It's Getting Harder to Dismiss the Thames as That 'Dirty Old River'

I’m not going in there. For centuries, this would have been any sane person’s response to the idea of jumping into the Thames in London. A murky (but economically vital) slug trail running thick with noxious ooze, dunking in London’s river was about as appealing as swimming in a spittoon. Dickens got it right when he depicted the river as a place from which bodies were trawled or, further downstream, where a convict could escape across sludgy marshes from a prison ship. But could the Thames finally be shedding its muddy reputation for good?

Looking at the recent stream of good news about the river, it looks like it already has. Thanks to improved sewage treatment, water quality has been steadily improving since the mid 1960s. So radical has the river’s turnabout been that the Indian government has been looking at the Thames as a possible model for cleaning the Ganges. This summer, almost a thousand seals have been spotted in the once moribund Thames Estuary. As this marine mammal map shows, some of the spottings were so close to London’s built-up area that the harbor seals in question might almost have been caught on a commute into town.