The Way to the Sea by Caroline Crampton – review

In his mock-heroic account of his travels to the Isle of Sheppey in 1732, William Hogarth describes a visit to a churchyard on the Hoo Peninsula where, unable to hold his bowel movements, he “untruss’d upon a grave rail in an unseemly manner”. Hogarth wasn’t the first Londoner to subject the estuary to his s**t, and he would not be the last. 

As journalist Caroline Crampton shows in this short but rich book, London’s answer to waste was often to “send it to the estuary and let it rot”. When the Thames overflowed with faeces in the Great Stink of 1858 — “reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror”, as Disraeli put it — those who lived furthest downriver were the most likely to catch cholera and other waterborne diseases. 

Even after Joseph Bazalgette put the river in chains with his great embankments and sewage system, many of the city’s sanitation problems were relocated eastward rather than eradicated. Until as recently as 1998, sludge vessels — nicknamed “Bovril boats” — transported waste to the Black Deep, a channel in the estuary, and dumped it there. Today the mud of the estuary — “as natural a phenomenon as the much-admired peaks in the Lake District” — is still for many shamefully “associated with dilapidation”. But for Crampton, who spent much of her childhood sailing the Thames with her parents, the estuary is the place she loves best. She finds herself drawn to it as an “in-between space, neither one thing nor the other”. 

She defends its “rich, varied and historic landscape” and argues its case as a place of importance, inspiration and beauty. She wants us to see in the estuary the “mysterious vastness” of Joseph Conrad; the solemn magnificence of Turner’s Temeraire; the gateway to a new world experienced by the passengers of the Empire Windrush.

Crampton mixes history with memoir, giving snapshots of her own love affair with the Thames alongside snippets of literary, political, ecological and social history relating to the river. Though the estuary is her ultimate focus, she starts her journey in Gloucestershire, at the source of the Thames, and gives a mini-tour down the river, heading through Oxford before reaching London and then beyond to Tilbury and Cliffe, Sheppey and Hoo, the Nore and the open sea.

She writes movingly, sometimes with flecks of nostalgia or melancholy, but ultimately her book is a rallying call for greater appreciation of the maligned and overlooked.

The Way to the Sea: The Forgotten Histories of the Thames Estuary by Caroline Crampton (Granta, £16.99)