The Thames Barrier

Today's allowed activity of exercise (and Blip search) was an 11 mile bike ride around London's Docklands, starting in Silvertown at the Thames Barrier Park.

The battering of the east coast and south eastern corner of England with rain and wind is no recent climate change phenomenon. Beset by flooding for generations, the east London hinterlands were relieved by the building of the Thames Barrier – which was a little too late for the fifty eight people who died on Canvey Island in the 1953 North Sea floods, along with several hundred others in East Anglia and Lincolnshire.

Opened by the Queen in 1984 and spanning 520m (1,706ft) across the river Thames at Woolwich Reach in south-east London, the Thames Barrier cost £500 million to build and is one of the largest movable flood barriers in the world

It is composed of 10 steel gates, which are raised monthly for testing (when not in COVID times). These gates help to regulate the flow of water in the Thames, which is a tidal river all the way to Teddington Lock in south-west London, protecting 125 square kilometres of central London from flooding caused by tidal surges, as well as during periods of high flow over Teddington Weir.

‘Flood’ By Blake Morrison

We live in the promise of miraculous lakes:
Dagenham, Greenwich, Wapping, the Isle of Dogs.

‘When the siren sounds, those in the blue environs
Should proceed immediately to non-risk zones.’

Spring tides, high winds: for days we can hear
Of nothing else, our eyes bright with disaster,

Our dreams a chronicle of mountaing anarchie,
The river-folke frantick, shippës trappt in trees.

And the dove we sent out, when it came back,
Had the brown glaze of estuaries on its beak.

In our dreams no sandbags hold back the flood:
We would bring the whole world down if we could.