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Comment by veunes | Hacker News Reader

I was surprised to know that you can swim in the Thames. There are a number of designated swimming spots along the Thames, where it is safer to swim. These spots are usually located in areas with calmer water and less boat traffic.

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Generally, I wouldn't get in the water anywhere after Teddington Lock, because it gets very tidal, very quickly. I grew up and lived in that part of London and sections of Twickenham are regularly flooded, plus cars are regularly swept into the Thames at Richmond despite warnings and it's very quick.

This link covers that whole stretch: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.444296,-0.3255391,15z?entr...

I have ended up in Thames somewhere past London Bridge, I think, forced into wading through the mud to try and dislodge our dinghy that my perennially headlong friend had gotten stuck, and IT WAS NOT FUN, not even Type 2 fun.

At the other end, by Teddington Lock Bridge, kids are always in the water. There is a weir not far, which I regard as a "drowning machine" because it is, but the area is quite agreeable.

Here's the Teddington Lock section: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.4306101,-0.3207403,435m/da...

Isleworth Ait, seen here, is frequently so empty of water that one can see the boats keels lying on the bottom:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.4684678,-0.3166315,1733m/d...

Street view showing how empty it is in both directions: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.4672369,-0.3218927,3a,75y,...

This spot is especially not to be fucked with, as conditions can change quickly and the treated sewage from Mogden Works ends up here. I love the Thames and have never lived more than a short walk from it, but I have a nervous respect for it, plus I am a rubbish swimmer.

I wouldn’t swim in any bodies of water in the UK at the moment, there’s a massive scandal with the privatised sewage companies paying massive dividends to shareholders while neglecting the infrastructure and repeatedly dumping raw sewage straight into waterways.

I grew up swimming in our local river. Obviously the river Thames is a different kind of beast with currents, etc.

However I nowadays would be very reluctant for swimming in rivers as soon as one is downstream of a sewer leading into the waters.

Furthermore the river I swam in is downstream of an area that industrially was heavily involved in galvanics. While the water itself is clean, who knows what heavy metals are still in the river bed and mud.

I can only imagine what the mud of the river Thames and its sources contains.

Oh and even in the mountains I remember how - on a hike - a friend contemplated drinking from that clear water stream shooting down the rocks and was glad not to have done that after seeing the poop from geese and cattle just a 100 m upstream.

Amoeba, E. coli etc are not fun.

Regarding drinking from streams, back in the mid-90’s I did a camping/hiking excursion with Outward Bound in the Appalachians of North Carolina.

We sourced all our drinking water from streams, using concentrated iodine to make the water drinkable (I think we had to wait 30 mins for it to take effect).

There was one part of the journey where we ran out of water and couldn’t drink from a nearby small river because it was downstream of a paper processing factory. And we had to go out of our way using old school topographical maps (which we used for all our navigation) to find another water source and hope it was available and flowing.

My comment of course was primarily about the swimming part (you involuntarily swallow some water).

Youtube is full of methods for making water safe on hiking trips / camping etc. Boiling can also be a honking great idea of course.

Boiling helps with bacteria, but not with toxic chemicals from factories. You need to capture evaporated water (or steam from boiling the water).

i worked for a university of london microbiology department in the early 80s, and one of my least favourite tasks was to go down to the thames (i used steps outside the national theatre) and get a couple of litres of river water for the students to experiment with. jesus, you would not believe the bacterial load in there! but i believe things have got better since then.

Never drink from a river that’s downstream of farm land (without thoroughly boiling the water), either. You might be thinking ‘yeah, cows and sheep poop outside’ but they also sometimes wander off, die and leave their rotting corpses in the stream.

> Never drink from a river that’s downstream of farm land

This. More so I’d be concerned about pesticides (arable).

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