Prince Edward — the youngest son of Queen Elizabeth — has married Sophie Rhys-Jones at a colourful ceremony in Windsor, west of London.

An average of 80 to 100 people lose their lives in the river Thames every year, according to police.

About 80% of these are by suicide, usually by jumping off one of the many bridges that cross the Thames.

Next of kin will be asked to make a formal identification, if police think it is likely to result in a positive identification and not prove too distressing.

If the body is suspected of being that of a missing person, checks can be made against a national database of missing persons, and dental records or samples of DNA if available. Fingerprint checks can also be made in some cases.

Personal items found on the body such as clothing and jewellery can be used as circumstantial evidence but will not always be conclusive on their own.

Decomposition of bodies in rivers can make identification difficult, but depends on conditions such as how the person died, temperature, pollution and river animal life.

Police and coroners say the vast majority of bodies found are eventually identified.

Four police forces are involved in policing the river Thames, along with the marine support unit of the Metropolitan police (formerly known as Thames division); the Metropolitan, Kent, Essex and Thames Valley police forces.

They have specialist training in body recovery and identification, and are responsible for policing the 54 miles of the river Thames between  Dartford Creek and Staines bridge. The river below Dartford comes under the jurisdiction of the Kent and Essex forces while the river above Staines is policed by Thames Valley. None of these three forces have a dedicated river police section although Thames Valley did have its own police launch until 1998.

After a body is recovered from the river it is taken to the mortuary at Wapping police station for identification.

Surrey police have used teams of police divers as well as boats from a private specialist search firm in the search for Amanda Dowler.

There are 15 units of police underwater search teams in England and Wales. They also carry out searches in canals, ponds, lakes and reservoirs.

The marine support unit (MSU) is the oldest police force in the country. It was formed in 1798 to combat theft, looting and corruption in the Port of London which were rife at that time.

There are currently four MSU reliefs (24-hour response teams), each with two sergeants and 12 constables. They operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with at least one boat patrolling the river at night.

Today much of their task is to combat drugs, firearms and terrorism on the river as well as ensuring the safety of the large number of people involved in leisure activities.

The swaying GBP18.2m  Millennium Bridge across the Thames in central London is to be closed for several weeks for checks.

Swaying problems that have closed the new GBP18m  Millennium Bridge will be sorted out quickly, the project's chairman promises.

Until it developed an 8in “wobble” that terrified its first users and caused its temporary closure, London's new  Millennium Bridge had been floating on a tide of enraptured praise. The “blade of light” that Lord Foster of Thameside has suspended between St Paul's and  Tate Modern is actually of wider significance than its architectural merits - or otherwise - necessarily suggest. A thing of pedestrian pleasure rather than motorised utility, it testifies to the fact that Londoners are rediscovering the Thames as something quite other than the “dirty old river” of habitual description, and finding newly genial forms of public life in places that were once more or less abandoned to the homeless and outcast.

Encouraged by the surging property market and a new planning framework that demands ambitious “landmark” buildings as well as the conservation of historic buildings and views, developers are pressing in on the river with big residential propositions. However, in London as in Tyneside and Belfast, the transformation is being led by large-scale cultural projects.

That imposing palace of state bureaucracy,  Somerset House, is being opened on the north bank. Out go the clerks and in comes the Gilbert Collection: a riot of gaudy jewel-encrusted snuff-boxes and a splendid waxwork model of the recently knighted donor: an elderly Californian property developer who will be forever lounging at his desk in tennis shoes.

Yet it is on the south bank of the Thames that the real breakthrough is taking place. There are still dead stretches opposite and upriver from the  Houses of Parliament where the stroller has to negotiate a forest of security cameras. And County Hall can hardly be said to have come together since 1992, when it was acquired by a Japanese corporation. The recarved and multiply tenanted former seat of the Greater London Council now looks like a corporate squat. Yet it also forms the land-base for the huge wheel of the London Eye, a brilliant innovation that enables the citizen to look down on the Houses of Parliament and assorted ministries of state from a great and belittling height.

