ESTUARY: OUT FROM LONDON TO THE SEA PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Rachel Lichtenstein | 336 pages | 22 Sep 2016 | Penguin Books Ltd | 9780241142882 | English | London, United Kingdom From The City To The Sea - The Thames Estuary - A London Inheritance And it does this most brilliantly through the eyes of those whose stories bring depth and character to what is often a bleak and desolate place. Caught by the River. Rather than impose herself on the landscape, she lets it seep into her psyche. The Guardian. Writing about [The Thames Estuary] presents a unique challenge. Opening in this way allows Lichtenstein to map the territory and set the scene. In the company of a cast of locals, Lichtenstein travels to the strange military sea forts, the sandbanks, the piers, ports and low-lying towns of this unusual landscape. What she finds among her interviewees is an overwhelming nostalgia for ways of life that are passing into history. These wounded visions of a glorious past and a barren present feel slightly sinister in the aftermath of the EU referendum. This nostalgia finds its antithesis in the futuristic London Gateway Project, a vast, largely automated deep-water container port going up on the Essex side of the river. It seems symptomatic of the modernity that has swept away the livelihoods along the estuary. When Lichtenstein finally visits the port in an epilogue, she notes that thousands of jobs will be created for locals. Aside from that, there are obvious environmental effects, as the dredging of the estuary by DP World, the global trade company developing the port, unearths old shipwrecks and disturbs marine life. Lichtenstein takes a trip to Sealand, the North Sea platform run as an independent country by the Bates family from Essex. Writing about it presents a unique challenge. How do you make such a landscape comprehensible, and how do you render it vividly for the reader? Karl Whitney. Sat, Nov 5, , First published: Sat, Nov 5, , For commercial shipping approaching the Nore and thus London, main deep-water routes were the Princes Channel, the Queens Channel and the South Channel to the south, to a lesser extent the Kings Channel and the Swin to the north. The Swin was used by barges and leisure craft from the Essex rivers, and coasters and colliers from the north east. The shallow bottomed barges and coasters would navigate the swatchways at flood tide, and would cross the sand banks at spitways, points where the water was least shallow, and just deep enough at that point of the tide. If they missed the moment they would heave to and wait for the next tide. Recreational craft are expected use channels most suited to the size of their vessel. When navigating to or from the north they should use the Middle Deep, Swin and Warp. Barrow Deep and Warp. To cross the estuary large vessels used Fisherman's Gat , and small vessels to were expected to use Foulger's Gat. This table shows, from west to east, the principal navigation lights, buoys and other marks to the north port and south starboard of the main deep-water channels of the River Thames from Gallions Reach to the Sunk Light Float. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Ramsar Wetland. Main article: Estuary English. See also: English in southern England. Greater Thames Estuary". Countryside Agency. Archived from the original on 27 February Retrieved 2 March Archived from the original PDF on 29 February Retrieved 18 March Estuary: Out from London to the Sea - Rachel Litchenstein The Swin was used by barges and leisure craft from the Essex rivers, and coasters and colliers from the north east. The shallow bottomed barges and coasters would navigate the swatchways at flood tide, and would cross the sand banks at spitways, points where the water was least shallow, and just deep enough at that point of the tide. If they missed the moment they would heave to and wait for the next tide. Recreational craft are expected use channels most suited to the size of their vessel. When navigating to or from the north they should use the Middle Deep, Swin and Warp. Barrow Deep and Warp. To cross the estuary large vessels used Fisherman's Gat , and small vessels to were expected to use Foulger's Gat. This table shows, from west to east, the principal navigation lights, buoys and other marks to the north port and south starboard of the main deep- water channels of the River Thames from Gallions Reach to the Sunk Light Float. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Ramsar Wetland. Main article: Estuary English. See also: English in southern England. Greater Thames Estuary". Countryside Agency. Archived from the original on 27 February Retrieved 2 March Archived from the original PDF on 29 February Retrieved 18 March Ramsar Sites Information Service. Retrieved 25 April Retrieved 27 June River Thames , England. Thames Head. Thames Estuary. Namespaces Article Talk. Views Read Edit View history. Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file. Download as PDF Printable version. Wikimedia Commons. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Estuary: Out from London to the Sea. Jul 24, Dead John Williams rated it it was amazing Shelves: reviewed. I come from Essex. I really do. That has always been such a stigma laden statement. 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 I come from Essex. 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. 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. 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. In a newspaper poll asking readers to mark English counties out of 10 for landscape beauty, Essex scored zero. And then it started to change. 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. 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 feels the echoes of that book in her wanderings around the marshes.