Thames River ecosystem

Category: Inland Aquatic Biomes.

Geographic Location: Europe.

Summary: The Thames has great historic and ecological significance to London. Its slow, decades-long recovery from infrastructure damage in the 20th century may now be jeopardized by climate change.

At 215 miles (346 kilometers), the River Thames is the longest river in England and the second-longest in the United Kingdom. It begins in Gloucestershire and flows eastward through Oxford, Reading, Windsor, and central London before reaching the Thames Estuary on the North Sea. The river has both seawater and freshwater stretches, is fed by dozens of tributaries, and has a catchment area covering much of southeastern England. Much of the Thames’ fame comes from its presence in London and its effect on London’s layout, geography, and local ecosystem.

The river has also been key to trade, as the riverside Port of London, once the world’s largest port, has been a center of international trade since the city’s founding in the 1st century c.e. Major port industries on the Thames have included ironworking, brass and bronze casting, paper milling, arms manufacturing, submarine communication cables, and timber. For most of British history, London was the nation’s shipbuilding center, and the volume of shipping in the 19th century supported 33 dry docks devoted to ship repair.

Today, sugar refining, vehicle manufacturing, and edible oil processing remain major port industries. In London, the river’s tide has a rise and fall of 23 feet (7 meters), with high tide reaching Teddington Lock.

Many gas works and power stations are located along the Thames and its canals and tributaries, the most prominent of which are the Beckton and East Greenwich gas works and the Brimsdown, Hackney, West Ham, Kingston, Fulham, Lots Road, Wandsworth, Battersea, Bankside, Stepney, Deptford, Greenwich, Blackwall Point, Brunswich Wharf, Wollwich, Barking, Belvedere, Littlebrook, West Thurrock, Northfleet, Tilbury, and Grain power stations.

Catchment, Flow, and Tides

Thames Head, the source of the river, is 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) north of the Gloucestershire village of Kembile, in the Cotswolds. The Thames River Basin District covers 6,229 square miles (16,133 square kilometers). The western part of the catchment is primarily rural, but the eastern and northern parts include heavily urbanized areas.

A total 38 main tributaries feed the Thames, including brooks, rivers, and canals, covering 3,842 square miles (9,951 square kilometers). Tributary rivers include the Churn, Leach, Cole, Ray, Coln, Windrush, Evenlode, Cherwell, Ock, Thame, Pang, Kennet, Loddon, Colne, Wey, and Mole, as well as the manmade Longford River. A complex of three locks and a weir, Teddington Lock was built in the early 19th century at Ham, in London’s western suburbs. Downstream of the lock, the portion of the Thames known as the Tideway is tidal and is governed by the Port of London Authority.

Upstream, the river is governed by the Environment Agency. An obelisk shortly below the lock marks the boundary between these navigation authorities. When spring leads to especially high tides, the headwater can rise above Teddington, reversing the river flow for a short period; at such times, tidal effects can be observed much farther upstream than usual.

The human-made Jubilee River, completed in 2002, is a hydraulic channel 7 miles (11 kilometers) long and 148 feet (45 meters) wide, built to alleviate flooding by taking overflow from the Thames via the east bank upstream of Boulter’s Lock near the town of Maidenhead, and channeling it to the northeast bank downstream from Eton.

The Teddington Lock is about 55 miles (89 kilometers) upstream from the Thames Estuary. That 55-mile (89-kilometer) stretch, the Tideway, is subject to the North Sea’s tidal activity. The main tributaries on the Tideway are the rivers Brent, Lea, Roding, Darent, Wandle, Effra, Ingrebourne, Fleet, Westbourne, and Ravensbourne. When it was founded as the new capital of Roman Britain at a natural hub for trade, London was established on Ludgate Hill and Cornhill, both of which were elevated enough to be out of reach of spring tides. Tide tables today are based on the tide at London Bridge. The London waters are brackish, a mixture of the freshwater upstream and the saltwater of the North Sea.

Engineering and Reconfiguration

The Thames contains nearly 100 islands. In several places, the islands are created by the river’s splitting into multiple streams. In Oxford, for example, the Thames splits into Seacourt Stream, Castle Mill Stream, Bulstake Stream, and several smaller runs, creating Fiddler’s Island, Osney, and other small islets. Upstream of London proper is Thorney Island, named for the brambles that posed challenges for the monks who settled there to establish Westminster Abbey. The Palace of Westminster, commonly referred to now as the Houses of Parliament, is also located on Thorney Island, on the north bank of the Thames.

The development of London and the construction of embankments destroyed the marshes that once surrounded the greater London stretch of the Thames; much the same soon happened in the other major cities by which it passes. Thorney Island, as one example, is no longer identifiable as an island to the casual observer, as the river has been completely embanked. The estuary was narrowed to about one-third of its natural width, so it is much deeper and faster-flowing to accommodate the same amount of water.

Nineteenth-century public health reforms aimed at improving the health and hygiene of the city backfired; the requirement of flushing public streets and the Thames’ tributaries to sluice away the waste simply deposited that waste and sewage in the Thames, and therefore into London’s drinking water. Disease outbreaks followed, including a succession of cholera outbreaks. The effect on the Thames ecosystem was significant, with pathogens introduced into the food chain, dissolved oxygen levels reduced, and the balance of microflora and microfauna upset.

The water quality of the estuary became so bad that numerous written records from the time attest to the stench, and in 1858, called The Year of the Great Stink, Parliament, housed on Thorney Island on the banks of the river, was unable to convene for the simple reason that the smell of the river under the summer sun was overwhelmingly nauseating. Extensive engineering efforts followed in the 1860s, creating interceptor sewers to divert discharges to outfalls, which succeeded in alleviating the situation in London but simply created a new problem in the mid-estuary area around Barking, where mudbanks of waste lined the river, and a fishery with more than 1,000 workers was destroyed. When two ships collided in 1878, three-quarters of the 800 people on board died without reaching shore; it was commonly accepted that the water was so polluted and stank so badly that swimming was too difficult.

