Sam Wollaston, for The Guardian, has been delving into the history of the Thames Estuary with Caroline Crampton, whose debut The Way to the Sea is published this week by Granta:

A literary dredger, she chugs downstream slowly (but with much more elegance than the literal dredger), scooping up stories of maritime disasters, floods and cholera, slavery, prison hulks, political upheaval, the rise of the far right, sewerage. When she is not on the estuary, she is travelling by foot along the Thames Path, which we are sitting beside. She finds joy – mudlarkers and archaeologists, happy sailing trips, the vast skies and light that Turner sought to capture – as well as sorrow and mud… She twists her own story, and the stories of the other storytellers, into the tale of the river, splicing it into something not only scholarly, but purposeful and personal, too.