#Thames estuary

[ocelotrevs]

28th November 2024

Thames Estuary, Grain

ig: walkuponacloud

[dubmill]

Southend-on-Sea, Essex; 2.7.2011

[caedmonofwhitby]

Thames Estuary, 1994–95

Michael Andrews (1928-1995)

Oil and mixed media on canvas

Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

[pastdaily]

Raids Over London - Raids Over Cologne - Nazi Infiltration - Stepped Up War Production - March 20, 1941

Raids over London: Spring was a little late that year. https://pastdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/news-for-march-20-1941.mp3 News for this day in 1941 (the 565th day of the War in Europe) had to do with the devastating overnight raids in London, reported to be the worst in a year, since the Blitz in 1940. The target for the previous evening was the Financial District with heavy damage and…

[daveamisdpda]

This is more digging through the archives and finding photographs shot on the last walk I went on in Thurrock before upping sticks and moving down to Keynsham in July 2022. It is interesting looking back on these images and realising just how bleak it could get down on the Thames estuary, even at the height of summer. This makes me appreciate what I have on my doorstep here in Keynsham:)

Location: Mucking, Thurrock, Essex, UK | Shot: 16.07.22

[quotesfrommyreading]

For me, the marshes of Essex feel akin to its soul. When I think of home, the first things I picture are these uncategorisable plains of spongy vegetation that could seem menacing in the right light, with reeds and samphire sprouting from a dark, glistening mud, where wading migrant birds stalk on the lookout for food. Grassy sea walls. Reclaimed munitions dumps. Flat fields with pillboxes and all that mud. A terrain sliced by creeks, accented by sluices and characterised by a great gloop that can remind folk that they are never far from the primordial.

And yet, the ambiguity and unstable nature of once-malarial marshlands led to their ruin. On a family picnic one beautiful and hot spring day on Two Tree Island, a nature reserve at the edge of the Thames estuary, my three-year-old daughter, Greta, kept asking “What’s that?” whenever she spotted the thick brown bottoms of beer bottles, 1980s Tesco bags or old shoes – so many shoes – protruding out of the dry ground. It was a surreal detail from a pleasant trip that I might once have laughed off, but now, accompanied by my children, it felt like a bad dream.

In some places, however, the matter that London no longer wanted has been used in productive and creative ways. An artificial hill in an old metropolitan Essex area of east London, formed from a huge heap of toxic spoil dumped by the old gas works, has been known for years as the Beckton Alp. Its most imaginative use was as a dry ski slope, opened in 1989 by Diana, Princess of Wales.

The RSPB used more than 3m tonnes of material excavated from Crossrail’s tunnel digs to raise part of Wallasea Island at the mouth of the Thames by an average of 1.5 metres, transforming farmland into a coastal marshland haven for egrets and oystercatchers and creating lagoons across 670 hectares.

Mucking Marsh was named a site of special scientific interest in 1991, owing to the populations of shelduck, grey plover, dunlin, black-tailed godwit and redshank that roosted on the salt marsh, and the abundance of vegetation such as sea purslane and sea aster, not to mention rare spiders, but it continued to be used for rubbish disposal until 2012. (A third of all coastal historical landfills are located near designated ecological sites.) Mucking’s conversion into a nature reserve, which was opened by David Attenborough in 2013, was partly financed by almost £3m in funds from DP World, the Dubai-owned company that built the London Gateway port nearby, and Enovert, a waste management company that used to use the site for dumping. The site at Pitsea is earmarked to be transformed by the RSPB in the next decade.

Further east, the landfill site at Two Tree Island in Leigh-on-Sea was converted back into public land in the 1970s. Now blackberries, apples, pears, damsons, plums and cherries all grow here. People come to swim in the water at Leigh, where there are also wild food foraging clubs. A local chef, John Lawson, has written about how his love for foraging was ignited by sourcing samphire fresh from Two Tree Island. But Spencer was alarmed by environmental reports for Two Tree Island that identified cyanide on the site. She didn’t even want to take samples back to the lab.

In 2017, Spencer wrote a report with her colleague at QMUL, Dr James H Brand, on the risk of pollution from historic coastal sites at risk of flooding or erosion for the Environment Agency, based on research into Leigh Marsh, used as a site for dumping between 1955 and 1967, and Hadleigh Marsh just a little way west, which was active during the 1980s. They analysed waste and soil-like material from the landfill. Some of the samples were found to have lead concentrations more than 12 times the recommended level for good ecological health.

Leaching of chemicals and other harmful substances from landfill is liable to increase with sea level rise. But it isn’t just coastal erosion that is breaching the deposits of trash. It is the effects of curiosity, too. Bottle Beach is popular with the mudlarking community, a burgeoning group of amateur historians and curious walkers who come and dig through the rubbish, burrowing holes into the scrub to find trinkets. We came across old 20th-century booze and medicine bottles in lines, as if they had been filed for consideration by a digger but didn’t make the final cut. There were certain people Spencer saw regularly “sitting in a toxic hole” eating sandwiches after digging like a mole into heavily contaminated earth with no gloves on. “‘Well, I’m fine,’ they’d say. ‘I’ve been doing it since I was a kid.’ But then asbestos takes 40 years to take hold.”

