For a few weeks in March this year, I culturally appropriated the life of Someone in the City.
I rose at 4am to prepare texts for cross-examinations. I dressed in unaccustomed structured garments with buttons and zips. I galloped up to London Bridge in flat heels to catch a suffocating bus and trotted through swarming streets to an expensive building where I changed to high(ish) heels. One day, I even bought coffee in a takeaway paper cup. Then I descended to a basement in the City of London for a long day of interrogation and legal argument.
While this was a strange new world for me, it wasn’t research for a novel. I was taking part in a Public Inquiry into the proposed Harbour Revision Order (HRO) of the Port of London Authority (PLA). An HRO is a way by which the PLA can change their governing Act without actually going to Parliament. In short, the PLA has been seeking to increase its powers. A number of Thames organisations are strongly opposed to this, and some (including my own) were shocked at the near absence of any provisions, within the proposed changes, to address the climate crisis and rising sea levels.
I won’t pretend that a Public Inquiry isn’t an intimidating process or that it was easy to understand and then learn the rules of engagement. For example, I was not allowed to speak myself but could script speeches for others.
I won’t pretend that I didn’t make mistakes.
But I did attend every single day. I also wrote every day – probably 100,000 words all together in just a couple of months, including the original submissions and the extended Proofs of Evidence. No, it wasn’t a novel, and it certainly wasn’t poetry. But it was all writing, whether detailed cross-examination questions, speaking notes or press releases. One of my pieces caused a colleague to break down mid-sentence, so it wasn’t all dry, legal stuff either.
In fact, all we had were words, which is why this blog is not illustrated - to give a flavour of such intense proceedings conducted almost entirely without pictures or video. Despite large screens in the room, with very few exceptions, the objectors were not permitted to show photos or film of, for example, cormorants wounded by violent wash from speeding Clippers. We couldn't show cruise ship fumes or risky RIB manoeuvres.
But, as we writers know, it is amazing what you can do with words alone.
For a very good, succinct overview of the Inquiry, I recommend this piece by Dr Hilary Pereira of the River Thames Society, a fellow-objector.
My own environmental group is called the River Residents Group (RRG). To the Public Inquiry, the RRG brought a number of issues, some of which have been covered in the press to which I’ll link to at the bottom of this post. The story the press loved most was the one about the enormous charges that the PLA lays on some balcony-owners and the aggression with which the Authority pursues the money. Another was the secrecy and unaccountability of the PLA’s process for granting ‘River Works Licences’, operating as both landlord and Planning authority for the river bed. (‘That’s Uzbekistan!’ former MP Sir Simon Hughes commented in his testimony, in which he called for the PLA’s multiple and sometimes conflicting powers to be disaggregated.)
Nevertheless, the PLA has continued to allow increasing numbers of cruise ships to come in to this area. And no follow-up report was commissioned, as we have verified.
Let’s say the Starburst Celebrity is 16,800 tonnes, 176m long and 22m wide. Let's say she has 518 passengers and crew.
The Starburst Celebrity’s arriving with tugs fore and aft, and at a slow-to-moderate safe speed adapted to the prevailing circumstances and conditions. She has her SAFE RETURN TO PORT document that shows trials have examined risks, failures and ways of dealing with them.
That means that problems are unlikely but not impossible.
Vessel problems can come from mechanical failure and human error. It’s an accumulation of things, sometimes small things individually, that can suddenly escalate into a dangerous situation.
As I've said, all of what I’m about to describe has happened, some of it on the Thames.
In our scenario, somewhere past Tilbury the Starburst Celebrity has suffered a failure on the main electrical switchboard that breaks the connection between the power supply to the engine and steering controls on the bridge. The emergency back-up runs on a battery that’s depleting fast. Alarms are sounding and flashing, but the crew are suffering from the known syndrome of 'alarm overload'. This is, by the way, exactly what happened with the MSC Opera in Venice in June 2019. None of the crew on the Opera’s bridge – or in the engine room – noticed the alarms until it was too late to prevent the 60,000-tonne vessel crashing into a river cruiser and the Zattere embankment, injuring six and causing millions in damage.
Back in London … Just as the Starburst Celebrity reaches Tower Bridge, the emergency system’s back-up batteries run out. The Starburst Celebrity experiences an uncontrolled power surge, something like what apparently happened when the Oceandiva allided with a stationary barge at Erith in June 2023.
