Epilogue
As you head west from the mouth of the Estuary into London, the distinctive shape of the giant quay cranes at the London Gateway Port dominates the horizon. They are situated close to Stanford-le-Hope, the village where Joseph Conrad began writing Heart of Darkness. The novel opens with a description of the Thames Estuary as the launching place of England’s great ships, where Sir Francis Drake sailed past on the Golden Hind, which was full of treasure, capturing the imperial ambitions of the nation of the time: ‘What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.’
Over a century later, this language sounds eerily close to the marketing copy used for the new DP World super port, which aims to become the new gateway for globalization to the UK, with deep-sea access for the ‘largest container ships the world has ever seen’. Within the next few years, the London Gateway Port will be completed: it will be the most automated deep-water super port in the world.
I visited the place myself. It looks completely different from anywhere else along the Estuary foreshore, with acres of desert-like sand fields, new roads, surveillance systems, mirrored office buildings and an extremely clean, clinical, almost silent, high-functioning quayside dominated by colossal quay cranes. Few workers were visible on site. Containers were lifted from the ships by automated cranes, then moved around by automated electric trucks operated by people in an office building sitting in front of computer screens. The equipment at the port is hybrid – part diesel, part electric – which means that when a crane goes down it generates power for the next one to go up. Outside, ‘the boxes are everywhere, mobile and anonymous, their contents hidden from view’ (The Forgotten Space, 2010, Noël Burch and Alan Sekula).
DP World have clearly worked hard to keep the construction process as sustainable as possible, in terms of materials, water and energy management. Their environmental and ecological programme is also impressive: they have created new natural habitats for over 320,000 animals; they have cut ditches, scrapes and fleets for birdlife, dug out new ponds and enhanced old bodies of water to create the right depth for rare great-crested newts. Contaminated soil from the decommissioned oil refinery has been cleaned up and recycled. They have built a public bridleway around the site and another nature reserve, working with local schools, the Essex Wildlife Trust and the Royal Society for the Preservation of Birds.
Thousands of jobs will eventually be created for local people at the London Gateway Port and in the surrounding logistics park. The discovery of the Roman salt works, along with the rediscovery of the London and the examination and preservation of many other significant shipwrecks and archaeological finds in the Estuary have all been made possible because of funding by DP World.
‘The chaps from Tilbury Docks, the stevedores and the lashers, wanted to come and have a look at this place,’ said the environment officer who showed me around. ‘They were absolutely astounded. The working environment, the gym facilities, the canteen – they could not believe it.’ Many people locally are positive about the new port. Keith Toms, the retired river tugman, said: ‘It won’t be the same as the docks in my day, but it’s better than the void that was left after the docks shut down. I remember, we went into the Royal Docks when it was finishing … The desolation still makes me feel emotional. It was just empty. Now you can look at the new port and say, “Maybe life is coming back to the river.” ’
Globally, sea trade is booming. Ninety per cent of the world’s cargo is now transported by sea, on the biggest ships ever constructed. The largest of these deep-hulled container ships are over five storeys high, more than 1,300 feet long, and with a capacity to hold 18,000 containers. They consume up to 380 tons of fuel per day and emit as much pollution as 50 million cars in one year. These giant vessels are the biggest single polluters of the environment on our planet – yet they are a much more eco-friendly method of transporting freight than by road or air, more fuel-efficient per volume shipped than either of the alternatives.
The majority of the cargo on the behemoths travelling up the Thames Estuary to the new port will have been manufactured in China and the Far East. Burch and Sekula’s epic documentary The Forgotten Space (2010) explores the modern story of globalization and the sea by tracking contemporary maritime trade through the ‘life history’ of containers. The filmmakers traversed the globe, shooting footage on container ships, in factories, dockyards and freight warehouses, focusing on the testimony of the (often) marginalized people found working in the industry today, often under deplorable working conditions.
The Forgotten Space looks inside the contemporary sea economy of the container ship, revealing the true price that people all over the world are paying for the West’s insatiable desire for cheap goods. The majority of such goods will now enter Britain via the Estuary and the London Gateway Port, exerting their toll on the environment and the local ecology.
The impact of the dredging on the fragile ecosystem of the Thames Estuary may have already been extremely damaging, as many people I spoke to whilst researching this book seem to believe. Even the young environment officer who showed me around said, ‘I can’t look you in the eye and say that the dredging work has not had an impact on the river, but it will recover. It is a strong environment. It will come back.’ I expect he is right. In the 1950s, the Thames Estuary was declared biologically dead. Now, seals and other wildlife are thriving and the water is cleaner than ever – but the long-term impact of hundreds of thousands of container ships moving along the Estuary, polluting the atmosphere and the water of this unique environment, may yet prove to be catastrophic and irreversible.
The new port has already begun to shape and define the future use and character of this historic waterway. When I walked along the coastline with Iain Sinclair, we visited Tilbury Fort and spoke to a man at the reception desk. He talked dolefully about the bright lights of the container port’s twenty-four-hour city, the lorries coming and going all the time, the sirens and hooters creating a throbbing, electronic zone that now dominates all the former places of melancholic memory along that coast.
The development of the new port and the big ships that travel there from around the globe are part of the continual battle over the space of the Estuary. In the late nineteenth century, steam and sail were in direct conflict over the same territory. Laws were being challenged about the rights of way on the Estuary of sail-powered vessels, and the courts were not able to control the behaviour of steam-powered ships around the wind-powered ships; it was left to the discretion of the captains of the steamships. The Victorian author Richard Jefferies’s essay ‘The Modern Thames’ discusses the newly untouchable steamship and tugboat pilots: ‘They were above the law by virtue of the technological power they were in command of, everything had to get out of their way.’
‘Big ships have obviously been coming into this stretch of water since before the Armada,’ said poet Justin Hopper, ‘but during the Victorian era it happened too quickly. The fishing community had no time to make any adjustments; the steamships were literally slicing through these little fishing smacks. Throughout history, in this location, someone is a victim of the sea grab going on in the Estuary.’
As I disembarked on my final journey for this project, I thought back to that first boat trip on Ideaal over five years before and realized that, since that time, I had achieved little more than to capture some moments, to document an interactive encounter with these locations, to gather personal testimonies and recollections that hopefully resonate within a wider experience of this place. In the end, I feel I have created a kind of collective memory map, attempting to highlight what lies under the watermark, what has been obliterated, what is being obliterated and what is still under threat in this indefinable and beautiful place where past flows into present into past in its eternal rhythm.