If you’ve been to London you will have seen the River Thames, but have you ever wondered where it goes from there? It heads eastwards towards the sea, into an area known as the Thames Estuary. This gave its name to a type of accent called “Estuary English ,” but that isn’t its only claim to fame. The pirate radio stations were based here, but it is also associated with older boats. Rachel Lichtenstein discovered this when she wrote her book, Estuary: Out from London to the Sea . As part of her research, she travelled with a group of people on a boat. Her first night was sleepless:
Rachel Lichtenstein (Standard British accent): That very first night that we spent moored up at the end of Southend Pier , I did have this – I still can’t explain it – experience of hearing all this kind of screaming and shouting throughout the night in the middle of a very rough storm , and then it was a year or maybe even two years later where I found out about this story of The London, which was a 17th century warship that accidentally exploded with a huge loss of life just off the pierhead of Southend and it was recorded in Pepys’s Diary at the time. It was known about, you know, 300 people died, the ship blew in half and then disappeared out of living memory and was only rediscovered back in 2007, during the dredging operations. And I spoke to one of the local divers , who is going down every weekend, removing all sorts of incredible artifacts off the wreck , and they’re learning a lot about 17th century naval life, but, you know, the first time he dived on the wreck, he thought he saw… he thought they were white pebbles and he picked them up and they were teeth still attached to a human jawbone ! So there’s still 300 skeletons lying on that seabed .
ACROSS THE WATER Rachel Lichtenstein grew up in Essex, on the north side of the Thames Estuary. During her research she also got to discover Kent, on the south side. She was intrigued by an area known as the Hoo Peninsula:
Rachel Lichtenstein: The Hoo Peninsula is a great swathe of land in Kent, directly opposite Southend, that stretches, really, from Gravesend up to the Isle of Grain. It’s very little known about, particularly by people in Essex, and it is a peninsula, the Medway (a river - ed) comes round the other side of it. And I visited the Hoo Peninsula because it was the proposed site of Boris Johnson’s Estuary airport and he proposed to take down all the little villages there, kind of brick by brick and all these beautiful medieval churches, and, you know, it’s also home to half a million migrating winter birds and nightingales and all sorts of other rare forms of wildlife and birdlife, which was, you know, just horrifying , but it is a bit like going back in time. It’s very rural, there’s great traditions of having kind of shepherds out on the saltmarsh there and it’s still a very rural, and kind of wild place, very much connected to the river, really beautiful. One of the people that I interviewed described it as this great kind of green desert, you know, 30 miles outside of London. Yeah, it’s an amazing place.
the vast sky And the same can be said for the Thames Estuary in general:
Rachel Lichtenstein: I think, ultimately, because it’s stunningly beautiful. It felt very important for me for this project for as much as possible to be on the water, to see it from that perspective, and there’s something about the water and these great big skies, you know, which have attracted artists for such a long period of time, and there’s wildness and there’s industry and there’s crumbling military installations all over the place and shipwrecks and stories and myths abound, and there’s something particular about even the colour palette , the kind of muted colour palette of the place, the way that it’s a very kind of horizontal landscape, not interrupted by too much and, yeah, I just encourage anyone to get out on a boat and explore it for themselves, really.