The Starburst Celebrity’s tugs – like the tugs of the MSC Opera in Venice – are unable to stop her in time. The Starburst Celebrity veers under Tower Bridge, across the Thames and allides with Tower Millennium Pier.
On the way, she runs down her own fore tug and the battery-hybrid Earth Clipper that is waiting at the Pier.
As she passes it, the Starburst Celebrity also clips Tower Bridge, damaging the bridge’s structure – as happened when HMS Jupiter crashed into London Bridge in 1984 … or as happened in Baltimore in March 2024 when the container ship Dali clipped one of the tiers of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. In that case, the whole bridge came down, and there were fatalities.
Even at low speed, the impact with Tower Bridge has opened a 5-metre gash in the cruise ship’s starboard hull. The Starburst Celebrity does polar cruises so she’s “Ice Class”, meaning a stronger hull. But she was built in 1993 and doesn’t need to conform with post 2010 rules for bunker tanks within secondary hulls. So the gash ruptures a full tank of fuel.
Cruise ships are not like cargo ships in that they still have very significant power requirements even when alongside (moored up). This is because they run as hotels 24 hours a day. That takes a lot of fuel. Potentially, a single bunker tank on the Starburst Celebrity could hold 100,000 gallons or even up to 250,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil or – best case – gas oil with a bit less sulphur. The tide immediately spreads the spill upstream and will then bring it back downstream in a few hours.
The Friends of the Earth 2024 Cruise Ship Report Card rates the (notional) Starburst fleet (the Celebrity's parent company) as F when it comes to both transparency and scrubber use. Open loop scrubbers allow ships to use high sulphur fuels by rinsing exhaust into sea, in other words converting their air pollution into water pollution.
On November 1 2023, a power outage on the cruise ship Carnival Magic caused a scrubber sludge dump inside Grand Turk port waters.
Starburst isn't telling, so we don’t know what kind of scrubber system the Starburst Celebrity uses. Maybe she is one of the rare cruise ships that hasn't chosen the cheaper scrubber solution over the environment ... maybe she has no scrubbers at all and uses better fuel. But potentially, if there are scrubbers, the accident also releases into the Thames half a million litres of hot sooty scrubber wash, containing acids, carcinogenic Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons, heavy metals and black carbon.
Water has rushed into one of the watertight compartments via the gash in the hull, causing the Starburst Celebrity to list 5% starboard. Unfortunately that pins the damaged Earth Clipper beneath her, like the Bowbelle pinned down the Marchioness party boat just down the Thames near Southwark Bridge in 1989.
So both vessels, the cruise ship and the Clipper, are wedged diagonally in the mud between HMS Belfast and Tower Millennium Pier.
Water entering the Earth Clipper reaches the power banks, compromising the Lithium-ion batteries. Escaping gases deflagrate and there’s an explosion, as seems to have happened on July 25 2022 aboard the river cruise ship the Viking Gymir in Amsterdam.
But this is summer in the heart of London, and there are thousands of people nearby. A toxic vapour cloud engulfs 50 people dining outside at Club Coppa, 500 visitors inside the Tower of London, the residents inside the165 apartments in Sugar Quay, 200 people picnicking in Potters Field, as well as patients and staff at London Bridge Hospital on the south side of the river. It doesn’t spare the people in office buildings north and south – latest estimates are that 625,000 work in the City.
Because of the vapour cloud, soon buildings up to 200 metres inland will need to be evacuated.
Fish, birds and seals are poisoned by the diesel spill and the scrubber wash, some dying immediately. Others will die slowly as the diesel corrodes their internal organs.
The Starburst Celebrity and Earth Clipper are stuck, a 176m obstacle blocking the Thames. It took three years to raise and drag away the wreck of the cruise ship Costa Concordia after its allision with rocks off the Isola di Giglio in January 2012. The Dali blocked the harbour in Baltimore for nearly three months. The economic impact was estimated at $15 million per day. How long would the Starburst Celebrity split the Thames in two? In that time, waste could not leave the city on the Cory tug and tows. Nothing could get past into the city either.
But the crash has only just happened. People have died on the cruise ship, on Tower Millennium Pier and some are being suffocated by the vapour cloud.
There are people in the water, choking on diesel, being dragged down by the current. The RNLI lifeboats are scrambled but are unable to deal with the number of people in the river.
That’s not all.