From this crowded democratic spot, you can wander past public sculptures and through the soon to be refurbished  South Bank Centre, a famously brutalist concrete warren which, despite habitual moaning, has actually been embraced by a richly varied London public. Next comes the National Theatre, and from there it is possible to follow the river through to the massive edifice of Tate Modern, which has been clocking in 3,000 visitors per hour, and the  Globe Theatre in Southwark, where tourists jostle with the members of a more indigenous New Elizabethan subculture. With the new  Millennium Bridge, this teeming, convivial, and largely car-free stretch of the river is now surely remarkable enough to convince even the most loyal of countrydwellers that the city may be the place to go if you want a really interesting riverside walk.

Just as intolerant rural incomers resent the crowing cocks that wake them up in the morning, people who now live in the converted warehouses near  Tower Bridge complain of being disturbed by the amplified warnings directed at motorists and pedestrians whenever the bridge is raised or lowered. Yet these minor irritations only serve to illustrate one of the preconditions of the new Thames: namely that the working river of old is almost completely dead. Indeed, the once industrious Pool of London is now so quiet that David Mellor, who lives in the Harbour Master's house at St Katharine's Dock, can record his Sunday morning Classic FM programme without leaving his house.

That would not have been possible in 1965, when the world watched as Churchill's draped coffin was ceremoniously taken up the London Thames to the accompaniment of a 19-gun salute. In those grainy, black and white days there were still waterside cranes to dip ceremoniously in tribute. Perhaps that was the last great sighting of the London river as a working entity, with its own population, culture and political traditions. Its waters had already been dubbed “liquid history”, but the man who coined that phrase, the Scottish Londoner John Burns, was not trying to lure tourists into riverside restaurants. A Liberal activist and politician, he had been among the radical leaders of the first Great Dock Strike of 1889.

By the early 1980s, the London docks had been killed off by containerisation. For years, walking through the old dockland areas was a bleak and lonely business. Yet sharp-eyed property developers were already alchemizing the redundant London river into a lucrative view. It seemed an unlikely ploy to begin with, but you only have to walk down Wapping High Street now to realise that the whole history of the Port of London was just a roundabout way of bringing Manhattan-style loft-living to the Thames.

Anyone interested in contemplating this recent conversion of the river would do well to visit  Oxo Tower Wharf, between the  London Eye and Tate Modern on the south bank. In the old London this was a meat warehouse dedicated to producing not just Oxo cubes but also the curiously extended tubular eggs that still run through some pork pies. No such item appears on the menu of the restaurant that Harvey Nichols now operate on the top floor.

From this smart and highly successful institution you can look out from your balcony seat and let your eye drift across the river to the City and the great dome of St Paul's. You may feel pretty good about yourself as all that money and tradition come together in your eye, but to look across the river from this new vantage point is to recognise that London has arrived too.

Oxo Tower is by no means the first restaurant to set out to alchemize the dirty old river into a radiant and dreamy prospect. Before it came the BluePrint Café at the Design Museum - which once seemed dangerously downstream at Butler's Wharf - the River Café and the ever more ironically named People's Palace at the Royal Festival Hall. It wasn't that many restaurants ago that an ordinary green pepper seemed like an exotic item in England.

Take the lift downwards and Oxo Tower Wharf turns into a building that proves you don't always have to be a millionaire to live in a riverside loft. There are workshops and several floors of social housing, run by staff who draw a certain satisfaction from telling prosperous inquirers that they earn far too much to be allowed anywhere near the waiting list for a flat. Oxo Tower Wharf is part of the Coin Street development, and the story of its conversion reveals something of the cost of reconfiguring the Thames as a view.

It was in the early 80s that the Coin Street Action Group fought off the developers, who planned to demolish Oxo Tower Wharf and other industrial buildings in the area and replace them with a 20-storey office block designed by Richard Rogers, at that time known as The Cossack of Coin Street rather than Lord Rogers of Riverside. As had happened earlier at Covent Garden, the site was saved by local community action. Eventually assisted by the GLC, the residents, threatened with displacement, acquired the various industrial properties and set about building low-cost housing. They also opened access to a stretch of the riverfront that had been closed for some two centuries. Writing in the New Statesman, the architecture critic Jules Lubbock commended the Coin Street Action Group for opening a new view across the river to St Paul's, the cathedral that had been the “very symbol of the British people in the face of Nazism” but which had since been “shamefully mutilated” by post-war developers.

