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‘A square yard of estuary mud contains the energy equivalent of 16 chocolate bars’: John Lewis-Stempel on the life of the English Estuary

John Lewis-Stempel John Lewis-Stempel

Part water, part earth and a habitat of constant movement, the bleak and desolate estuary environment is an acquired taste. Yet this monochrome minimalism can be paradise, says John Lewis-Stempel.

In the estuary, worlds meet, combine, finish. Not only the various states of Nature — the freshwater of the outgoing river, first embracing, then battling the incoming saline sea, merely to dissolve into oceanic extinction — but human states, too. I know of no more perfect exemplar of the estuary phenomenon than the Thames at Tilbury. You take the c2c train from Fenchurch Street, London, proceed 20 miles as the gull flies, disembark, take the uncharter’d, lager-can-strewn streets down to where the old Thames doth flow… and there is a clapperboard pub at the end of the lane, surrounded by nibbled grass and piebald ponies. The pub is called The World’s End. If it had pirates sitting outside, you would say: ‘Of course.’

Up to East Tilbury, the tidal Thames could be mistaken for a river. After Tilbury, the Thames is unmistakably an estuary, a quint-essential estuary. The water widens, the view opens, the sky enlarges. It is a primitive landscape/waterscape of horizontals: foreshore, water, foreshore. On the nose, the tang of salt and rotten egg of silt (as opposed to the weedy, wet-dog sniff from a river) and in the soul, the ingress of solitude. Paradigms of ecology, history, spirituality, society shift. At Tilbury, the metropolitan South-East becomes estuarine Essex, with its gravel pits, waste dumps, docks and petrochemical plants — all the proletarian mechanisms that allow the glamorous façade of London to perform.

Yet one can wander the estuary path downstream from Tilbury for miles and meet no one. Not one soul. Estuaries make and seek their own solitariness and on an estuary, one can be wonderfully alone, even in 24/7, 2024 Britain. Alone with the rustling saltgrass, the anxieties of mist in twisting creeks and the wild birds — and what birds. Unloved by humans, the Thames estuary is a haven for waders and wildfowl. On my first visit to Tilbury, I passed a section of exposed mud studded by a dead bike and bottles devoid of messages, turned a bend in the concrete sea wall to find a small bay with an avocet sifting happily. One touch of the delicate black-and-white wader to the scene was sufficient to transform faecal sludge into brown velvet, smooth and flawless. Bobbing on the water was a whole raft of avocets, a rare opportunity to use the collective noun for Recurvirostra avosetta, an ‘orchestra’. A bird of air, water and mud, the avocet is perhaps the avian synthesis of the estuary.

Mud, to the human eye, is an inconvenience, an effrontery, something to be dispensed of, wiped off. No one ever said ‘mud gilded’. (Perhaps we do not wish to be reminded of our humble origins: we came from the ooze.) Yet tidal mud supports fantastic numbers of invertebrates, these feeding on the minute particles of organic matter that are brought benevolently by both the river and the sea, agitated by the non-stop hydrodynamics; estuary water is stirred brown soup. The consequence is that a square yard of estuary mud contains the energy equivalent of 16 chocolate bars for estuary creatures to consume.

Mudflats at sunset over The Wash Estuary, Norfolk. Credit: Nature Picture Library

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Salted chocolate bars, in fact. The estuary: part water, part earth and part the mix of water and earth that is saltmarsh. A shifting, saline place, altered twice every 24 hours by tide, apparently hostile. Yet the tidal Thames supports 92 species of bird and 115 species of fish. This habitat of constant movement is, appropriately, characterised by piscine migration. Salmon, sea lampreys and sea trout swim upriver to spawn and the young fish move down to the sea to feed. Eels move in the opposite direction: young eels, or ‘elvers’, swim upriver to feed and mature, then return to the sea to spawn.

Once upon a time, the prolificity of eels in the estuarine Thames granted the city’s poor a cheap, nutritious, readily available food source. The Roman occupiers of Londinium ate eels, the Anglo-Saxons grilled eels lengthways (‘spatchcocking’) and, in the 19th century, jellied eels and stewed eels, sold first as street food and then from eel, pie and mash shops, became the signature dish of the East End, as Cockney as the Bow Bells and Pearly Kings and Queens. Today, only a handful of eel, pie and mash shops remain, mostly run by families that have passed their businesses down through the generations, such as the Manzes and Clarks. London has lost its taste for eels, but then, the Thames has lost its eels. The eel population may have fallen by more than 98% since 2010.

The eel, emblem of the estuary. Credit: Alamy

Like the avocet, the eel is an estuary emblem. This fish belongs to the tri-spheres of water, earth and air, as it can emerge from aqua to traverse terra. More, it metamorphoses, from amoeboid-like larva to snaky adult, with a s-s-s-shapely wriggling that is a river’s winding course made flesh. As estuaries are generally unappreciated, so is the eel enigmatic rather than charming. If it were feathery or furry, rather than serpenty and with a catholicity of appetite (encompassing cannibalism), there would be a 38 Degrees petition launched on its behalf.

Purslane. Sea beet. Sea kale. On the margins of the estuary, marginal people foraged plants, together with fishy things. Historically, some plants could be harvested in sufficient quantities to be sold on, hawked around the streets. Scurvy, caused by vitamin C deficiency, was widespread among landlubbers, as well as sailors in the Georgian capital; a cheap cure was scurvy grass (Cochlearia officinalis), picked from the Thames saltmarsh, taken as a vegetable or a brewed tonic. The majority of saltmarsh plants obviously evidence their habitat, being strongly saline on the tongue.

Estuaries are an acquired taste. Even in summer, they can seem bleak, formless; in winter, they are, under a grey sky pressing down on aluminium water, confirmations of desolation. Then, in the monochrome minimalism, you notice the sublimities. No, because of the monochrome minimalism you notice the sublimities; the way the creeks run with mercury under the descent of the autumn sun; the solo cormorant swimming out on the water, making a perfect rounded arch of its black body as it dives; the E6 pitch-exact piping of the oystercatchers on the tideline. I have stood outside a pub at Leigh-on-Sea (more accurately, Leigh-on-Silt) on an autumn evening and heard 100 brent geese descend, air-brake whoosh, before they started calling and cackling to each other, just as we humans murmured and bantered. Sometimes, on a dirty old estuary, you can find yourself in paradise.

Country Life columnist John Lewis-Stempel has twice been crowed winner of the Wainwright prize for nature writing, and is a former BSME Columnist of the Year. His most recent book, ‘England: A Natural History’, explores the 12 distinctive habitats that define the English landscape (Doubleday, £25)

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