We’re not saying that it is, but what if the Starburst Celebrity were one of the cruise ships equipped with ‘magic pipes’ that allow oil-contaminated waste water to be secretly discharged against environmental regulations? If it were, survivors in the river would also be gulping on that.
If you think that this could never happen - hundreds died in raw sewage on the Thames in 1878 when the Princess Alice pleasure steamer went down after a collision.
Back in today’s world, the Starburst Celebrity has destabilized Tower Bridge’s northern shaft. The bridge is declared unsafe. Traffic is gridlocked down to Chelsea on the north side and backing up to Peckham on the south side. Nothing can get across Tower Bridge and the remaining bridges are soon blocked. Emergency services are overwhelmed and many cannot get to the site.
I know it sounds like a rather bad Hollywood disaster movie and I know that this should never happen. But I need to keep reminding the reader that, separately, all of these things have happened, some them not far from my desk.
One final factor, the Starburst Celebrity, like so many cruise ships, is registered in the Bahamas. Starburst Cruises, which owns the vessel, is a fully-owned subsidiary of another household name Group which is incorporated in Liberia.
We know that ships are required to have
- Hull & Machinery insurance to cover sinking,
- Protection and Indemnity insurance for injuries and damage
- Wreck Removal Liability
- Bunker Pollution insurance
But the incident would stress-test the most well-prepared of organisations. And at this point, everything is urgent and lives depend on speed.
This seems the place to pause and ask ...
For a very good, succinct overview of the Inquiry, I recommend this piece by Dr Hilary Pereira of the River Thames Society, a fellow-objector.
My own environmental group is called the River Residents Group (RRG). To the Public Inquiry, the RRG brought a number of issues, some of which have been covered in the press to which I’ll link to at the bottom of this post. The story the press loved most was the one about the enormous charges that the PLA lays on some balcony-owners and the aggression with which the Authority pursues the money. Another was the secrecy and unaccountability of the PLA’s process for granting ‘River Works Licences’, operating as both landlord and Planning authority for the river bed. (‘That’s Uzbekistan!’ former MP Sir Simon Hughes commented in his testimony, in which he called for the PLA’s multiple and sometimes conflicting powers to be disaggregated.)
Other objectors questioned the way the PLA spends what it calls ‘Stakeholder benefit’ mostly on its own staff and pensions, while the rest of its stakeholders receive very little.
Many important matters were aired. Other issues, however, were evaded by the officers whom the PLA chose to represent their interests at the hearing. The CEO and Chair did not appear.
One issue that was regrettably sidestepped was the RRG’s concern about the increasing number of cruise ships coming into the heart of London, including some of those rated as the dirtiest and least transparent in the world by the Friends of the Earth, which produces an annual report card on the leading companies. The cruise ships moor by the Tower of London alongside HMS Belfast and at Greenwich, surrounded by thousands of residents. Air pollution is one worry but there is also the risk of accidents.
The PLA has outsourced the management of central London’s cruise ship arrivals to a consortium that includes the owners of the Thames Clippers. Many cruise vessels are registered in Panama or the Bahamas by Liberian-owned companies, adding to the complexity of what might ensue, should there be a major cruise ship accident in the centre of London. This has always worried us.
For the Public Inquiry, we created a scenario intended to stress-test the PLA’s provisions for such an incident. This was a hypothetical scenario. But each individual event within it drew on an incident that had really happened somewhere, including on the Thames. All we did is combine them in what we understand is a normal process in risk assessment. In the event, we were not permitted to ventilate the full scenario in the Public Inquiry and instead eked out just a colourless paragraph about it as the basis of questions that were in the end passed down the line from one PLA witness to another until time was up – leaving the RRG even more concerned than we were before the Public Inquiry.
I feel that our scenario deserves to be out there. It is a serious document, checked by a member of the Honourable Company of Master Mariners to ensure it was ship-shape. So I am confident of our tech. And very confident of our history. So I thought I’d bring the scenario to this blog, where history is always welcome.
Here is our scenario.
Let’s say the PLA has given the Starburst Celebrity cruise ship a Passage Plan into central London. The Starburst Celebrity does not exist, but ships of similar sizes have been allowed into central London.
Many important matters were aired. Other issues, however, were evaded by the officers whom the PLA chose to represent their interests at the hearing. The CEO and Chair did not appear.
One issue that was regrettably sidestepped was the RRG’s concern about the increasing number of cruise ships coming into the heart of London, including some of those rated as the dirtiest and least transparent in the world by the Friends of the Earth, which produces an annual report card on the leading companies. The cruise ships moor by the Tower of London alongside HMS Belfast and at Greenwich, surrounded by thousands of residents. Air pollution is one worry but there is also the risk of accidents.
