Free Downstream by Caitlin Davies

good place to drown yourself in,’ comments the narrator of
Three Men in a Boat
, while
Dickens’s Dictionary of the Thames
notes, ‘It is notorious to all rowing men and
habitués
of the river.’ The Pool of Tears in
Alice in Wonderland
was a result of Carroll’s visit to Sandford, while Michael Llewelyn Davies, one of the inspirations for Peter Pan, drowned here in 1921. The lasher is described on modern maps as a treacherous weir pool with a very strong undercurrent, while the lock has the deepest drop on the non-tidal Thames.
    While people still swim at Tumbling Bay and Port Meadow today, bathing in the Thames around Oxford is the subject of repeated warnings in the local press. It may once have been normal for schoolchildren to be taken to the river to learn to swim, a basic skill that everyone needed to know, but according to the media today it’s a dangerous pursuit. ‘The deadly lure of deep water during sunny spells has once again proved fatal,’ reported the
Oxford Times
in 2000, following ‘a long list of tragedies’. Youngsters are told ‘not to indulge in the dangerous “sport” of jumping into the water from river bridges’, and the Environment Agency (EA) estimates that ‘between 50 and 100 children a day can be found playing unaccompanied along the Thames’ as a whole. Swimming, it cautions, should always take place under adult supervision and ‘preferably in a swimming pool’.
    The EA, established in 1996, is the navigational authority on the Thames, operating under legislation that goes back to Magna Carta, and owns the forty-one locks on the upper Thames, where swimming is banned, as it is in weirs. It is responsible for registering craft and generally managing any river activity. But Russell Robson, Waterways Team Leader, stresses that there is a free right to use the Thames: ‘we are not the owner of the river or of the water. The riparian landowners have rights to the banks andbed where their land adjoins the river, so if a house has a garden leading down to the riverbank then they own that bank. If you want to dive in we have no powers to stop anyone, but a landowner can restrict access and if there is damage then it’s trespass.’
    While he says that in general people have become ‘softer’ with the introduction of indoor pools, there has also been a growth in mass-participation events on the Thames. ‘People see it as a fantastic backdrop for their event. You get the choice between an idyllic, tree-lined, sun-warmed river, or a twenty-five-metre-long municipal pool with hair floating in it. People have always paddled from the banks, fished, bathed, cleansed and played in it. The perception is it’s getting cleaner, which it is. I grew up in southeast London in the 1970s and the Thames was a floating rubbish dump. Today it’s an ever-improving environment for wildlife, but it’s not bathing water.’ The three main risks are the cold, flooding and possible infection, but ‘if people take precautions there is no reason why they shouldn’t swim’.
    Yet while the EA monitors ecological and biological quality, there are no official bathing waters on the Thames, so it doesn’t test for E. coli or strep. ‘To be brutally honest, it wouldn’t pass bathing water standards,’ says Russell; ‘there is land drainage, water for agriculture and drinking water, power industries and wastewater discharge. Climate change means we have warmer summers and people are attracted to riverbanks. It’s a free activity and it’s more popular now, but that doesn’t mean it’s safe. People still go and swim at Tumbling Bay, although it’s not open any more, and there is a drowning there every few years.’
    Perhaps the most dangerous activity on the Thames is jumping from bridges, which Russell says goes on all over the place with at least one incident every year.