{"id":3795,"date":"2010-02-12T11:59:21","date_gmt":"2010-02-12T11:59:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/?p=3795"},"modified":"2010-02-12T11:59:21","modified_gmt":"2010-02-12T11:59:21","slug":"the-river-thames-in-london-may-soon-have-safe-swimming-beaches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/the-river-thames-in-london-may-soon-have-safe-swimming-beaches\/","title":{"rendered":"The River Thames in London may soon have safe swimming beaches"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A brave girl going for a swim in the River Thames near St Paul's Cathedral in Central London<\/p><\/div>\n

I guess she is going to be OK. If wild swimming takes place in the River Thames upstream, as it does, then the biological hazard should be less in the tidal Thames – because the water is salty and salt is a disinfectant. ‘The discovery of a colony of short-snouted seahorses (Hippocampus hippocampus) living in the Thames means that the London river is becoming cleaner, conservationists said…Scientists from the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) have discovered five seahorses during routine conservation surveys in the Thames estuary in the past 18 months, evidence which they say indicates that a breeding population exists.’ The River Thames Website<\/a> explains the position as follows: ‘The water quality is very good and in fact the tidal Thames is now acknowledged to be one of the cleanest metropolitan rivers in the world’. Thames water is pleasantly warmer than sea water with about 75% of its ‘thermal pollution’ coming from power stations. One man’s thermal pollution is one girl’s heated water. There is also a good supply of mud for her fair skin and she will be able to save money on spa treatments and make a sustainable contribution to combating climate change. One thing which does worry me though is whether she has a sufficient layer of Factor 30 sun screen. If the brave girl is poisoned there will be a public outcry and the River Thames Cleanup, underway since the 1960s, wll then be driven by a popular outcry. I regret that it takes a tragedy to effect reform but as Tertullian remarked, ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church’.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I guess she is going to be OK. If wild swimming takes place in the River Thames upstream, as it does, then the biological hazard should be less in the tidal Thames – because the water is salty and salt is a disinfectant. ‘The discovery of a colony of short-snouted seahorses (Hippocampus hippocampus) living in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,19,23,24],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3795"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardenvisit.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}