At that time Lubbock was among Prince Charles's architectural advisers, and a few weeks later, that same argument about St Paul's turned up in Prince Charles's Mansion House speech, in which the traditional look of St Paul's cathedral was used to redeclare the memory of the second world war against the peace that had followed it. Prince Charles chose to launch his revivalist “Vision of Britain” with the help of Turner's view of St Paul's, looking up the Thames from  Greenwich, and also Canaletto's earlier downriver view from the terrace of Somerset House. By the time Charles and his advisers had finished with the dome of St Paul's, the whole question of the city and its future was lost in a barren argument about architectural styles, with modernism being bad and undue praise falling on classical revivalism.

To look out from Oxo Tower Wharf now is to realise how far we've have come since that chaotic, largely ghost-written argument. St Paul's looks fine, and the architects have recovered too. The same cannot be said for the tradition of state-led social reform, which got written off as so many infernal council tower blocks. As for the “public access” that is now routinely demanded in riverside planning, that has already come to mean considerably more than the right to squeeze past private residential fortresses and their security systems. The south bank especially has become a new public amenity, which is already changing the feel of London: it's an energetically mixed-up place, where Londoners encounter one another in their flamboyant post-colonial diversity while tourists from more monocultural places boggle enviously at the result.

Meanwhile, the river itself is becoming something more than just a moneyed view. Mark Rylance, the artistic director at the Globe Theatre, describes it as both sinister and inspiring, a brown deity that brings nature and myth into the midst of an over-controlled city. The London Rivers Association has also been working to intensify the meaning of the resurgent and successfully cleaned-up river, insisting that it should be seen as an “ecological super-highway” and “reservoir of memory”, and disconcerting some architects by describing it as a potential “blue-belt” and nature reserve.

As ever, the money will look after itself. But Ken Livingstone is plainly the man to take the public aspect of the new river further. As the figure responsible for “promoting the wellbeing of London and Londoners”, the new mayor doesn't have to confine his attention entirely to London's irksome transport problems. His real job is to be the patron of London's new public domain, and the river should be among his focal points.

It can be assumed that Livingstone will do everything he can to establish that cosmopolitanism is one of the great qualities of London's people rather than just its most exotic cuisine. Since wandering about, whether in a spirit of curiosity or of mutual exhibitionism, is to play such a considerable part in new London life, he should preside over a general increase in public litter bins - early casualties of the IRA, who seem to have provided every cost-cutting bureaucrat in the country with the excuse to get rid of them. He might also encourage the return of herbaceous borders: traditional but labour-intensive features of municipal parks that were among the first victims of council job cuts in the 80s.

If further measures are needed to dispel any hint of smugness that may already be arising in this perfect new metropolitan world, Livingstone might consider reviving an ancient river custom that was unaccountably missing from the watery scenes of Shakespeare in Love. In the days when watermen propelled wherries and other such floating taxis up and down the London river, their passengers used to enjoy hurling insults at one another. Samuel Johnson was proud of the killer line with which he put an end to one such virtuoso contest: “Sir, your wife, under pretence of keeping a bawdy house, is a receiver of stolen goods.” That particular example would only cause perplexity if called out from the wind-buffeted Millennium Bridge today, but more appropriate versions would surely be forthcoming with a little encouragement.

The sites on the Thames

St Katharine's Dock

 Battersea Power Station

Design Museum

County Hall/London Aquarium

 Canary Wharf

London Eye

Millennium Dome

South Bank Centre

Somerset House

Oxo Tower Wharf/Coin Street

Tate Modern

Millennium Bridge

Globe Theatre

Site of new GLA building

Huge crowds are blamed for causing London's first new bridge in 100 years to sway alarmingly on its public opening.

Hot and bothered residents are being warned against cooling off by taking a dip in the River Thames.

The Thames has strong currents and the Port of London Authority even advises against walking on the shores because of the danger of getting stuck in the mud or cut off by the tide.

A spokesman said: “The Thames is deep and moves very fast.

“Currents can sweep a person away in just a few minutes and the water can be very cold even at warm times of the year.”