The PLA has outsourced the management of central London’s cruise ship arrivals to a consortium that includes the owners of the Thames Clippers. Many cruise vessels are registered in Panama or the Bahamas by Liberian-owned companies, adding to the complexity of what might ensue, should there be a major cruise ship accident in the centre of London. This has always worried us.
For the Public Inquiry, we created a scenario intended to stress-test the PLA’s provisions for such an incident. This was a hypothetical scenario. But each individual event within it drew on an incident that had really happened somewhere, including on the Thames. All we did is combine them in what we understand is a normal process in risk assessment. In the event, we were not permitted to ventilate the full scenario in the Public Inquiry and instead eked out just a colourless paragraph about it as the basis of questions that were in the end passed down the line from one PLA witness to another until time was up – leaving the RRG even more concerned than we were before the Public Inquiry.
I feel that our scenario deserves to be out there. It is a serious document, checked by a member of the Honourable Company of Master Mariners to ensure it was ship-shape. So I am confident of our tech. And very confident of our history. So I thought I’d bring the scenario to this blog, where history is always welcome.
Here is our scenario.
Let’s say the PLA has given the Starburst Celebrity cruise ship a Passage Plan into central London. The Starburst Celebrity does not exist, but ships of similar sizes have been allowed into central London.
In this scenario, the Starburst Celebrity’s on her way to her berth alongside HMS Belfast, just west of Tower Bridge.
Now this is the stretch of the Thames named as the most dangerous for collisions in London – in a 2016 report commissioned by the PLA and Transport for London (TfL).
The "Assessment of Vessel Traffic Capacity on the River Thames in Central London" states “The Thames Traffic Model was refined and adapted to also calculate collision risk for vessels navigating in Central London. The Level of Safety was measured by estimating the probability of a major incident occurring using the model …The greatest risk is determined to be adjacent to Tower Pier and HMS Belfast where vessels berthing at Tower Pier encounter vessels transiting past the pier – through traffic.”
Now this is the stretch of the Thames named as the most dangerous for collisions in London – in a 2016 report commissioned by the PLA and Transport for London (TfL).
The "Assessment of Vessel Traffic Capacity on the River Thames in Central London" states “The Thames Traffic Model was refined and adapted to also calculate collision risk for vessels navigating in Central London. The Level of Safety was measured by estimating the probability of a major incident occurring using the model …The greatest risk is determined to be adjacent to Tower Pier and HMS Belfast where vessels berthing at Tower Pier encounter vessels transiting past the pier – through traffic.”
In its conclusions, the Assessment states, “The impact of mooring cruise ships at HMS Belfast was analysed and shown to increase the likelihood of a collision adjacent to Tower Pier by between 15% and 30%, which equates to approximately 5% across the whole study area. Half of this increase is associated with transfer vessels between the cruise ship and Tower Pier.”
It really could not be much clearer, could it?
It really could not be much clearer, could it?
Nevertheless, the PLA has continued to allow increasing numbers of cruise ships to come in to this area. And no follow-up report was commissioned, as we have verified.
Let’s say the Starburst Celebrity is 16,800 tonnes, 176m long and 22m wide. Let's say she has 518 passengers and crew.
The Starburst Celebrity’s arriving with tugs fore and aft, and at a slow-to-moderate safe speed adapted to the prevailing circumstances and conditions. She has her SAFE RETURN TO PORT document that shows trials have examined risks, failures and ways of dealing with them.
That means that problems are unlikely but not impossible.
Vessel problems can come from mechanical failure and human error. It’s an accumulation of things, sometimes small things individually, that can suddenly escalate into a dangerous situation.
As I've said, all of what I’m about to describe has happened, some of it on the Thames.
In our scenario, somewhere past Tilbury the Starburst Celebrity has suffered a failure on the main electrical switchboard that breaks the connection between the power supply to the engine and steering controls on the bridge. The emergency back-up runs on a battery that’s depleting fast. Alarms are sounding and flashing, but the crew are suffering from the known syndrome of 'alarm overload'. This is, by the way, exactly what happened with the MSC Opera in Venice in June 2019. None of the crew on the Opera’s bridge – or in the engine room – noticed the alarms until it was too late to prevent the 60,000-tonne vessel crashing into a river cruiser and the Zattere embankment, injuring six and causing millions in damage.
