Estuary: Out from London, to the sea

by Rachel Lichtenstein

The Thames Estuary is one of the world's great deltas, providing passage in and out of London for millennia. It is silted up with the memories and artefacts of past voyages. It is the habitat for an astonishing range of wildlife. And for the people who live and work on the estuary, it is a way of life unlike any other - one most would not trade for anything, despites its dangers.

Rachel Lichtenstein has travelled the length and breadth of the estuary many times and in many vessels, from hardy tug boats to stately pleasure cruisers to an inflatable dinghy. And during these crossing she has gathered an extraordinary chorus of voices: mudlarkers and fishermen, radio pirates and champion racers, the men who risk their lives out on the water and the women who wait on the shore.

From the acclaimed author of Brick Lane and Rodinsky's Room, Estuary is a thoughtful and intimate portrait of a profoundly British place. With a clear eye and a sharp ear, Rachel Lichtenstein captures the essence of a community and an environment, examining how each has shaped and continues to shape the other.

Genres: Nonfiction, Travel, London, History, Natural History, Environment, British Literature

288 pages, Hardcover

Published November 22, 2016

Reviews

[Dead John Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

I come from Essex. I really do. That has always been such a stigma laden statement. It's like saying:

I am a criminal
I torture kittens
I have an IQ of 23
I carry a knife
I have an IQ of 23 and I carry a knife
I killed my grandmother
I strangled 4 puppies
I am bored......

I will define Essex as being anywhere within 20 miles of the river. Beyond that it may be called Essex but that's as close as it gets.

As little as 10 years ago you couldn't pay a writer to go to Essex, shit, you couldn't pay anyone to go to Essex. No-one took Essex seriously except for the Armed Offenders Squad. There was no art in Essex. The only thing that was made from Thames mud was shallow graves. The place and it's people were shunned and ridiculed as nothing but a wasteland full of pikeys, thieves, and sluts.

Watch this video from a well known English TV program, they sing a song called Essex is Crap.

The thing about Essex was that we all knew secrets about the Thames. I was born in Grays and I knew where the ancient causeway still lay ignored, overgrown, and rubbish strewn. I used to drink in the Theobald Arms where the Press Gang once lurked. We all knew about the English Armada at Tilbury and Pocahontas at Gravesend.

I found this in a very old book:
"There is a certain Essex quality that is imperishable, stubbornness is that quality, downright cussedness that refuses to be brought into line. But there is no common purpose, no uniformity in this obstinacy, it is simply a series of unconnected statements of implacable self confidence."

It's no coincidence that Pirate Radio began in the waters off Essex.

In a 2005 newspaper poll asking readers to mark English counties out of 10 for landscape beauty, Essex scored zero.

And then it started to change. Slowly. Articles in the Guardian that didn’t mention crime figures, the usual gastronomy rubbish, bloody Jamie Oliver, and so on. The once highly toxic waste dumps were grassed over and the birds came back along with their pathetic watchers, we broke into their cars then set fire to them but still they came.

A more cynical person could claim that it was the middle class appropriation of our river but I tend to think that they too always held the river in high esteem but were simply too afraid to actually set foot in Essex.

Until finally, the great Robert McFarlane walks around Essex and suddenly everyone wants to go there except Will Self who would no doubt, and deservedly, get his head punched.

That's the pre-amble to this book Estuary: Out from London to the Sea by Rachel Lichtenstein. Believe it or not I came to it with an open mind. I originally came across this book when it was published but some of the reviews put me off. But picking it up now, within 10 pages I was committed (in Essex that means something very different).

So I can relate to this book in two ways, I guess the content had me emotionally committed from the get go so that's one way and it gets 5 stars from me on that score, the other is by the book itself as a piece of writing.

After I had read about half I went and looked at some of the negative reviews. Someone said the photos were terrible but I thought that maybe they had never been along the Thames with its huge skyline and brooding skies, the ever present skylark song, the mournful ducks flying fast at sunset on winter days. In the photos the sky is so big that anything on the land and even the land itself seems shrunken beyond what is real but that's really how it is.

While I agree it could have been edited better, there was nothing that bad that I'd be bothered to do it. There was repetition in places but it sometimes helped to get the connections between places. I found her reporting of, and interactions with, the locals to be refreshingly honest and non-judgemental. I liked her easily where I had to work at liking Robert McFarlane.

