Touring the Thames

The Thames is navigable by small boat up to the town bridge of Cricklade, close to the source, though motor cruisers and barges must turn at Lechlade, 10 miles (16 km) downstream. Meandering gently through lowlands for the first 28 miles (45 km) between Cricklade and Oxford, the river passes Kelmscott Manor—the gabled stone home of the 19th-century designer, socialist, and poet William Morris, who is buried in the village churchyard. Before reaching Oxford, the Thames (or Isis, its literary epithet) swings in a northward loop around the wooded hills of Wytham and Cumnor, which overlook the city from the west. A side stream at Wolvercote leads to the mill where fine paper was made for Oxford University Press from the early 17th century to 1943. Braided into many backwaters around the gravelly site of the celebrated university town, the river in summer is alive with elegant flat-bottomed punts, rowing eights, and skiffs. Decorated narrowboats (canal barges) may also be seen making their way to or from the West Midlands and the north of England via the Oxford Canal.

The Thames at Oxford is 150 feet (46 metres) wide. Reinforced by three tributaries from the north—the Rivers Windrush, Evenlode, and Cherwell—it swings southward past the woods of Nuneham to the market town of Abingdon. There it collects the River Ock, which drains the Vale of White Horse. The Thames then trends east and south by the ancient towns of Dorchester (with its 14th-century abbey) and Wallingford. Passing between the Chiltern Hills and the Berkshire Downs at Goring Gap, it is joined by the Great Western Railway (London to Penzance) in a beautiful valley with beech woods rising to either side. It emerges from the chalk escarpment at Pangbourne to collect the River Pang. There the banker and author Kenneth Grahame wrote about the joys of “messing about in boats” in the opening chapters of The Wind in the Willows.

Soon afterward the Thames enters Reading, where it is joined by the River Kennet. Following the dip slope of the Chilterns, it loops north to Henley-on-Thames, scene of a celebrated annual rowing regatta, then east and south again toward Maidenhead, passing below Cliveden House (former home of the Astor family and now owned by the National Trust). From there it maintains a broadly easterly course, passing by Eton College, royal Windsor Castle, and Runnymede, where Magna Carta was drafted in 1215. It is joined by the River Colne on the northern bank at Staines.

On the approaches to London, villas lining the riverbanks and the “gin palace” cruisers at private moorings make an ostentatious display of wealth. But the Thames is also a great popular playground, with thousands of acres of public parkland along its banks and intensive (and sometimes conflicting) use by sunbathers, swimmers, walkers, fishermen, rowers, canoeists, dinghy sailors, campers, and bird-watchers. Less visibly, the river thereabouts provides the metropolis with the greater part of its water supply. Some 63.6 million cubic feet (1.8 million cubic metres) are diverted per day between Windsor and Hampton on London’s western periphery and pumped to large storage reservoirs prior to treatment and distribution. The same water eventually rejoins the Thames by way of the giant sewage-treatment facilities at Mogden to the west of London and at Beckton and Crossness to the east.

At Teddington the river is 250 feet (76 metres) wide. The embanked tideway broadens steadily to 750 feet (229 metres) at London Bridge, 2,100 feet (640 metres) at Gravesend, and 5.5 miles (9 km) at The Nore. The tidal Thames is joined by the Brent at Brentford, the Wandle at Wandsworth, the Ravensbourne at Deptford, the Lea at Blackwall, the Darent just east of Erith, and its greatest tributary, the Medway, at Rochester.

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The urban Thames was once best admired from the deck of one of its many scheduled passenger boats. It can now also be viewed to striking advantage from the Millennium Bridge (2000; retrofitted and reopened 2002), the only bridge across the Thames that is solely for pedestrians, and from the London Eye, a sort of enormous Ferris wheel. Other outstanding riverside landmarks on a boat voyage through London include Kew Gardens, the Tate Britain, the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye, the Tate Modern, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, Canary Wharf, the former Royal Naval College and the Millennium Dome at Greenwich, and the gleaming steel of the Thames Barrier, the last marking the transition to estuarine flatlands.

London has exerted a dominant influence on the river for centuries. A statute of 1393 granted powers to its citizens to remove weirs from the Thames, and the lord mayor of London’s water bailiffs enforced rights of navigation thereafter. An act of Parliament in 1771 enabled Thames commissioners to build locks along the river upstream of Maidenhead, while the Corporation of London carried out similar improvements on the lower stretches of the river. By the beginning of the 19th century, a busy cargo traffic extended upstream to Lechlade, where a canal link (now defunct) connected through the Cotswolds to the River Severn by way of the two-mile-long Sapperton Tunnel, opened in 1789. The origins of the modern system of water control were in place, as were the river’s 48 navigation locks. The grandest, Teddington Lock (1811), is 650 feet (198 metres) long with three sets of gates and is capable of taking a tugboat and six barges at one time.

The Thames is crossed at a number of points, including 16 bridges in Greater London alone. Most are road and rail bridges, but some, such as the Golden Jubilee Bridges and the aforementioned Millennium Bridge accommodate pedestrians. There are also two foot tunnels, one at Greenwich and the other at Woolwich, and a number of road and rail tunnels. The Woolwich Ferry links Woolwich in the borough of Greenwich with North Woolwich in Newham.

Economic factors

As on other rivers and canals in Britain, commercial waterway traffic declined steadily during the 20th century to the point of near extinction after World War II. Less inevitable, perhaps, was the collapse of seagoing traffic on the Thames in London—in notable contrast to Rotterdam, Netherlands. From 1970 the Port of London Authority concentrated all its investment in modern cargo-handling technology at Tilbury, 20 miles (32 km) downstream of the metropolis. The unwelcoming but functional industrial landscape of the London riverfront and docks was rapidly transformed beginning in the 1980s, as wharves and processing plants gave way to apartment and office buildings, promenades, and parks. The river was biologically dead in the 1950s, but changing land use together with improved pollution control have brought dramatic improvements in the quality of the water and a renewed abundance of fish. See also London Docklands.