In the hidden world beneath London an army of 4,000 workers is attempting to build the biggest sewer in Britain’s history: seven metres wide and twenty miles long, the enormous tunnel will run directly beneath the River Thames. The five-billion-pound tunnel is urgently needed. The Five Billion Pound Super Sewer I, BBC 2018
A project first mooted almost twenty years ago. ibid.
London’s excess sewage has to go somewhere so to stop it backing up into people’s homes – it’s released into the Thames. ibid.
London’s Victorian sewers are a labyrinth of more than 500 miles of interconnecting tunnels. Parts of the network have never been accurately surveyed. ibid.
If successful, the new super-sewer will capture this waste and transfer it to Europe’s largest treatment works east of the city. The Five Billion Pound Super Sewer II
Jim must scan every inch of the 20-mile stretch of the Thames to complete the underwater map. ibid.
Every day over 30 tonnes of wet-wipes are flushed down London’s loos. ibid.
During tunnelling, engineers plan to excavate over 40,000 tonnes of earth every week. ibid.
The most important part of the machine is the cutter-head; it’s been built specifically based on the predictions of what the earth will be like sixty metres bellow the Thames. The Five Billion Pound Super Sewer III
Sixty metres below the assembly team’s feet deep underground in Battersea excavators have been battling through the tough ground. ibid.
London Bridge is falling down
Falling down, falling down,
London Bridge is falling down
My fair lady. Nursery Rhyme: London Bridge Is Falling Down
The Thames is so wonderful because the mist is always changing its shapes and colours, always making its light mysterious. Arthur Symonds, 1909
Thames, the most loved of all the Ocean’s sons,
By his own sire, to his embraces runs,
Hasting to pay its tribute to the Sea,
Like mortal life to meet eternity John Denham, Cooper’s Hill, 1642
It is the shortest river in the world to have acquired such a famous history ... But none of them has arrested the attention of the world of poets and novelists and artists and historians in the manor of the River Thames. This is the story of the life and death of civilisations. It is the story of culture and geology shaping one another. It is the story of myth interwoven with history. The river embodies the history of the nation. Peter Ackroyd’s Thames 1/4, ITV 2008
The Thames and the Rhine were once one river. ibid.
London could never have existed without the Thames. ibid.
London was chosen to be a city because the river ran through this particular stretch of land. ibid.
The Normans did the most to alter the appearance of the River. ibid.
The Thames was seen as the microcosm of the nation, a potent symbol of past and present running within each other. It was liquid history. ibid.
On this historic river everyone is equal. ibid.
This is a sacred river. There are more than fifty churches and chapels along its banks dedicated to Mary, who can truly be hailed as the goddess of the river. ibid.
It has always been a river of art. In the Tudor period the Thames became the river of magnificence. Peter Ackroyd’s Thames 2/4
It was the Theatre of Water. ibid.
Turner lived by the Thames all his life. He was born in Maiden Lane just off the Strand in 1775 and as a child he wandered beside the barges and sailboats a hundred yards from his door. He died by the river in the Bankside residence of Chelsea. By the banks of the Thames he began his art. And by the banks of the Thames he finished his life. He loved the river. ibid.
The luminous quality of his paintings has often been remarked. And it is possible that his early experience of river light helped to form his mature sensibility. His watercolour sketches of the river look as if they have been imbued with the light of the Thames, as if the water has washed over the paper and left its radiance there. ibid.
The Thames of Whistler is the river of mystery ... Whistler illustrated the working banks of the river from a characteristically low view-point. From this vantage it is a world of mud and banks and bales. ibid.
The greatest twentieth century artist of the river however is Stanley Spencer whose enduring image is that of Cookham, the village by the Thames where he grew up, and where he spent most of his life. ibid.
Stanley Spencer – he had a reverence for the river just as if it were one of the holy rivers that flowed from Eden. ibid.
The river creates its own weather. ibid.
There are 134 bridges along the length of the Thames. ibid.
The Thames has given London a beauty and a grandeur it would otherwise not have possessed. It is the epitome, the liquidescence, the spirit of the City. ibid.
The Thames has always been a river of trade. Its tidal reaches from the estuary to London have always been hard at work. Peter Ackroyd’s Thames 3/4
It was said in the sixteenth century that, ‘From a distance the river looked like a forest of masts.’ ibid.
The Thames handled the trade of the world. ibid.
They endured for a thousand years, but then like their red sails they slowly mixed with the sunset. ibid.
And there were the watermen ... some forty thousand in the eighteenth century. ibid.
The watermen were faced with a terrifying menace ... steam. bid.
In the battle for the Thames steam would win. ibid.
The penny steam-bus became known as the omnibus of the River. ibid.
Not for nothing was it called the Silver Thames. ibid.
The first brick warehouses were as large as palaces and as well defended as castles. ibid.
The West India Docks survived until 1980. ibid.
The River inspires dreams, or what we may call dream-like reflections. Peter Ackroyd’s Thames 4/4
The great poet of the river was undoubtedly Charles Dickens – there is scarcely a novel by him in which the river is not present carrying all the burden of the novelist’s obsession. For Dickens the river was a river of tears and of darkness. And he knew of what he wrote. He had lost his hope beside the Thames; at the age of twelve he was put to work in a blacking factory beside the river at Hungerford Stairs. ibid.
The estuary is the brackish zone ... It has its own beauty. ibid.
In the poetry of the Anglo-Saxons it is a land of nightmare. ibid.
Perhaps nowhere is the history of a city, indeed a nation, its royalty, and its river, so intimately entwined as in the saga of London’s great waterway the Thames. Now a new exhibition here at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich called Royal Rivers sets out to explore that story. Tim Marlow on Royal River with David Starkey
Anne Boleyn: hundreds perhaps thousands of vessels ... This extraordinary combination of pomp, circumstance and near absurdity. ibid.
The City of London itself held an annual Lord Mayor’s procession on the river. Ibid
The Victorians also set about constructing new ways to cross the river. ibid.
Between Richmond and the North Sea thirty bridges span the Thames. They carry people across a stretch of river thirty-five miles long. Don Cruickshank, The Bridges That Built London, BBC 2012
These extraordinary structures have been the making of London. ibid.
Vauxhall – here in 1,500 B.C. before Troy fell and long before Julius Caesar came to Britain the people of the marshes made a first attempt at a crossing. ibid.
The Thames is like the River Jordan. ibid.
The river bed is changing all the time ... in truth very shallow. ibid.
Bridges were sacred things, things of religion. ibid.
London Bridge is the most famous. ibid.
For six hundred years London Bridge dominated the City. ibid.
The river regularly froze over. ibid.
The Watermen were a very powerful lobby indeed. ibid.
Between 1750 and 1850 nine bridges were thrown across the Thames. ibid.