How The Thames, Once a ‘Zombie River,’ Was Brought Back to Life

[DGUtley]

How The Thames, Once a ‘Zombie River,’ Was Brought Back to Life

Sharks, beavers, and humans are all returning to London’s iconic waterway thanks to decades of restoration work.

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AROUND 200 YEARS AGO, DURING the Industrial Revolution, London’s River Thames was both a hub of trade and transport and a dumping ground for human excretion and industrial waste. The cradle of England’s industrial heritage was quickly becoming a glorified sewer. The stench was so unbearable during the sweltering summer of 1858 that it forced some government offices on the riverbank to close. That summer earned the nickname “the Great Stink.”

The Great Stink never garnered the notoriety of London’s Great Fire or Great Plague, although we can at least thank the stench for inspiring the invention of the modern sewage system. But the Thames didn’t hit rock bottom until 1957, when the city’s Natural History Museum declared the river “biologically dead.” Wildlife that hadn’t fled were expiring in the water. On the Thames, The Guardian would write two years later, “people were living near and working on what was to all intents and purposes an open sewer.”


This past November, a health checkup by the Zoological Society of London revealed what the group hadn’t seen in the River Thames for more than 60 years: promising signs of life. Hundreds of species, including 115 types of fish, 6-foot sharks, seahorses, eels, and the occasional stray whale now call the body home. The Thames—the River of Death, the zombie river—can finally shed its “biologically dead” label, according to the society’s report. The resurrection has brought benefits both to the creatures who dwell within it and the ones who live, work, and play on its banks.


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https://www.atlasobscura.com/article...e-river-thames