I knew almost everywhere that was mentioned, had been to lots of them but more than that I knew the territory of the map that Rachel was creating with words. She has a sympathy for the places. I really like Robert McFarlane but his stuff is "drier", excellent, but definitely drier. Rachel's writing is wetter, never wet but definitely on the moister side of things. I could see why the Essex people liked her, underneath their bullet proof vests they are really just big softies, psychopathic maybe, but softies all the same.

She makes reference to The Peregrine by J A Baker, Robert McFarlane rates the book as "a masterpiece of twentieth-century non-fiction". She feels the echoes of that book in her wanderings around the marshes. The Peregrine is an absolute masterpiece by which other non-fiction nature books are (rightly) judged. The fact that they both mention it, is all part of the rehabilitation of Essex. If The Peregrine had been set in the Scottish Highlands instead of Essex I am sure it would be on the reading list of all the schools where they teach reading, in other words anywhere outside of Essex.

Overall I found it a comprehensive account of her time on the estuary and a comprehensive account of the estuary. I liked her writing style, I felt her presence on every page. I liked how she found characters everywhere she went and got their stories, leaving a more resonant memory of the place she describes.

After reading it I immediately wanted to go there, even though I was born there and couldn't get away quick enough. I could feel the pull of the river even though it is grey, dirty and unforgiving. Even though it is surrounded by nutters and rubbish and just plain ugliness, as long as you face the river it all looks good.

[Penny · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book about the Thames estuary, seen not only through the author's eyes but also through the lives of the people she meets on her journeys.
She tells us several times that the book took 5 years to write, and I can well believe this.

Lichtenstein captures the sense of a constantly changing landscape (controversial dredging might be revealing archaeological wonders but many feel it is destroying the environment too).

The book was marred for me for 3 reasons. Firstly there was a lot of repetition. Secondly I picked up on several  incorrect 'facts' which made me think there were probably a whole lot more.
And lastly a lot of the black and white photographs are truly terrible. The estuary is a scenic place (I used to live in Essex and know parts of it well) and yet many of the photos are so bad to be almost laughable. What a shame!

[Sophy H · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great foray into the life of the Thames Estuary, from upriver London out to the sea.

Rachel Lichtenstein has an easy writing style which draws you in and keeps your interest throughout.

Everything is covered here, from the changing history of the river itself to the land usage, the wildlife variation and the slowly dying communities of river dwellers or those having relied upon the water for their livelihood.

The author's conversations and interactions with the riverside communities are honest and thorough, providing oral commentaries on the fascinating tidal world.

I really enjoyed this one and would highly recommend if your interest is tidal communities and river living.

[Karen Mace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having lived next to the Estuary all my life, I found this to be a fascinating, illuminating and detailed look at the evolution of the Thames Estuary and all those who live by it or work on it. The folklore, the role it has played in history, the way that outsiders see Essex and how that differs from those who live there and just how much it has changed over the years.

Being a local I found it so easy to feel connected to the stories told by the author, and the places she visited as she travelled along the Estuary. She stopped off in numerous places to meet people who have lived or worked on the Thames and it was so interesting to hear them share their stories. She travelled on boats and walked alongside the estuary and that really helped her give you a real flavour of estuary life. The use of black and white photos was also really clever as it didn't make the estuary out to be a glossy, colourful place as most of the time it isn't!

There are more shipwrecks on the floor of the estuary per square foot than anywhere else along the UK coastline and I loved hearing the stories of those, especially of the London and the Montgomery and those who have dived down to see them. Having recently visited an exhibition of items from the London at the local museum I found these chapters to be most enlightening.

It's a book I've learned so much from about the local area and found it to be brilliantly written and so absorbing to read.

[Rachel Stevenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like a (very) long read in the LRB.

[Richard Carter · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Estuary, Rachel Lichtenstein travels on and about the Thames estuary, meeting people with different connections to the place: writers, artists, singers, sailors, bargemen, mudlarkers, cocklers, historians, naturalists, Sealanders.

The book provides an interesting snapshot of a time when traditional ways of life around the estuary are dying out. In this respect, it reminded me of Ronald Blythe's Akenfield, Redmond O’Hanlon's Trawler, and Eric Newby's The Last Great Grain Race: stories of an almost-bygone era.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lichtenstein's writing is always engaging but this book was superb. Despite very interesting subject matter it had a sense of tranquility about it that really almost forces you to read and digest it slowly. I suspect that's on purpose. There's no way to learn about the Thames estuary in one big gulp first hand so if one wants to write a book to help others see and feel the things you do when approaching and being out on the estuary you've got to slow it down. It was a gorgeous read.

