaper goods and ordinary people had more money in their pockets to buy them. Firms responded to this by producing more and cheaper products in what w
as essentially worthless, throwaway packaging. As London grew in size and consumed more and more, rubbish lost its value and instead of being paid for their rubbish, parish authorities began to pay to have it taken away. They bought up cheap, remote marshland beside the river in Kent and Essex and the tons of rubbish London produced was towed east by barge and dumped there.
Acres of riverside marshes in Essex are filled with London’s waste. Mucking received London’s rubbish for fifty years before it closed in 2011, when it was capped off with a 100-foot ‘pie crust’ of soil. It has now been transformed into a nature reserve. But at Tilbury, opposite Gravesend, a little further west, the rubbish from an old landfill site is spilling out of the bank, onto the foreshore and into the river.
It was curiosity that first drew me to Tilbury. I’d heard from other mudlarks about the bottle diggers who worked the riverbank and the bottles and glass that stretched into the distance on Bottle Beach, and I wanted to see it for myself. On the handful of times I’ve been, my adventure has always begun at Gravesend, with the little ferry that leaves around every half an hour from the pier, although the timetable is confusing and it can be a bit random. A ferry has been plying its trade between Gravesend and Tilbury for at least 500 years and its latest incarnation – at least when I was last there about a year ago – is the Duchess, a rusting relic with a smashed wheelhouse window covered over by torn cardboard boxes to keep out the wind. I join a group of other passengers – locals returning from the shops in Gravesend, a couple of men with mountain bikes and some walkers – and we file silently on board.
Inside, the Duchess is basic and I have the distinct feeling that nothing about it has changed in years. There are wooden benches around the edge and a few old kitchen chairs lashed to the side with rope in case the river gets choppy. It is much too warm and fuggy, and condensation slides down the dirty windows and drips onto the lino-covered floor. Each time the door swings open it lets in a tempting breath of cold river air and I soon decide to stand outside on the small deck for the duration of the journey. A man unties the ropes, the captain folds up his newspaper and we push off. The Duchess revs loudly, engulfing us in a cloud of black smelly diesel smoke, and is briefly taken by the retreating tide. The water looks slow, but it is slick and fast-moving and the ferry struggles a little to regain its direction before it pushes steadily towards the north shore. It is a short journey. We reach Tilbury within five minutes.
We dock at the end of the old cruise ship terminal, a low, solid, brick-built building, and walk up a long wooden gangplank alongside the deserted station. The passenger landing stage opened in 1930 and the station brought people to and from the boats until the terminal closed in the 1960s. This dock is where £10 Poms left on assisted passages to start a new life in Australia, and where the Windrush arrived in 1948, bringing the first people in a wave of migration from the Caribbean to the UK. It is abandoned and dilapidated now. The old light green and cream paint is peeling, many of the windows are smashed and the metal girders that once supported parts of the roof are streaked with rust. I squint through a gap between the heavy wooden padlocked doors into the large open hall, which has a semi-glass roof. There’s a dusty free-standing ticket office in there, untouched since the day it sold its last ticket, frozen in time.
The railway station closed in 1992, but the ship terminal reopened in 1995 and today is disembarkation day. A cruise ship is docked in front of the building and the area is buzzing with cars and taxis. Behind the terminal, thousands of newly imported cars sit in neat rows and stacked containers wait to be loaded onto the large container ships that moor at Tilbury Docks. Tilbury Docks was opened by the East and West Indian Dock Company in 1886, but it wasn’t until the central London docks and warehouses closed in the late 1960s that it came into its own. Its proximity to the sea and ability to accommodate large container ships finally made it a success and it is now one of Britain’s three major container ports. But I turn away from all this and start walking east at a pace. I have a way to go and the tide is already falling.
This Essex stretch of the Thames is a strange, ugly-beautiful place of industrial sprawl and tangled electricity pylons against wide skies that can quickly lower and turn angry. I find the river path in front of the aptly named World’s End pub. There’s a concrete wall, but it is low enough to see over and I look out at the falling water as I walk. The river is much wider here than I am used to further west and below me the foreshore is a smooth expanse of deep gloopy mud. I won’t be venturing onto that. It is scored into a series of tiny valleys by rivulets of water and a solitary wading bird is picking its way between washed-up strands of seaweed. I can sense the sea. The light has changed; it is brighter and cleaner and I can see for miles.
