Mud-gilded places

Part water, part earth and a habitat of constant movement, the bleak and desolate estuary environment is an acquired taste. Yet this monochrome minimalism can be paradise, finds John Lewis-Stempel

- John Lewis-Stempel

IN the estuary, worlds meet, combine, finish. Not only the various states of Nature-the freshwater of the outgoing river, first embracing, then battling the incoming saline sea, merely to dissolve into oceanic extinction-but human states, too.

I know of no more perfect exemplar of the estuary phenomenon than the Thames at Tilbury. You take the c2c train from Fenchurch Street, London, proceed 20 miles as the gull flies, disembark, take the uncharter'd, lager-can-strewn streets down to where the old Thames doth flow... and there is a clapperboard pub at the end of the lane, surrounded by nibbled grass and piebald ponies.

The pub is called The World's End. If it had pirates sitting outside, you would say: 'Of course.' Up to East Tilbury, the tidal Thames could be mistaken for a river. After Tilbury, the Thames is unmistakably an estuary, a quintessential estuary. The water widens, the view opens, the sky enlarges. It is a primitive landscape/waterscape of horizontals: foreshore, water, foreshore.

On the nose, the tang of salt and rotten egg of silt (as opposed to the weedy, wet-dog sniff from a river) and in the soul, the ingress of solitude. Paradigms of ecology, history, spirituality, society shift. At Tilbury, the metropolitan South-East becomes estuarine Essex, with its gravel pits, waste dumps, docks and petrochemical plants all the proletarian mechanisms that allow the glamorous façade of London to perform.