[Pam Ditton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not brilliant writing but it I was gripped by every page. I grew up on the Thames Estuary at Leigh-on-Sea and spent my childhood sailing on the estuary, so it brought back so many memories and told my a great deal I never knew as a youngster. This book may not appeal to a wider audience but I thank Rachel for her research and pulling all this information together in such an accessible form.

[Georgie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written evocation of the Thames Estuary. Rachel Lichtenstein explores the landscape and the Estuary itself, meeting wonderful, eccentric, passionate people along the way. Powerful sense of place, history, possibility, and the endangerment of our natural landscapes.

[Schopflin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Atmospheric and informative, I really enjoyed reading about the people and the places. But then I love the Thames Estuary.

[Barrowsend · Rating 4 out of 5]

Evokes perfectly the bleak beauty and steel-grey solitude of the estuary edgelands, while putting the people who work the river at the heart of the story.

[Mike Newman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Over the past few years, as my explorations of the Thames have taken me further and further eastwards, I've begun to appreciate the estuary in a different way. It's fair to say that, until recently, the wide expanses of flat empty land almost terrified me. The broad sweep of silver sky broken only by marching ranks of pylons seemed endlessly and bleakly awesome. But it has also always drawn me - the edges of London blurring into the post-industrial wastelands of Essex and Kent are curiously intriguing to me. Haunted by Joseph Conrad and Bram Stoker, and never far from the weird rural gothic of rural eastern England, these white spaces on the map of the British Isles dared me to fill them in with detail. Rachel Lichtenstein's account of her own curious relationship overlaps with mine, but her gaze is firmly eastwards. Having grown up in Southend-on-Sea where the broad mouth of the river opens into the North Sea, her fascination is strongest when considering the remote forts which stride ominously across Shivering Sands, or the treacherous muddy reaches which can strand a cockleboat for hours during slack tides. Those familiar with Lichtenstein's style will be comforted - she writes primarily about people in the context of place, and the social history of the river and shore is never far from the forefront of her prose. She finds the families who trace back their generations in Thames Barge pilots, the women who have lost husbands to the unforgiving tides, and the eccentrics who choose to live out on remote broken outposts in the river - whether for art or solitude.

A theme worming through the book is the impact of the vast Thames Gateway port near TIlbury. This is variously described to her as an imposition on the delicate ecosystem of the river and a necessary evil to keep the seamen and dockers at work, even in now greatly reduced numbers. The impact on the lives of fishermen and their families, wreck-hunters and navigators of the complex estuarial sand bars is carefully catalogued. The sense is that no-one really knows how it will change the topology of the river despite mathematical modelling and careful studies, and this is echoed in the uncertain future faced by the people who live beside it. Lichtenstein is careful to tread the documentarian's path here - she hears and retells the stories, but doesn't wholly pass judgement. The estuary has changed immeasurably over the millennia - and her book is just a sliver in time, describing the latest shifts and changes.

Early in the book, Lichtenstein notes that little has been written about the Estuary as an entity - perhaps because London draws the heat? She interrogates the few sources available carefully, weighing their sometimes quaint historical evidence against what she hears from those who currently live and work here. While it appears true that few factual accounts focus on the estuary, she engages with those who have woven it into their art - not least with Iain Sinclair who trails the river east in his meta-fictions Downriver and Dining on Stones. He joins her at Tilbury Riverside, the former port and railway station where immigrants from the Commonwealth and beyond would arrive in the UK and commence their journey west to London. Her work with Sinclair here - and in earlier shared projects - has been neatly complementary. His topographical and historiographical work meshing with Lichtenstein's social history - bringing his sometimes breathtaking and overwhelming occultism down to a human scale. Together here, they play off each other's interests - Sinclair considering the tide of humanity arriving on these shores, while Lichtenstein looks for eerie geographical features - the stranded masts of the SS Richard Montgomery are unpredictable, decaying fuses signifying the knife-edge on which the estuary sits: politically, culturally and environmentally.

For me, and for other topographical obsessives perhaps, the book feels incomplete - the sinister reaches of the Thames between Purfleet and Greenwich largely unexplored for example. But for Lichtenstein the work is complete - bookended by two journeys: one a dangerous excursion which makes its mental and physical marks on her, the second a redemptive but still incomplete unravelling of the first some years later. In that sense Lichtenstein's broad descriptive sweep and sometimes unfocused prose style are perfect - this is a reflection on a season of life where the estuary haunted her. It is a reverie and an exorcism as much as a social history. A book focused on this very territory was always likely to draw me in - and while covering such an ambitious sweep in a personal account like this didn't feel entirely satisfying, it's certainly one of the finest books written about this weird and remarkable part of Britain. Given how the blank Essex skies often feel like an unpainted canvas, I suspect that anyone who has walked the shoreline will only ever be satisfied with their own version of the estuary. For now, this is a fine proxy.

