Excerpts for Thames : The Biography The River as Fact It has a
length of 215 miles, and is navigable for 191 miles. It is the
longest river in England but not in Britain, where the Severn is
longer by approximately 5 miles. Nevertheless it must be the
shortest river in the world to acquire such a famous history.
The Amazon and the Mississippi cover almost 4,000 miles, and the
Yangtze almost 3,500 miles; but none of them has arrested the
attention of the world in the manner of the Thames. It runs
along the borders of nine English counties, thus reaffirming its
identity as a boundary and as a defence. It divides Wiltshire
from Gloucestershire, and Oxfordshire from Berkshire; as it
pursues its way it divides Surrey from Middlesex (or Greater
London as it is inelegantly known) and Kent from Essex. It is
also a border of Buckinghamshire. It guarded these once tribal
lands in the distant past, and will preserve them into the
imaginable future. There are 134 bridges along the length of the
Thames, and forty-four loc