Anewly hatched coot chick, limp teaspoonful of saturated feather and weightless bone, sprawls on the surface of Waterworks River. Seventy miles away, the 66,433-tonne Chinese container ship Xin Yan Tai, 280 metres long and carrying the equivalent of 5,688 lorryloads, nestles into its berth at Felixstowe, while drivers on the A12, A14, M3, M25, M1, A1 and M6 check the traffic news.
For the coot, now bucking in the wake of British Waterways’ 150-horsepower rigid inflatable boat, there is a miracle. The helmsman, soft of heart as he is craggy of feature, kills the throttle, scoops up the barely alive morsel and returns it to the reeds. For everyone else, it’s business as usual. Felixstowe’s cranes pluck like ravens at the ship’s innards. Traffic on the M3, M25 and M6 closes up, stops, starts and stops again. Such is the UK’s “integrated transport policy” – so good you have to queue for it.
What connects the hatchling to the ocean giant and the clogged motorways is our peculiar ambivalence to our greatest national asset, and a transport system whose presiding geniuses are habit, expediency and chaos. If globalism has a downside, then this is it. Decisions crucial to our quality of life are being dictated not in the mutant, stakeholder English of the UK government but in unfamiliar languages from foreign boardrooms. The reasons are simple: world trade is dominated by container ships whose statistics are beyond the ken of anyone who thinks aircraft carriers are big. Even the Xin Yan Tai is no contender for the record books. The biggest ship ever to put in at Felixstowe was the 106,700-tonne Xin Los Angeles, also Chinese-owned, which stretches 337 metres from end to end and can hold 9,560 20ft-long freight containers (or 9,560 lorries’ worth). At its Trinity and Landguard terminals, the port altogether operates nine container berths. Eight of the 10 ships that docked there on the same day as Xin Yan Tai were bigger than the Royal Navy’s flagship, the aircraft carrier Invincible.
Owners of such colossi will never run them inefficiently. They want maximum cargoes, direct routes and no hanging about for tides or berths. There is no time for diversions into remote backwaters such as the North Sea. Felixstowe and Southampton may be convenient stop-offs on routes to Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg, but in any language (and especially Chinese) a 250-mile detour to the Tees is nonsensical. If there is no berth available in the south, then they’ll steam straight on to Rotterdam, and the UK can fetch what it needs from there. Hence the concentration of deep-water container berths in what planners call the GSE – the greater southeast – and the scramble to build a whole lot more.
Hence, too, anxiety in the GSE as it anticipates yet more pressure on its overloaded roads, and the clamour from the Freight Transport Association for yet more tarmac. Meanwhile, one of the most brilliantly engineered trading networks in the history of commercial enterprise – Britain’s inland waterways – has been reborn as a linear holiday resort and our coastal waters are ignored. The harder you look at it, the crazier it gets.
Waterworks River is part of a nearly forgotten web of backwaters, the Bow Back Rivers, following the course of the River Lea north of its confluence with the Thames, which was once east London’s main commercial artery. Never pretty, it drew to its banks the kind of bad-neighbour industries – scrap metal, garbage, chemical works, car breakers’ yards, sewerage – that were unwanted anywhere else (though it also had three handsome mills and a gin distillery). Its concrete banks were last reinforced in the 1930s and barge traffic had mostly petered out by the 1950s.
For all but four hours of the day it’s now all but unnavigable. When the tide turns, it drains right down to the mud (sometimes houseboats get so firmly stuck in it, they are unable to rise on the flood and are overwhelmed). Wherever you look, there is something abandoned, swinging on its hinges or scabbed with corrugated iron. Even the buddleia and Japanese knotweed bursting through the banks appear to extinguish life rather than embrace it. And yet, in a multiplicity of ways, these are rivers of hope.
The half-dead coot made its first attempt to swim right next to the designated site of the 2012 Olympic aquatic centre. Waterworks River and the Old River Lea, into which it transmutes at Stratford, will be the design focus of the Olympic Park, wellspring of a reinvented, self-confident East End. The banks will be terraced; river bed cleared; bridges removed or realigned; new ones built. In all but grid reference it will become an entirely new place, delivered from another planet.
But that is not why British Waterways wants to show it off. The revival of Waterworks River need not be just a landscaper’s dream. There is real work for it to do. The construction of the Olympic site – stadium, velodrome, aquatic centre, basketball and hockey venues, the athletes’ village, food halls, roads and vehicle parks – will require a small mountain of aggregates, asphalt, cement, steel, glass, wood and concrete, thousands upon thousands of lorryloads that, in the Blackwall tunnel and on east London’s already log-jammed streets, would guarantee gridlock. The salving balm, green as you like, is the waterway system.
What the Bow Back Rivers were in the past, they can be again. All that’s needed is a £15m lock on Prescott Channel (no, it’s nothing to do with that Prescott), and for the first time in 40 years the level above Three Mills Island can be controlled and the navigation reopened. This is the plan, which now waits only upon a funding package that British Waterways hopes to wrap up shortly. The lock would enable the passage, two at a time, of 350-tonne barges, each the equivalent of 14 25-tonne lorries. Richard Rutter, BW’s regeneration manager, calculates that the overall saving would be at least 100,000 road journeys at greatly reduced cost and minimal noise and pollution. After the Olympics, the river will make an ideal exit path for east London’s garbage – another 250,000 tonnes a year taken off the roads. It is, as Rutter puts it, “a no-brainer”, and the only puzzle is why water transport was not made a planning condition in the first place.
In continental Europe, waterways have never been swallowed by “heritage”. You would never hear a German say – as an official of British Waterways (not Rutter) said to me – that advocates of waterborne freight were “romantics”. Nor would you stand on a bridge over the Rhine, as I did above the Thames at Westminster, and see nothing but tour boats. In Germany, 64.3% of freight travels by waterway; in the UK, less than 1% does.
Sadly, there seem to be some people within the now leisure-dominated waterways industry who won’t cheer too hard for the Bow Backs in case they are seen as a precedent.
As recently as 1995-6, 3.7m of freight was carried this way, but much of this was coal. With coal out of the picture, the figure slumped to 1.6m in 2004-5, though it crept up again to 1.8m last year. This was due mainly to the aggregate company Cemex, which began using barges to carry sand and gravel on the River Severn. All you need to make sense of this is basic numeracy. Each barge carries the equivalent of more than 20 lorryloads but uses only a fiftieth of the fuel needed by a single lorry. Cemex’s barges on the Severn will save 34,000 road journeys a year.