Back in London … Just as the Starburst Celebrity reaches Tower Bridge, the emergency system’s back-up batteries run out. The Starburst Celebrity experiences an uncontrolled power surge, something like what apparently happened when the Oceandiva allided with a stationary barge at Erith in June 2023.
The Starburst Celebrity’s tugs – like the tugs of the MSC Opera in Venice – are unable to stop her in time. The Starburst Celebrity veers under Tower Bridge, across the Thames and allides with Tower Millennium Pier.
On the way, she runs down her own fore tug and the battery-hybrid Earth Clipper that is waiting at the Pier.
As she passes it, the Starburst Celebrity also clips Tower Bridge, damaging the bridge’s structure – as happened when HMS Jupiter crashed into London Bridge in 1984 … or as happened in Baltimore in March 2024 when the container ship Dali clipped one of the tiers of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. In that case, the whole bridge came down, and there were fatalities.
Even at low speed, the impact with Tower Bridge has opened a 5-metre gash in the cruise ship’s starboard hull. The Starburst Celebrity does polar cruises so she’s “Ice Class”, meaning a stronger hull. But she was built in 1993 and doesn’t need to conform with post 2010 rules for bunker tanks within secondary hulls. So the gash ruptures a full tank of fuel.
Cruise ships are not like cargo ships in that they still have very significant power requirements even when alongside (moored up). This is because they run as hotels 24 hours a day. That takes a lot of fuel. Potentially, a single bunker tank on the Starburst Celebrity could hold 100,000 gallons or even up to 250,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil or – best case – gas oil with a bit less sulphur. The tide immediately spreads the spill upstream and will then bring it back downstream in a few hours.
The Friends of the Earth 2024 Cruise Ship Report Card rates the (notional) Starburst fleet (the Celebrity's parent company) as F when it comes to both transparency and scrubber use. Open loop scrubbers allow ships to use high sulphur fuels by rinsing exhaust into sea, in other words converting their air pollution into water pollution.
On November 1 2023, a power outage on the cruise ship Carnival Magic caused a scrubber sludge dump inside Grand Turk port waters.
Starburst isn't telling, so we don’t know what kind of scrubber system the Starburst Celebrity uses. Maybe she is one of the rare cruise ships that hasn't chosen the cheaper scrubber solution over the environment ... maybe she has no scrubbers at all and uses better fuel. But potentially, if there are scrubbers, the accident also releases into the Thames half a million litres of hot sooty scrubber wash, containing acids, carcinogenic Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons, heavy metals and black carbon.
Water has rushed into one of the watertight compartments via the gash in the hull, causing the Starburst Celebrity to list 5% starboard. Unfortunately that pins the damaged Earth Clipper beneath her, like the Bowbelle pinned down the Marchioness party boat just down the Thames near Southwark Bridge in 1989.
So both vessels, the cruise ship and the Clipper, are wedged diagonally in the mud between HMS Belfast and Tower Millennium Pier.
Water entering the Earth Clipper reaches the power banks, compromising the Lithium-ion batteries. Escaping gases deflagrate and there’s an explosion, as seems to have happened on July 25 2022 aboard the river cruise ship the Viking Gymir in Amsterdam.
But this is summer in the heart of London, and there are thousands of people nearby. A toxic vapour cloud engulfs 50 people dining outside at Club Coppa, 500 visitors inside the Tower of London, the residents inside the165 apartments in Sugar Quay, 200 people picnicking in Potters Field, as well as patients and staff at London Bridge Hospital on the south side of the river. It doesn’t spare the people in office buildings north and south – latest estimates are that 625,000 work in the City.
Because of the vapour cloud, soon buildings up to 200 metres inland will need to be evacuated.
Fish, birds and seals are poisoned by the diesel spill and the scrubber wash, some dying immediately. Others will die slowly as the diesel corrodes their internal organs.
The Starburst Celebrity and Earth Clipper are stuck, a 176m obstacle blocking the Thames. It took three years to raise and drag away the wreck of the cruise ship Costa Concordia after its allision with rocks off the Isola di Giglio in January 2012. The Dali blocked the harbour in Baltimore for nearly three months. The economic impact was estimated at $15 million per day. How long would the Starburst Celebrity split the Thames in two? In that time, waste could not leave the city on the Cory tug and tows. Nothing could get past into the city either.
