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The leisure navigation and sporting activities on the river have given rise to a number of businesses including boatbuilding, marinas, ships chandlers and salvage services. The River Severn Facts". BBC. Archived from the original on 11 October 2007 . Retrieved 17 August 2022. This is when we expect the defences downstream of the Thames Barrier will stop giving the required standard of protection against storm tides. The required height for some downstream defences will be around 30 to 60 centimetres (cm) higher than it is now, depending on location. 2040: deadline for choosing end-of-century option for adapting to sea level rise Some parts of tidal barriers are on land as well as in the river. If we decide to build a new tidal barrier on the Thames, we will need land in either Gravesend Reach or Long Reach. We do not yet know exactly where this land will be needed. The amount of land will depend on the design of the barrier.

In The Deptford Mice trilogy by Robin Jarvis, the Thames appears several times. In one book, rat characters swim through it to Deptford. Winner of the Nestlé Children's Book Prize Gold Award I, Coriander, by Sally Gardner is a fantasy novel in which the heroine lives on the banks of the Thames. Mark Wallington describes a journey up the Thames in a camping skiff, in his 1989 book Boogie up the River. Researchers have identified the River Thames as a discrete drainage line flowing as early as 58million years ago, in the Thanetian stage of the late Palaeocene epoch. [36] Until around 500,000 years ago, the Thames flowed on its existing course through what is now Oxfordshire, before turning to the north-east through Hertfordshire and East Anglia and reaching the North Sea near present-day Ipswich. [37] The Thames Estuary is where the River Thames meets the waters of the North Sea, in the south-east of Great Britain. Richard Coates suggests that while the river was as a whole called the Thames, part of it, where it was too wide to ford, was called * (p)lowonida. This gave the name to a settlement on its banks, which became known as Londinium, from the Indo-European roots * pleu- "flow" and * -nedi "river" meaning something like the flowing river or the wide flowing unfordable river. [10] [11] Aquatic mammals are also known to inhabit the Thames. The population of grey and harbour seals numbers up to 700 in the Thames Estuary. These animals have been sighted as far upriver as Richmond. [46] Bottlenose dolphins and harbour porpoises are also sighted in the Thames. [47]

Doggett's Coat and Badge for apprentice watermen of London, one of the oldest sporting events in the world In non-tidal stretches swimming was, and still is, a leisure and fitness activity among experienced swimmers where safe, deeper outer channels are used in times of low stream. [102] Meanders [ edit ] Scargill, Naila (18 December 2019). "Stanley Spencer's Love Affair With the Thames Revealed in New Show". Trebuchet. Archived from the original on 25 October 2020 . Retrieved 27 August 2020. Ordnance Survey map". English Heritage. Archived from the original on 24 April 2012 . Retrieved 11 December 2018. Provision of buoys and beacons for the purpose of navigation came relatively late to England (compared to the Netherlands, for example). [16] Instead, coastal navigators and pilots relied on the use of transits (the alignment of prominent structures or natural features on land) for guidance. In 1566 Trinity House of Deptford (which oversaw pilotage on the Thames) was empowered to 'make, erect and set up [...] beacons, marks and signs for the sea' (albeit at its own expense). [17] Not long afterwards, the decay of the steeple of Margate Church (an important landmark for negotiating 'the Narrows', a complex route between sandbanks used by vessels sailing to or from London along the North Kent coast) led to Trinity House marking the Narrows with buoys in the late 16th century. [16]

It dammed the river in Hertfordshire, resulting in the formation of large ice lakes, which eventually burst their banks and caused the river to divert onto its present course through the area of present-day London. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, first published in 1889, is a humorous account of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. The book was intended initially to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history of places along the route, but the humorous elements eventually took over. The landscape and features of the Thames as described by Jerome are virtually unchanged, and the book's enduring popularity has meant that it has never been out of print since it was first published.Davies, Caitlin (4 May 2015). "The return of wild swimming: Swimming in the Thames is becoming the norm again". Independent. Archived from the original on 6 December 2016 . Retrieved 27 August 2020. Martian machine over the flooded Thames. Illustration from H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898) This option involves improving the existing Thames Barrier so that it can manage higher storm tides. Flood storage and upgrade the Thames Barrier

In the Middle Ages the Crown exercised general jurisdiction over the Thames, one of the four royal rivers, and appointed water bailiffs to oversee the river upstream of Staines. The City of London exercised jurisdiction over the tidal Thames. However, navigation was increasingly impeded by weirs and mills, and in the 14th century the river probably ceased to be navigable for heavy traffic between Henley and Oxford. In the late 16th century the river seems to have been reopened for navigation from Henley to Burcot. [72]

Beyond Woolwich in the other direction, the route joins up with the Thames Path National Trail, which carries on through London and out west, to the source of the Thames in the Cotswolds. Walking both trails enables you to follow the Thames in its entirety, from source to sea. The demand for land in the Thames Estuary is very high, and land use planning processes take a long time. We will need to get the right to the land in time to build a new barrier by the deadline of 2070. Until we choose an option, we will need the right to land for all of them. We call this ‘securing land’. Sandford Hydro". Low Carbon Hub. Archived from the original on 15 February 2022 . Retrieved 15 February 2022. Needham, P. (1985). "Neolithic And Bronze Age Settlement on the Buried Floodplains of Runnymede". Oxford Journal of Archaeology. 4 (2): 125–137. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0092.1985.tb00237.x.

The River Thames has been a subject for artists, great and minor, over the centuries. Four major artists with works based on the Thames are Canaletto, J. M. W. Turner, Claude Monet and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. [103] The 20th-century British artist Stanley Spencer produced many works at Cookham. [104] Two rowing events on the River Thames are traditionally part of the wider English sporting calendar:

Laville, Sandra (23 January 2023). "Thames Water's real-time map confirms raw sewage discharges". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 21 April 2023. This part of the river is managed by the Port of London Authority. The flood threat here comes from high tides and strong winds from the North Sea, and the Thames Barrier was built in the 1980s to protect London from this risk. The River Thames contains over 80 islands ranging from the large estuarial marshlands of the Isle of Sheppey and Canvey Island to small tree-covered islets like Rose Isle in Oxfordshire and Headpile Eyot in Berkshire. They are found all the way from Fiddler's Island in Oxfordshire to the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. Some of the largest inland islands, for example Formosa Island near Cookham and Andersey Island at Abingdon, were created naturally when the course of the river divided into separate streams. Grahame, Kenneth (2009). The Wind in the Willows: An Annotated Edition. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674034471. A timeline showing activities planned between 2023 and 2100. These include maintaining and adapting the existing flood defence system, and raising defences. The timeline shows 4 options for the future of the Thames Barrier. We need to decide on one by 2040 and implement it by 2070. Securing land