The first day Chris Healy came to see the Thames, he was so excited he almost killed his father. Aged five, he was helping pump air down to Healy senior, a Port of London Authority diver – until he abandoned the wheel to see what all the activity on the river was about.
Fifty years later, Healy’s patrol boat is passing a safer-looking dive operation, surveying the riverbed to build London’s super sewer. “It’s all changed dramatically,” he says. “But the river changes every hour. From the height of summer and top of the tide it’s totally different. You’ve not seen London until you’ve seen it from the river.”
The Port of London Authority is hoping many more people will share that view. Healy, skipper of the patrol vessel Barnes, is one of just 350 PLA staff today, helping to manage the tidal river and ensure safe navigation. That number compares with 12,000 in its 20th-century heyday, when London was the world’s busiest port and it owned and operated docks stretching from Tower Bridge all the way east to Tilbury.
But plans have been drawn up to revive the Thames: doubling the number of passenger trips to 20m a year, drumming up more tourists, leisure users and moorings, and bulking up the freight on a river that the PLA claims adds £4bn to the UK economy each year.
On a wintry weekday, it is quiet aboard the Barnes. Its beat is the busiest middle section of the Thames, a patrol where passenger and pleasure craft mix with some commercial vessels. The passing cruise boats are nearly empty, or moored to floating platforms. But in summer, there is barely space to get the tourists on and off. “The big thing that constrains our growth is piers,” says Robin Mortimer, PLA chief executive.
For commuting, the river’s role is relatively niche, though one that provides an enviable daily cruise for inhabitants of Thameside properties such as St George’s Wharf. But as London grows to the east, and improved transport links and swaths of development transform the capital’s map, the river’s role could be greatly expanded, Mortimer suggests. The commute of the future could feature people living in new developments, such as Barking Riverside, jumping aboard a Thames Clipper to Woolwich, from where Crossrail trains will whizz them into the centre of London.
Another current of the PLA’s Thames Vision plan is leisure: pushing both the tourist draw of the riverside and boating for sport and pleasure. Upstream from Putney, on the more picturesque stretches of the Thames, rowing clubs and watersports centres are plentiful, but the PLA believes there is scope for more, as well as for more sailing on eastern stretches.
Not all leisure users necessarily find approval in the ranks of the PLA, it seems. Some paddleboarders have become a new bugbear for the patrols: “Don’t get me started ...” mutters Healy. Recreational users are not always aware of the danger of the Thames, he says: “The one thing people don’t realise is the strength of the tide and the undercurrents.”
Even those in motor boats can put themselves at risk in a way a car driver would never countenance, Healy says. On patrol, he recently issued a warning to a new boat owner blithely sailing a cabin cruiser in from Surrey to the busy section round Tower Bridge to show the city after dark to a girlfriend – despite having no lights on his vessel. “I forced him to moor overnight. On the way back he hit a pier anyway.”
The foolhardier swimmers are another concern. Today, only a few people dot the shores at low tide, and Healy keeps an eye on them through binoculars. “If they’ve still got clothes on, they’re not usually a problem.”
Some wild swimming clubs exist, and the PLA thinks demand might increase – possibly with lidos alongside the river rather than encouraging the general public to risk the Thames’ treacherous tides.
Cleaner water might tempt more people to its banks, with the Thames tideway tunnel promising to substantially improve environmental standards when it starts operating in 2023. The tunnel is expected to virtually eradicate sewer overflows, grimly termed “dead fish episodes”. “It’ll be the cleanest since the industrial revolution, and attract many more people to do watersports and enjoy the river,” says Mortimer.
Thameside land is highly sought-after by housing developers. The PLA has a symbiotic dance with those who naturally want the prime riverfront land for the priciest pads. While that land commands premium prices, the PLA needs to preserve its wharves.
“Obviously, if you’re the developer, you’d love to stick a few extra houses on the waterfront and we have to make ourselves unpopular by saying ‘hold it’,” says Mortimer. But, he asks: “If you care about London housing, how do you get the materials in without more HGVs on the road? The wharves are critical. It’s not a trade-off – it’s part of the solution.”
For now, the heaviest loads are going downstream: barges filled with 250 tonnes of waste from Wandsworth float to Bexley combined heat and power station to be burned for electricity for London homes. Other significant loads are the spoil from excavations: millions of tonnes of earth from Crossrail’s tunnelling has gone into the eastern stretch of the river to build the RSPB’s Wallasea Island reserve. In all, 5.5m tonnes was freighted downriver in 2014.
“Because it uses the tide, it is a very low-energy, green way to transport bulk materials,” says Mortimer. Boats will also move spoil when tunnelling starts on the Northern Line extension to Battersea.
Freight is otherwise rare on this stretch of the river; a trial taking stock upstream to west London Sainsbury’s stores was stymied by lack of wharf space. Otherwise, grins Mortimer: “They’d love to take an orange barge past parliament every day with their logo on it.”
Containerisation of cargo killed the Thames docks of old: heavier loads could be carried more easily on bigger ships, which required deeper water than found in central London. Out of sight of most visitors to the capital, the industrial eastern Thames has 70 terminals ranging from specialist ones for oil, sugar and cars to the multi-purpose Tilbury port, and now London Gateway, DP World’s new and underutilised facility, has been added, which can bring in the world’s largest container ships. In tonnage terms, London is still the UK’s second-biggest port and the PLA believes that with improvements to the surrounding road infrastructure and new Thames crossings in the east it could pass its 1964 peak of 61.3m tonnes.
Since those days, the high-profile razing of the old East End docks for the new Canary Wharf financial centre and surrounding Docklands redevelopment has cemented an image of decline – for river traffic at least. But Mortimer insists that perception is no longer true.
“There’s been this feeling that the heyday of the port was way back when,” says Mortimer. “Partly, this vision is about the psychology – this is not decline but a bright future … But we need investors and politicians to know we are on the up.”
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