There's something in the water: the shocking contents of the River Thames

What is London made of? To learn about the quotidian existence of its citizens, look to the murky waters that rush beneath its bridges — and, more importantly, what’s in them, says Samuel Fishwick
Illustration by Katie Horwich

A t 11 o’clock on the first Monday in July, the habits of eight million lifetimes are flowing through a monitoring station (which is actually just a plastic bottle) near the Houses of Parliament. ‘It’s the kind of science which involves getting your hands dirty,’ says Dr Leon Barron, one of the King’s College London researchers analysing illicit substances in the Thames and the sewers beneath the city.

To cut to the chase, there are the usual suspects: MDMA, or ecstasy, showing up in concentrations of 33 nanograms per litre (ngl). That’s the equivalent of a teaspoonful of sugar in 40 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Ketamine, another party drug (and also a legal animal anaesthetic used in farming) is at 76ngl. Both are found in higher concentrations in waste water in London’s sewers, where they enter the system in urine, but their presence in the river clearly reflects the city’s insatiable tastes.

Where studies in other cities show cocaine use rises and falls, weekday levels are particularly high in London, which in 2016 had the second highest concentration per litre in Europe after Antwerp. About 7.5kg of the drug is snorted or smoked here every day, Barron says, noting that ‘it’s more of an everyday drug in London, which is quite frightening’.

‘The river is very much a barometer for society,’ explains Kate Sumnall, curator of the Museum of London’s Secret Rivers exhibition, which is currently plotting a meandering human history back to the Romans 2,000 years ago. ‘If you do a visit down to the foreshore and look at some of the detritus of modern life that’s washed up, you’ll see a mirror to us.’

New habits mingle with old — we remain a superstitious people. ‘The story has it that when you find an artefact, it’s something that a sailor has thrown in, like a good luck charm,’ says David Hiddleston, a licensed mudlark (you need a permit) who picks detritus from the Thames’s shore. The river is flooded with ‘tales waiting to tell themselves’, says Hiddleston. Take the wedding and engagement rings he’s found in greater quantities near Wapping tavern sites, ‘where lovers have sat, had arguments and threw their wedding bands in’. Or a coconut containing ‘a 52g, 24-carat gold statuette of a Hindu god’, which he believes was either ceremonial or a discreet disposal of a spent artefact; and the ash remains of an American man set afloat by his family ‘because he loved London’. Or a set of ‘untraceable’ Second World War medals that ‘as an ex-military man myself, I can tell you some returning soldier will have thrown into the waters thinking, “I went to war for what?”’ The river is where we try to forget ourselves, Hiddleston says. But it remembers.

Our litre sample of Thames water, which spends four minutes being filtered and tested using mass spectrometry equipment at King’s College, is screened for 200 compounds. It passes through an electric field within a lab device that looks like a large coffee machine, separating and counting them. King’s was the first lab in the world to pick up explosive residues in the London water network — DNT and TNT in the wastewater — and Barron has been funded to be a ‘first alert’ for the manufacture of improvised explosives by terrorists in the capital. The Thames is coloured by the dangers of modern society. Today, though, the waters are becalmed.

Our preoccupation with preventative medicine is obvious from what is found in the water. Antihistamines spike in the summer as pollen counts climb (in the winter, we see more antibiotics as bugs go round). Painkillers — or analgesics — are prevalent too. We’re a society conditioned for comfort but, interestingly, these only began showing up in such vast quantities in the early Noughties. Professor Michael Depledge, professor of environment and human health at Exeter University and former chief scientist of the Environment Agency, ascribes this to ‘an ageing population who are looking to manage aches and pains from their 40s onwards’. Tramadol, a prescribed opioid, is here in quantities of 161ngl; amphetamines, antipsychotics, beta-blockers and antidepressants are all here too.

‘The problem with a lot of these drugs is that they’re designed to hang around in the body’s system, meaning they’re too powerful to be filtered in waste treatment,’ says Dr Alice Baynes, a research fellow in aquatic biology at Brunel University, who helped determine that high levels of oestrogen in the Thames were causing male fish to produce eggs. Antidepressants make for happy fish, she says, but also confused ones, more likely to swim towards predators. ‘The Thames runs through approaching nine million people, and a lot of people who are depressed,’ says Hiddleston, who talks of the human bodies mudlarks find washed up. He says that, on average, one body a week washes up along the banks — he’s personally found two. ‘And that’s sad. But it’s an honest river.’

There are also farm pesticides — including fenuron, a banned substance, found today in concentrations of 169ngl, as well as steroids, which Baynes says are likely to be from farmers trying to induce livestock to procreate at the same time. But if all this sounds like a desperate picture… well, it’s complicated. The river is much cleaner than it was in 1950, when it was so starved of air as pollutants leached oxygen that there were no fish living there (it was technically declared ‘dead’). Then, according to the Environment Agency, 1,000 tonnes of polluting load entered the river a day — by 2000, this had fallen to 118 tonnes a day.

There are fewer shopping trolleys and wheelie bins thrown out, partly due to stricter penalties introduced by successive pollution acts. But new habits are reshaping the environment. ‘In Putney, we find reefs 50 metres by 20 metres made of wet wipes,’ says AJ McConville, one of the citizen scientists at clean waterways charity Thames 21. ‘That’s 200 so-called “flushables” per square metre.’ McConville says consumer habits have been influenced by marketing strategies to swing from tissue paper to wipes in the past decade, and the Thames is bearing the cost.

The river knows us, it seems. And it all comes out in the wash.

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