As the tides ebb away in their predetermined rhythm, each day brings fresh revelations. Some elements on the foreshore are, even if gradually eroded more or less fixed. Others change with every tide.
Liable to slip on the foreshore, instead I lean over embankment walls, taking zoom pictures to examine later. I leave the real work to experienced, licensed mudlarks*, who have the eyes and knowledge to spot items of archaeological interest together with the knees to retrieve them.
Patterns left by the tides are ever-changing, depending on the strength of currents, the weather and time of year. The height of the river can rise and fall by up to 7 metres twice a day and the speed of the tides can reach from 4 up to 8 knots. So smaller objects are easily moved, swept away, or rearranged, sometimes neatly, sometimes not, …
…while larger objects, or remains of structures, stay fixed, so there is something new to observe each day.
The foreshore below Victoria Tower Gardens was carefully explored by Gustav Milne and a group from the Thames Discovery Programme in 2013, who recorded the visible structures and layout of the shore that day.
The chains in the photograph above could perhaps be grab chains that have become detached from part of the Embankment wall. Such chains were first installed along the central London Embankment of the Thames after the Marchioness disaster, when fifty-one young party-goers on the boat were drowned after a collision with the dredger Bowbelle on the night of August 20, 1989. Rob Jeffries, Honorary Curator, of the Thames River Police Museum at Wapping, tells me that “The chains on the river walls are a legacy of the Marchioness disaster. […] They were one of the many recommendations, from the Inquest and enquiries into the incident, which included the setting up of the four RNLI Stations on the tidal Thames.” These safety recommendations were eventually carried out, as during the Inquest it was revealed that some of the victims drowned as there was nothing on the steeply embanked river they could hold onto.
Granite blocks blown out of the embankment wall – so swiftly and expertly repaired by one of the teams set up by Sir Thomas Peirson Frank during the Blitz – are still clearly discernible even though shifted a little by tidal movements. However, many noticeable objects arrive and depart quickly, so that what is left by each low tide is something of a lottery. A lottery which, if you have the time to spare, can appeal to the imagination…
And so the searches go on…
Sources and further Information
With thanks to Rob Jeffries for sharing his knowledge of the River Thames and to Claire Trévien, artist and poet for the title of this article.
Milne, Gustav: The Thames at War, Saving London from the Blitz, 2020
*Port of London Authority: Thames foreshore permits
Thames Safety Inquiry, January, 2000
Victoria Tower Gardens, Key Site Information
An earlier article of mine on the same subject: Fragments of History