But the crash has only just happened. People have died on the cruise ship, on Tower Millennium Pier and some are being suffocated by the vapour cloud.
There are people in the water, choking on diesel, being dragged down by the current. The RNLI lifeboats are scrambled but are unable to deal with the number of people in the river.
That’s not all.
We’re not saying that it is, but what if the Starburst Celebrity were one of the cruise ships equipped with ‘magic pipes’ that allow oil-contaminated waste water to be secretly discharged against environmental regulations? If it were, survivors in the river would also be gulping on that.
If you think that this could never happen - hundreds died in raw sewage on the Thames in 1878 when the Princess Alice pleasure steamer went down after a collision.
Back in today’s world, the Starburst Celebrity has destabilized Tower Bridge’s northern shaft. The bridge is declared unsafe. Traffic is gridlocked down to Chelsea on the north side and backing up to Peckham on the south side. Nothing can get across Tower Bridge and the remaining bridges are soon blocked. Emergency services are overwhelmed and many cannot get to the site.
I know it sounds like a rather bad Hollywood disaster movie and I know that this should never happen. But I need to keep reminding the reader that, separately, all of these things have happened, some them not far from my desk.
One final factor, the Starburst Celebrity, like so many cruise ships, is registered in the Bahamas. Starburst Cruises, which owns the vessel, is a fully-owned subsidiary of another household name Group which is incorporated in Liberia.
We know that ships are required to have
- Hull & Machinery insurance to cover sinking,
- Protection and Indemnity insurance for injuries and damage
- Wreck Removal Liability
- Bunker Pollution insurance
But the incident would stress-test the most well-prepared of organisations. And at this point, everything is urgent and lives depend on speed.
For the Public Inquiry, we had prepared fourteen questions about how long it would take to remove a wrecked cruise ship from the Thames, who would be liable for the damage, who would take overall financial responsibility, whether a desktop exercise was done annually to manage the risk of a cruise-sized major pollution incident at Greenwich or the Tower of London with loss of life and effect on London’s infrastructure? We wanted to know if the PLA invests in live exercises for a climate/pollution or collision disaster? We wanted to know if the PLA was planning to dredge the estuary and river to allow even bigger cruise ships to come to Tilbury.
Most of all, given their own report showing cruise ships increased the likelihood of a collision adjacent to Tower Pier by between 15% and 30%, we wanted to asked why the PLA still gives these vessels Passage Plans to the same site.
All those questions remain unasked (except here) and unanswered.
And the very day I drafted this blog, a large three-masted Mexican training ship, the Cuauhtémoc, lost power and crashed into Brooklyn Bridge, resulting in two fatalities.
Most of all, given their own report showing cruise ships increased the likelihood of a collision adjacent to Tower Pier by between 15% and 30%, we wanted to asked why the PLA still gives these vessels Passage Plans to the same site.
All those questions remain unasked (except here) and unanswered.
And the very day I drafted this blog, a large three-masted Mexican training ship, the Cuauhtémoc, lost power and crashed into Brooklyn Bridge, resulting in two fatalities.
This seems the place to pause and ask ...
How much history does it take to make a difference to the future?
At the date this blog is published, we're still waiting for the Inspector's conclusions from the Public Inquiry. They are due next month. There are three possible results: that the HRO should be scrapped, that it should be passed as the PLA wishes or that amendments should be made. We understand that we objectors will be consulted in the third case.
In the time between the Public Inquiry and now, my writing life has changed. There's a publisher and publication date in sight for The Puffin, the long-gestated sequel to my novel The Book of Human Skin. I have an inspiring agent who loves the book and a publisher who is a poet. The Puffin is teaching how not to be afraid of Instagram.
I still spend a great deal of time writing about the Thames and the Venetian lagoon, not as a novelist but as a campaigner for NoGrandiNavi and the River Residents Group (Join us! it's free and you don't have to live on the Thames; you just have to care about it). We're all interested in commodification of liquid public realms and in legal personhood for bodies of water that have not been protected by those charged to keep them safe. The comradeship is wonderful. The learning never stops.
But I admit that it's good to feel like a novelist again and to wake up thinking my characters' thoughts.
Michelle Lovric's website.
Some links to press coverage of the Public Inquiry into the PLA's HRO:
Liberal Democrats Call for End to Balcony Charge
“Racket” - London Post
Thames flat owners hit out at 'extortionate' five-figure balcony charges
| The Standard
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