Tilbury is London’s handmaid, its engine room, spoil heap and protector. Just before the sewage works and a soon-to-be-demolished power station, on the outer edge of the port complex and surrounded by scrubby marshland grazed by hairy black-and-white horses, is Tilbury Fort. The fort was first built by Henry VIII to protect London from invasion along the Thames and was enlarged with distinctive star-shaped defences in the late seventeenth century that give it a futuristic look when seen from the air. Close by, in 1588, Elizabeth I gave one of the most famous speeches in English history. Dressed in white, her torso armoured by a shiny silver cuirass and mounted on a white charger, she rallied her troops in advance of the Armada, defending her strength as a queen and promising to live and die among them in battle. As I near the plant I can smell the sewage, but I notice yellow lichen growing on the wall. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t grow where there’s pollution, so I reason the air must be quite clean despite the smell. There were small patches of it as I passed the fort and now round, flat crusty blooms, the size of saucers, are fighting for space with each other and covering the concrete.
I am heading for a small ‘cove’ just beyond the power station and reach a short flight of metal stairs that take me down a level to pass in front of it. The other side of the stairs is a tall concrete security wall, topped in places with rusty barbed wire and covered in old-style graffiti, scribbles, rude words and people’s names. The wide tarmac path has gone; it’s a thin dusty trail now, which winds along the wall, through the reeds and grass that grow down to the foreshore. There is evidence of the high spring tides in the dust and caught among the reeds, a tangle of multicoloured cotton-bud sticks, straws, bottle caps and other miscellaneous bits of plastic. I pass a red football, dried out and crazed with cracks. Large pieces of driftwood lie stranded – tree trunks, pieces of broken jetties and telephone poles, bleached and rotting, carved by the water.
I carry on under a concrete walkway that leads to a large jetty. It was built when the power station was still active and at one time took huge ships carrying up to 66,000 tons of coal. It’s a depressing sight now, strung with coils of razor wire and covered with more crap graffiti, but I am almost at the cove. Suddenly, the concrete wall ends and the land opens up. I can see electricity pylons marching away across the marsh, white aeroplane scratches high up in the sky, and a tiny fluttering speck – a skylark that is filling the silence with its frantic song.
I search two spots at Tilbury and the cove is the first I come to. It’s more intimate than the second, which is a long straight empty beach, and I feel more comfortable here. The river has eaten a small deep semicircle into the bank next to a jetty to which a couple of barges are moored, so I’m enclosed on all sides. From the path above I can already see bottles and shards of china scattered across the foreshore and I know that beneath my feet, just below the surface, there are thousands more. This is the site of one of the Essex marsh dumps and it is slowly eroding into the river. Since the rubbish was dumped here, sea levels have risen by around four inches, and with no river wall to protect it, very high tides are slowly mining the riverbank for its treasures, revealing layer upon layer of ancient landfill.
I wade through the tall grass, then scramble and jump over the deep holes left by bottl
e diggers and slither down the steep side of the riverbank, bringing a landslide of broken crockery and thin dusty soil filled with ashes and cinders with me. The tide is quite low and I look around to see what it has left behind. I am surrounded by rubbish up to a century old, household waste and the ordinary detritus of everyday life. Almost everything I can see is glass, ceramic or rusting metal, and everything is broken, chipped, worn out and empty.
My visits to Tilbury have yielded smashed china dolls’ heads and twisted lead toys; single glass lenses from old-fashioned round spectacles; worn-out shoes; and a large brown earthenware hot-water bottle, shaped like a loaf of bread, chipped and missing its stopper. I’ve found a flattened doll’s pram; a crushed cigarette case; the metal frame of a purse; broken glass lampshades, still blackened by lamp soot on the inside; thick white utility crockery with the names of long-closed-down hotels, restaurants and cafes; smashed ornaments – heads, legs, bodies and empty plinths; a headless glass pig; a small porcelain Christmas cake decoration, a ‘snowbaby’ in a white fuzzy suit that once sat proudly on top of someone’s cake; and a compressed lump of eighty-year-old newspaper, sodden and yellowed, but still readable, a simple snapshot of everyday life before the Second World War turned it upside down. On one piece there were advertisements for second-hand cars – £175 for a 1933 Daimler – and for indigestion relief. On a second piece there were situations vacant, although just the ‘F’ and the ‘P’ sections: a Fish Fryer and wife with experience; a Fishmonger in Marble Arch; Fitters for the RAF; a Floor Inspector in a press shop; Piano Polishers; Piano Stainers; Piano Fly-Finishers and Plasterers. It was too fragile to take home and I left it to float away on the next tide.