River Thames 🐋 Continental waters dotted with a polluting history 🐭🐬

It would have cost England a great deal to experience early economic and social development without this imposing navigable tributary. Now, the River Thames carries with it a health history of suffering and calamity. Between 1348 and 1350, a pandemic broke out in the heart of London that resulted in its population, statistically speaking, a third of its inhabitants died because of the spread of the enterobacteria Yersinia pestis, a potent pathogen that spread through the flea of rodents (Xenopsylla cheopis) and from rats to humans by the uncontrolled population as a result of inadequate management of waste and solid waste and liquid effluents.

You can see the characteristic color of this beautiful tributary born in the stony Cotswold mountains nestled in the southeast and southwest of England, traveling about 346 kilometers to expand and flow into the majestic estuary that embraces it with the North Sea.

When at first glance one observes this immense body of water and is unaware of its history, one would never think that in the middle of the 20th century it was declared biologically dead by the health authorities.

Two-thirds of the London population's drinking water comes from this river.

Lessons on environmental sanitation were learned at the cost of thousands of human deaths, without diminishing the importance that aquatic biota was severely reduced by the focus of contamination and exhaustion of oxygen in the water.

Beneath its aquatic bed underlies one of the most emblematic works of transport, which began in 1800 and ended in 1843, the architects Thomas Cochrane and Marc Isambard Brunel would be the designers of this tunnel of six meters high by 11 wide.

It was a work of stature and advanced technology for the time. What better way for England to position itself as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution?

This aquatic colossus has more than 30 bridges that interconnect the northern and southern axes of the city. From high points of the city can be seen, as well as, many species that have experienced their repopulation thanks to an effective program of decontamination and protection that began more than 70 years ago.

So much for my ecological, touristic and historical sharing.

References

River Thames. link
Canal boat rentals on the Thames. link

• Iphone 4 mobile equipment was used for the photographs.