Our dynamic estuary has history and a great future

Every since Julius Caesar spat contempt at the estuary (“dreary and unfit for human habitation”, he called it), it has been dismissed as the unfashionable end of the Thames. One writer even called it “the bum end of the Royal River” (me actually - sorry).

All that has now changed, almost at the speed of the turning tide. Everyone wants a piece of the estuary. Canvey Island, for instance, has woken up to what one local letting agent calls “a yupee invasion”. The trend has been noted by perhaps the island's most famous resident, Wilko Johnson. He says: “All sorts of unlikely people are getting fascinated by Canvey.”

Big things are happening on the estuary mud. They include the birth of two new supertowns on the Essex shoreline, Barking Riverside and Purfleet-on Thames.

Barking Riversidewill soon be home to 50,000 homeowners, on the site of an old power station and the sort of no-man's marshland that is Essex's unique contribution to landscape.

Barking Riverside has been dubbed by its developers “Barcelona-on-Thames”. Its key feature will be a wide, two-mile promenade along the riverfront.

The dogs and I tried to road test this promenade, but right now Barking Riverside is just a vast building site. Rising above the mud and the JCBs, however, is a finished building. A site demountable? No, it is a university, signifying the high ambitions for things to come.

Barking Riverside will galvanise the transformation of the Essex riverside from industrial wasteland to cool postcode. Even in its unreconstituted state, bereft of Barcelonas, the Thames Estuary has had its cheerleaders, including celebrities.

One leading fan is Simon Schama, TV's history king, currently presenting the new BBC series Civilisations (along with history queen, Mary Beard). Once, again, Schama travels to some of the most exotic places on earth. Yet he keeps talking wistfully about the landscape of his own childhood. His home town? Southend.

This was the setting that shaped his historical awareness, and particularly his sense of the role of landscape in human affairs. In his memoir Landscape and Memory, he recalls with affection “the low, gull-swept estuary, the marriage bed of salt and fresh water, stretching as far as I could see from my northern Essex bank”. He also trashes anywhere that does not belong to this world, referring to “a thin black horizon on the other side. That would be Kent, the sinister enemy.”

His one regret, he claimed in an article in the FT, was that he never encountered the young Helen Mirren. “Growing up almost down the road from her in Westcliff and Leigh-on-Sea, how the hell did I manage to miss her on the Southend mud or at the back of the Leigh cockle sheds?”

Around the same time, but a few miles up-estuary, a bunch of Canvey-bred lads were heading off the island, and into London, there to entertain an army of fans ranging from Princess Diana to George Melly.

The crowds who flocked to listen to the Dr Feelgooders were also fascinated by the place they came from. Many had never even heard of Canvey, let alone been there. Dr Feelgood played up this sense of a mysterious presence to the hilt. In the band's biopic, Oil City Confidential, Wilko Johnson hails the result of this PR operation. “Canvey acquired romance. We saw to that...we did a good job. Thousands of tourists now flock there from all four corners of the earth.”

One of these tourists was Madness lead singer Suggs. In Oil City Confidential, he recalls being smitten by the romance of Canvey. “We thought it was some lost island of rhythm and blues.” Actually, that description wasn't far off the truth.

Julien Temple's film looks back to the roots of Dr Feelgood on Canvey. It was a still remote place, with an intense sense of community, still reeling from the 1953 flood disaster. It does not take much to appreciate why such a place was as awash with original music, as it was with water. The Canvey sound became the signature music of the Thames Estuary.

Oil City Confidential was released in 2009 to loud press cheers (Mojo: “the dog's bollocks”). The film is as much a tribute to Canvey as it is to the band. Surviving Feelgoods roam settings such as the Monico, the Labworth sea-wall, and the grassed-over 15ft rubbish tip known, with typical local, as Canvey Heights.

Music apart, the estuary has also been the inspiration for great literature. A century before Feelgood, an even more illustrious fan of the estuary took up residence on the Kentish heights, opposite Canvey Island.

Charles Dickens moved to Gadshill Place in 1856. By now wealthy, and one of the most famous men in the world, he could have made his home anywhere. He chose the Thames marshland. Here he went on living until his death on June 9 1870. Here, inspired by the view from his study window, he wrote one of his most famous novels, Great Expectations.

[Last week] a stage version of Great Expectations played to packed houses at the Palace Theatre, Westcliff. Audiences only had to walk down Hamlet Court Road and look out over the mudflats to see the place where most of the story is set.

Dickens got in early on the local property ladder. But he could by no means claim to have “discovered” the Thames Estuary. In 1066, following the Battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror arrived in London to take up the throne. He took one look a his new capital city, and decided it wasn't for him. Instead, he moved to a downriver site, and made his royal abode in an altogether more idyllic spot. The name of that place? Barking.

Tom King is the author of The Essex Joke Book and The London Joke Book.