Eventually, ponds were constructed to collect solid waste from discharges, a solution that was retained until the end of the 20th century. The water quality of the estuary gradually improved, and fish populations returned, even becoming plentiful. When London’s population increased again after World War I, the new sewage system was able to maintain water quality with no troubles, though the bombing during World War II damaged the infrastructure enough to temporarily set things back to 19th-century levels. The poor state of the postwar British economy made a full repair of infrastructure impossible until the 1960s.

Biodiversity

The Thames supports more than 120 species of fish and marine mammals, including populations of dolphins, seals, and whales in the Tideway, and the Thames Estuary is commonly considered to be the cleanest metropolitan estuary in the world. The ecology of the estuary was deeply affected by the 19th century, not only because of the construction of the Teddington Lock, but also because of the Industrial Revolution, the rising prominence of the United Kingdom, and the growing urbanization of the country, factors that resulted in London’s growing to become the largest city in the world. The population reached 4.7 million people by the end of the 19th century.

Well before pollution became a problem, the series of weirs and locks installed to enable boats to navigate upstream to Reading and points beyond created obstacles for the habits of migratory fish. The Thames salmon population declined to near zero by 1820, because adults had too much trouble reaching their spawning grounds upstream.

Freshwater eels have long been plentiful in the Thames and are a traditional British food, from the jellied eels particularly common in East London (and once one of the cheapest forms of animal protein available to Eastenders) to elvers, young eels prized as a delicacy. Eels travel through the river for up to 20 years before journeying across the Atlantic to spawn in the Sargasso Sea; their larvae return to complete the cycle.

Environmental changes, however, have made this once-plentiful creature a rarity. A 2010 study suggested that in only five years, the eel population of the Thames was more than decimated, reduced to 2 percent of its 2005 levels. A total of 1,500 eels were counted in catch-and-release traps in 2005; only 50 were counted in 2010. The outlook for the eels grew even more grim by the 2020s. An eel trap at the Teddington Lock caught just nine eels over a 150-day period in 2019. Some studies estimate the Thames eel population has declined by 98 percent since 1980. After the significant damage to the Thames ecosystem in the past, eels were one of the first species reintroduced to the Thames Estuary after the 1960s, and the rapid collapse of local eel populations could be a signal of a sharp reduction in the overall health of the ecosystem.

Birds are plentiful along the Thames, including both sea and shorebirds. Cormorants, black-headed gulls, and herring gulls are the most common. The mute swan and the rare black swan are both traditional birds in the area.

Plants found along the banks of the Thames include yellow flag iris, marsh marigolds, and purple loosestrife. The Lodden lily and snake’s-head fritillary are both rare plants that bloom only on flooded areas during the spring season.

Environmental Threats

One environmental problem that the river faces is discharge of raw sewage during heavy rains as sanitary sewers overflow. This can be a serious problem for the fish, plankton, microflora and microfauna living in the river, as well as the animals that depend on it for food or water, including Londoners, who receive two-thirds of their drinking water from the Thames. The resulting decrease of dissolved oxygen can have consequences on Thames life far beyond the obvious pathogenic issues associated with untreated sewage.

Since the 1960s, the Thames ecosystem has been the subject of frequent study and serious interest, in tandem with studies of its water quality. The number of species found in the estuary has steadily increased, including seahorses, goldfish, stingrays, and angler fish. The level of suspended solids in the estuary has remained essentially constant since the early 1990s, after a gradual drop since 1977, indicating that the present level is most likely the natural muddiness inevitable with an estuary, rather than an artificial elevation caused by proximate human habitation.

Heavy metals have decreased in the same period, and pesticide levels have dropped steadily since record-keeping began in 1988. On the other hand, dissolved oxygen, a key factor in measuring the health of an aquatic ecosystem, has repeatedly decreased and increased since 1977, and in the 21st century, it is at very low levels similar to those of the 1970s, when the ecosystem was still being replenished.

The estuary is getting warmer, mainly because of climate change, and the increase has been rapid. Warmer waters mean faster bacterial breakdown, reducing oxygen levels in the water when organic material is present. The combination of warm water and major storm events, which can overflow sewer systems, leads to significant increases in pathogens such as Escherichia coli in the summer, and this has caused numerous mass fish kills as pathogen levels exceed the threshold that Thames fish populations can tolerate. Climate change also contributes to drought-like conditions in southeastern England, reducing the amount of freshwater contributed to the Thames, which over time will increase the brackishness of the Tideway. In 2022, the ongoing drought was accompanied by a heatwave that reduced the River Thames’ level to a nearly two-decade low.

Bibliography

Attrill, M. J., ed. A Rehabilitated Estuarine Ecosystem. The Thames Estuary: Environment and Ecology. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998.

Chalmers, Matthew. “The Iconic London Eel Has Nearly Disappeared.” South West Londoner, 12 Aug. 2021, www.swlondoner.co.uk/news/12082021-the-iconic-london-eel-has-nearly-disappeared. Accessed 30 Aug. 2022.

Frangoul, Anmar. “Drought Conditions in Britain Prompt Water Restrictions for Millions of Londoners.” CNBC, 17 Aug. 2022, www.cnbc.com/2022/08/17/london-to-face-water-restrictions-from-next-week-thames-water-says-.html. Accessed 30 Aug. 2022.

Hall, Jenny and Ralph Merrifield. Roman London. London: HMSO Publications, 1986.

National Trails. “Wildlife on the Thames Path.” Natural England, 2012. http://www.nationaltrail.co.uk/thamespath/text.asp?PageId=30.