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Hello and welcome to Spectator Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor-dictator, and this

week I'm very pleased to be joined by Caroline Crampton, who's the author of a new book called The Way to

the Sea, the Forgotten Histories of the Thames estries. Caroline, welcome. This is a book about the

Thames as a whole, not just the estuary, isn't it?

But it's also a very personal book. Can you say in what way it's personal, how it comes to be your story as well as the story of the river?

Well, it starts with my parents who, when they were about the age I am now, so in their early 30s, they'd been born and bred in South Africa, decided that they wanted

to get out of there, it was the early 80s, and they built a boat, and they sailed it to Britain.

They ended up in the Thames estuary coming into London, and at that point they sort of realized,

well, it's a bit late for us to go south now. It's taken months to get here, and we've only just arrived.

So they came in through the estuary, and they ended up living on the boat for six months over the winter in St. Catherine's Dock just by Tower Bridge.

Then they kind of thought, well, maybe we don't really want to go back there, maybe we want to stay here. My dad is a steel engineer and the job he got was at the

steelworks on the Isle of Sheppey way out in the Thames estuary. So that's where they moved to

and that's where they were living when I was born. So that's how my connection with the estuary

began really, this pure chance that they happened to, you know, decide to come in on the boat through the Thames rather than, you know, the Humber or something.

What did, I mean, it's slightly parenthetical, but what did cause them to think we'll build a

boat and go from South Africa to London? I mean, it's not something everybody does.

Well, it was, yeah, it was, I think, initially, my parents love a project. They always have loved a project. And the project's got progressively larger as they found their feet as a couple, you know, through their 20s and so on. And they'd, you know, done up houses, they'd climbed mountains. And I think they moved from, they were originally from Johannesburg. They moved to Cape Town for work. You know, they lived right by the sea.

They had no background and sailing, no family interest, no inherited knowledge of the sea.

But they just thought it's there.

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