I am one of those unfortunate people who suffers from travel sickness so I can't read in traffic nor sit backwards on buses which rules out at least 8 of the seats on the new Boris Buses. However I had never anticipated that I would feel seasick on the Thames!
This feeling came over me during the recent
Thames Festival when I was volunteering at the
RNLI's busiest lifeboat station -
Tower RNLI which is a floating station situated south of Somerset House just next to Waterloo Bridge. The station rises and falls with the tide and is also affected to a degree by passing boats especially Thames Clippers. I love the beginning of this time-lapse
film of 24 hours in the life of Tower RNLI showing the station rising with the tide.
Thankfully sucking a Gin Gin (a ginger sweet - nothing to do with gin!) made the nauseous feeling disappear but I did have to escape to dry land at lunchtime! Bizarrely in the afternoon/evening I was fine.
Until
last year I am ashamed to say I was one of the high percentage of Londoners who had no idea
that there was one lifeboat station on the Thames, let alone four. After the
report into the 1989 Marchioness disaster was published the RNLI was asked to set up bases on the Thames. The RNLI lifeboats now cover the Thames with stations at Gravesend, Chiswick and Teddington as well as this one on the north side of Waterloo Bridge. Tower RNLI was originally based at Tower Pier but the facilities weren't ideal. In 2006 they moved into their current location in the former floating police station which they bought for a £1 (which was then donated back).
A
year on from our tour and the Westminster Guides have kept in touch and so it was
that a number of us volunteered to help them with some public tours they were doing as part of the Thames Festival. As with our own tour the year before
tours can be privately booked by any interested group - you don't have to wait for open days such as this. The tour includes a talk about the lifeboat - as long as it hasn't been called out and looking at the kit and if time permits you may be able to try some of the kit on! All the kit is designed solely for use by the RNLI and the Thames' wear differs slightly from that of coast based stations as all the volunteer crew are on site for an entire shift and can be ready to go only 90 seconds after the alarm has sounded.