  —  The rubbishscapes of Essex: why our buried trash is back to haunt us

[francescaswords]

Walk into the sunset with the characters in Rotting Trees! Just kidding, they're having a terrible time and would resent your toxic positivity.

Join the weekly readalong here my Patreon and trial for 7 days!

[tiend]

A war is an ecological disaster as much as it is any of the other kinds. When it is over, when they win, when the Republic becomes the Empire and begins to inflict its peace across the galaxy -

There's an army of men, bought and paid for, that it doesn't need. Can't demobilise or repatriate. Battle droids you can wipe and recycle. Men? Not so much. Especially the ones that are injured too badly to make it as stormtroopers and not badly enough to not be a threat if they chose to organise themselves against the Empire.

In the years of their fighting they have left a considerable mess behind them, across Christophis, Felucia, Geonosis. Convenient, then, fitting, that they're the ones who get to clean it up, ammunition dumps and burnt-out hulks and UXO and the accretions disks of dead capital ships with the frozen corpses of their dead brothers amidst the rest. Exploded buildings and rubble and twisted beams and jagged skyscrapers like broken teeth. Shipbreakers and smelters.

The Empire skimps on their protective gear. Alternatively it is fiscally responsible by mandating contracts are awarded to the lower bidder. Whatever the reason, the clones die to UXO, to vacuum, to dormant commando droids. Not many people care; at least they're being useful. Might has well get all the use out of them while they can.

Some deaths take longer; fine dust to scar up their lungs, or improperly stored tibanna rotting through the tanks to pollute the soil. Felucia's microbes slowly wending their up the spinal cord to erupt in the brain years later.

So they're broken up into smaller groups. Ground down by attrition and exhaustion. Some desert. Some find a place among established scavenger crews. Many die, and their deaths are logged in Imperial spreadsheets by Imperial bureaucrats who go home to their loving families and think nothing of it.

[venusiancarbondioxide]

i love making up names for characters who we only get the partial names of. nadia dolorosa du pont you are the people's princess of traitor characters <3333 i forgive you for choosing sister thurrocks as your parish name bc even though it sounds kind of ugly, you sure did try to be a port town on the banks of this unforgiving estuary <3333 you tried to be the hold of this ship <333 and you failed so bad <33333 and don't get me started on my hypothetical val names list, which is just me listing off famous sacrificed martyrs. my "what the fuck is faulkner's last name" list grows by the hour. a possible last names for mercer and gage list will get written down. i'll give carpenter's parents names and you can't stop me <333

[timharrold]

The Deconfliction Zone (7-11.12.24)

[ocelotrevs]

28th November 2024 II

Thames Estuary, Grain

ig: walkuponacloud

[aisphotostuff]

Thames Barge & Whitstable Town in Backgound Kent by Adam Swaine Via Flickr: Whitstable is a town in the Canterbury district, on the north coast of Kent adjoining the convergence of the Swale Estuary and the Greater Thames Estuary in southeastern England, five miles north of Canterbury and two miles west of Herne Bay.

[selidor]

[famousinuniverse]

London, United Kingdom: London is the capital and largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of around 8.8 million, and its metropolitan area is the largest in Western Europe. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a 50-mile estuary down to the North Sea and has been a major settlement for nearly two millennia. The City of London, its ancient core and financial centre, was founded by the Romans as Londinium and retains its medieval boundaries. Wikipedia

[ltwilliammowett]

Wreck of Lightvessel 38

38 is reported to have been built of oak in 1860 and was known as Gull. She served as a lighthouse on Lynn Well station near the Wash; Gull and Brake station on the Goodwin Sands, and finally at Mouse station on the Thames estuary before being laid up in 1941.

In 1946, after the Second World War, she was bought by the Thurrock Essex & Grays Yacht Club in 1960 when she retired from service, but later suffered damage after a club house was built on the shore.  She was advertised for sale in the Exchange & Mart for £100 and then for £1 and was finally purchased, but the Port of London Authority refused permission for her to be moved.

The vessel was taken apart and sold for scrap in October 2011, but thanks to a campaign, the Gull's mast and lantern have been saved to shine once more within the safety of Thurrock Yacht Club's grounds.

[mutant-what-not]

wikipedia - The Maunsell Forts are towers built in the Thames and Mersey estuaries during the Second World War to help defend the United Kingdom. They were operated as army and navy forts, and named for their designer, Guy Maunsell.The forts were decommissioned during the late 1950s and later used for other activities including pirate radio broadcasting. One of the forts is managed by the unrecognised Principality of Sealand; boats visit the remaining forts occasionally, and a consortium named Project Redsands is planning to conserve the fort situated at Red Sands. The aesthetic attraction of the Maunsell forts has been considered to be associated with the aesthetics of decay, transience and nostalgia.