[Jake Goretzki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nicely balanced: not too boaty, but gives enough boat to be interesting and novel to the layman. Collectively spot on and very timely about the desolate charm of these kind of landscapes and the unloved but often bleakly gorgeous Kent and Essex estuary. I'd recommend this alongside books like 'Edgelands' and (of course) the wonderful 'Rings of Saturn'.

Some great characters and scoops here too - I've always been interested in Sealand and it's almost investigative journalism to get on there. Frankly, if your entire working existence is deskilled and deracinated like mine, there's something very satisfying reading about people who actually do things and take risks. And the sociology / ethnography aspect of it: I'm a lifelong devotee of Ewan McColl's 'Singing the Fishing' and I could listen to an oldtimer talk about fishing in the thirties for hours. There's a quote (might be Joseph Conrad) about the effortless demotic poetry that pours from them.

Good to hear Sebald had such an influence on her too (it's obvious). This being Rachel Lichtenstein, that tedious NIMBY twat Iain Sinclair was always going to make an appearance, but it's fairly light on him and he only drops in from his million pound De Beauvoir townhouse for an afternoon. Lichtenstein does display flashes of Sinclairism (the final chapter bemoans the harm caused by the Western desire for white goods, forgetting that Easterners rather like white goods too). But not enough to annoy the reader.

All told, an enjoyable blend of meditation and landscape. Well worth a look.

[Terry Pitts · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rachel Lichtenstein's The Estuary is a multifaceted documentary about the river Thames and its estuary, from central London out to the North Sea. I read this in anticipation of a trip to London in a few months, realizing that in my previous trips I could hardly recall ever seeing the Thames. And yet, this waterway has been central to London's history for well more than a millennium.

The book is the result of five years of intensive research, one leg broken during a boating accident, and at least one very close encounter with death. Lichtenstein's prose is engaging. She's observant, she's done her research, and she's a good listener. But most importantly, Lichtenstein locates great informants. There are few, if any, experts consulted in The Estuary, but there are plenty of people in the trenches, so to speak. She walks with birders, local historians, and artists. She goes out on the Thames with tug boat captains, cocklers, fishermen, ferrymen, and others who make their living on or near the Thames. She documents their stories about the past, their observations about the present, and their fears, worries, and hopes for the future of the river and the ecosystem it supports. Collectively, their stories add up to a picture of how essential the river and its estuary is to London and all of England.

[Tobias · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading Rachel Lichtenstein’s account of the Thames Estuary which does a great job in stiching together the oral and social history of the Thames estuary including accounts from pirate radio operators operating from boats and world war II seaforts, Prince Michael of Sealand; fishermen, cocklers, sailors, bird-watchers, ferrymen, dockers, artists.

There is also the story of the dangerously explosive wreck of the SS Mongomery which sank during the Second World War with more than seven thousand tons of live bombs and chemical detonators on board; the effect of the dredging for the new ultra-mechanised Thames Gateway estuary port. The author also explores the shifting sands and shallows of the estuary through journeys on various boats, barges, dinghies and ferries

One thing which didn’t work as well as it could have done were the many photographs included in the book. These tended to be relatively low resolution images in the melancholy tradition of WG Sebald’s books. Many of them were also portrait photographs which is OK for people but surely the natural portrayal of the Thames Estuary’s wide horizons would have been landscape orientation and while this might have pushed the book towards being a coffee table book (which, of course, this book is not), consideration of colour photographs might have been a good idea.

[Eduardo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Engaging and beautiful collection of portraits and anecdotes on the Thames Estuary, which is after all the protagonist of the book: the continuous ebb and flow of the tide taking and bringing ships and people...., shifting sandbanks, stirring past and present.
The uncaptioned black and white photographs illustrating the book add a layer of meaning and help bringing to life the narrative.

[Pogue · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I actually buy a book after reading it from a library shelf it is guaranteed to get a high five!

I know the Thames estuary intimately as a sailor on it, but not as she knows it.
Rachel Lictenstein's exposé is multi-faceted and I'm in total awe
at just how many facets she exposes in this diamond of a book.

