Thames21: from the early 1990s to 2024

Published
Opening ceremony at Chinbrook Meadows wetlands in September 2024.

Just like that, 2024 comes to an end. It’s been a busy, exciting, and rewarding year at Thames21. We’re extremely proud of all we have achieved and look forward to continuing to maximise our efforts to protect and restore London’s waterways, engage communities, and connect more people to their blue and green spaces. As we welcome new team members and volunteers to our great troop, we thought we should start our 2024 round-up from the very beginning: how Thames21 began.

Back in the early 1990s, the amount of litter accumulating in the Tidal Thames caused public concern, leading to volunteer action to clean it up. Due to the sheer scale of river pollution, a strategic and organised approach was key to upscale and support community response. Initiated by Keep Britain Tidy, with funding from the Environment Agency, and in partnership with the Port of London Authority, Thames Water, British Waterways, the City of London Corporation, and 19 local authorities, Thamesclean came to life. The initiative was hugely successful, spreading onto the River Thames tributaries and clearing large waste items from the rivers.

What does the ‘21’ in Thames21 stand for?

Working closely with these urban waterways revealed that the issues they faced went well beyond litter: straightened, channelised and lifeless rivers choked by all kinds of pollution and in desperate need of care, protection and restoration. To rise to this challenge, Thamesclean evolved to Thames21. The new name reflected Agenda 21, the blueprint for sustainable development that emerged from the UN’s Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992.

Over the years, Agenda 21 has developed and become the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Thames21 also continued to evolve by developing technical expertise, partnerships with communities and varied stakeholders, and delivering innovative programmes across the Thames River Basin through public and private funding by various charitable trusts and companies.

We’ve come a long way since then, 20 years to be precise, and we did commemorate it in style. We held our Volunteer Awards and 20th-anniversary celebrations at Leaside Trust overlooking the River Lea. It was the perfect opportunity to recognise our amazing volunteers and celebrate our achievements and successes, which were only possible due to their hard work and commitment to our rivers.

Volunteers at the Mama Osun event at Battersea Bridge during London Rivers Week 2024.

This year we started and developed many river restoration projects such as the Roding Rises, Dollis Brook toe board removal, and Floating Pennywort Control in Thamesmead, as well as community engagement initiatives like the Chestnuts Field, Hounslow SuDS, and Beckenham Place Park River Ravensbourne programme.  In the summer, we also collaboratively organised a successful London Rivers Week – a week-long annual campaign inspiring the public to celebrate all of London’s rivers and the many projects taking place to protect them. We engaged nearly 3,000 people across the city.

We also had some important launches: we inaugurated grant schemes to support community action and citizen science as part of EMPOWER Rivers, unveiled a Plastics Action roadmap to help volunteers develop and expand clean-up groups, and launched the Oxford Rivers Portal, which combines different data sets to help people understand the health of the Thames and its tributaries in Oxfordshire –  all with our great partners.

Thames21 staff members Harrison Tremain, Toby Dighero and Carolina Pinto with Desiree Shepherd, from Peabody, at the Social Value Awards 2024.

In other equally important news, we welcomed the previous Government’s plan to ban plastic in wet wipes, a campaign we worked on for years, and had our work recognised at two prestigious awards: the River Restoration Centre’s (RRC) UK River Prize for the Rewilding the Rom project in partnership with Barking and Dagenham Council and the Social Value Award in the ‘Best Innovation Category’ for the collaborative Gallions Lake project.

We couldn’t finish 2024 without thanking our committed and hard-working team, volunteers, funders, trustees and partners. Your time, support, and dedication enable Thames21 to keep working to protect and restore London’s rivers while building climate resilience and connecting communities to their blue spaces. We’d like to say a warm thank you to all of you. We can’t wait to see what 2025 has in store for Thames21 and our rivers.