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The Thames is liquid history.

But if people want to swim in the Thames, if they want to take their lives into their own hands, then they should be able to do so with all the freedom and exhilaration of our woad-painted ancestors.

I've never been far from the river. I'm sort of like a Thames-nymph.

I've just swum the length of the Thames. I feel quite tired.

I long ago suggested the hypothesis, that in the basin of the Thames there are indications of a meeting in the Pleistocene period of a northern and southern fauna.

If my history, my indisputable British history, has never been visited, where does that put me? If we are only going to look at things that need a revisit, you are wiping me out of this country's history. That is unacceptable to me.

I've been doing a little project with my 11-year-old son, Charlie: we're canoeing from the source of the Thames to the Houses of Parliament. It's taken us three years so far, and we're only half way.

Since the day of the air, the old frontiers are gone. When you think of the defense of England you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover; you think of the Rhine.

For centuries my father's family lived on Britain's biggest tidal river, the Severn, on which there was a huge trade with the interior, and through the Port of Bristol with America.

There's an idea that London is a planet on its own: that it's starting to diverge from the rest of the solar system. We need to combat that.