[Edoardo Albert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an enlightening, enriching and superbly written account of the shifting waters and treacherous sands that join the River Thames to the North Sea. Lichtenstein works broadly downstream, starting from London and moving eastwards, telling the extraordinarily varied stories of the lives that intersected and intersect with the river. The river was what made London, bringing the world to the city, but what is fascinating is how much life went on in and around the river, from dredgers and fishermen, to a self-declared autonomous republic on an old sea fort in the estuary.

The sea fort, calling itself the Principality of Sealand, has been fought over, invaded and defended in its time. The river itself flows with tales, from drowned boats laden with unexploded munitions to the hard lives of the fishermen, and Lichtenstein does a superb job of telling them.

She also has a great deal of time for the various artists who seek to incorporate the river into their work – sometimes with near fatal results. Taking a photographer with her to record the sailing of an old yacht, the photographer faffs around for so long trying to set up his camera that the boat crashes. In the crash, Lichtenstein is quite badly injured. Her commitment to river side artists shows a notable lessening thereafter!

For anyone interested in the river and how the people living alongside it have used, abused, loved and hated it, this is a wonderful book.

[Annette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most likely a niche readership - and I fit perfectly in that niche - of people who have a personal connection to the Thames and its outflow to the ocean. I walked the Thames River in 2023 from origin to the estuary and was wow'ed by every part of the experience. Somehow, I always thought London was closer to the estuary -- discovering another world beyond the edges of the city was a delightful discovery (I'm from away). At the urging of a friend who lives in Oxford (another stunning spot along the river) who asked if I know anything about the area east of London (I replied no, of course), I bought this book which accompanied me from Kew to the end. Not as a guidebook but as a mood, and a factual, well-researched depiction both of the historical uses and current challenges of life near the Thames estuary.

[Katy Wheatley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this. Lichtenstein opens the book with an abortive journey from Tower Bridge along the Thames Estuary to the sea. It whets her whistle for unpacking the journey at a more leisurely and successful pace. Social and naval history entwines as she meanders up and down the river banks and channels talking to people for whom the salt flats, marshes and open expanses of water are a way of life. She looks back to the past, documenting dying trades and craft but also forward to the future, heralded in by a super port that is being built as she writes. Having spent two years living on a boat in the East End of London, some of the things she writes about cross into the life I came to know and this felt like such a personal book for me.

[NN · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many a time in the hour before sleep below the gentle yawing of a ship sailing in the tide I was drawn into the shifting sandbanks and the clinging mudflats between Essex, Kent and London. This book project is an Akenfield for the soon to be forgotten lives along the shores of the outer Thames, of those who witnessed the changes taking place there: the floods and the creation of land and the successive seagrabs. Stories left behind in the remaning seaforts inhabited by ghosts of the past scanning the horizon for the ghosts of nazi bombers.

[Kathryn Castles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found the structure of the book a bit slippery but so many interesting stories and facts in it, pushed me to go and explore the Estuary properly. Because she said Rings of Saturn inspired her to write I moved onto that next, after meaning to read it for years - and so far, though I can see how influential and individual Saturn is, Estuary has been the more satisfying read. One I might lend out or return to

[Tim O'Mahony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pleasant to read but there was no sense of wholeness about the book as the trips and excursions which form the basis of the social history of the Estuary went back and forth over the same ground quite a bit. But the descriptions of the light and the sea are memorable and the history itself is never less than fascinating.

[Penny Farnsworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book about the shifting, liminal estuary; of a fast disappearing world. Fascinating and from an environmentalists view also worrying. I now feel the need to walk some of the lonely coastal sea walls with only birds and wind for company.

[Hilary Blake · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting look at the Thames and it's far reaching estuary.A bit haphazard to follow at times but good to know more about familiar areas.
The pictures in the p/b edition which I read had no titles which was unhelpful!

[Alan Fricker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some beautiful tales and prompts to further explore the area. A bit bitty

[Bronwen Griffiths · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating study of the Thames estuary - its history, culture and people.

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed reading about the Thames Estuary and the people, places, and birds/animals along the waterways. A very educational read.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

A meandering journey around the estuary, touching on the lives of those who live and work along it. Evokes the atmosphere of the place. Makes me want to take a walk by Rainham marshes.

[Ian Allsop · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full of facts and poetic writing. Hugely evocative, conjuring up those big Essex estuary skies. You can almost smell and taste the saltwater, and the ghosts of the past