As many of you will know the nature of Aveley Bay means that it acts as some sort of rubbish receptacle for the River Thames as the circulating waters of the bay collect and deposit almost anything that is floating around in the Thames on our little precious piece of saltmarsh.
Back in pre and post Victorian times it was well known as a Dead Man’s Point where anyone unlucky enough to find themselves floating face down in Old Father Thames may well wash up where the Mudlarks would scavenge for anything valuable along the tideline. This may well include a corpse or two to sell as a cadaver to medical school or such like or perhaps just a new pair of shoes. Over the last fifteen years we have had a cow and a porpoise wash up but thankfully no humans although we have wrecks of gentlemans combs, tennis balls (usually after Wimbledon!) and coconuts... oh and several messages in bottles...
Mudlarking about...
Things have changed somewhat but the rubbish that now arrives over a high tide is far more damaging and disturbing. It is not the huge timbers and pieces of timber that cause a problem – in fact they are undoubtedly beneficial to the ecosystem that lives on the marsh – it is the plastic which ranges in size from litter bin covers from central London, down through countless drinks bottles to bottle tops and unbelievably the little blue plastic sticks that make up cotton wool buds! Who actually flushes these down the loo??!
This leaves us with a job on our hands and as such we hold regular events to help tidy up this human created mess.
This was the foreshore after the high tides of January 2014...
Last week we had a great team from HSBC come down and join our own enthusiastic Wardening work party for a few hours of collecting. In this time they collected sixty black bin bags of plastic which they put into a huge skip kindly donated by Veolia who will themselves sort through it and recycle as appropriate.
It was a huge skip... this is only 60 bags! We filled it by the end of the week!
There will probably be a couple of public volunteering days throughout the year for this lovely job as well as ragwort pulling out on the marsh so keep on the blog for more details!
Howard Vaughan, Information Officer