BBC 1’s Breakfast carried a report to mark the 200 anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. The location report came from North Kent from the Medway Towns that Dickens knew as a child, from Cooling Church and from the evocative North Kent Marshes where Pip’s Great Expectations were launched by his act of kindness to the escaped convict Abel Magwitch.
If, in some crazy future, this area was to be the foundations of a massive four-runway airport and its associated infrastructure, links with our own heritage would be lost and communities destroyed.
Today is also another anniversary – World Wetlands Day celebrates a global convention on wetlands of international importance, in the words of the Ramsar Convention ‘especially as waterfowl habitat’.
The Thames is one of those ‘Ramsar sites’ – the badge of a world class wetland. Ramsar, by the way, is the town in Iran that hosted the conference.
The special waterfowl that depend on the Thames would have been familiar to Pip, but their links to the flats and saltings go back millennia.
In an earlier campaign to protect our estuaries we produced a video called 'Britain’s Other Airports' – highlighting the international arrivals and departures, the throngs of wildfowl and waders that use the Thames and other estuaries as a hub on their great journeys from Arctic breeding grounds to their winter homes further south.
Perhaps 2 February should be the date we celebrate what we have in the Thames, on the doorstep of London, and ensure that reckless flights of fancy no longer threaten its obliteration?
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We too watched the BBC news report and echo every word you say. Evocative images indeed. We live on those very same marshes, have raised our families here and from 2002-2005 alongside RSPB and others we fought with all our might to save this most precious wilderness from becoming the UK's largest airport. The No airport at Cliffe campaign was successful; yet here we are again just a few years later, a new coalition government, and once again our natural and cultural heritage is under threat. It is shameful that on World Wetlands Day 2012 when other countries around the world are celebrating the Ramsar protection afforded to these valuble ecosystems that the UK government are even contemplating the wholesale destruction of these sites in the Thames estuary. We are proud of our natural and cultural heritage and with 'conservation and communities united' we will protect it for future generations to enjoy.
No Estuary Airport
Friends of the North Kent Marshes