Planning permission is given for a £1.5bn redevelopment of Heathrow Airport.

The mayor of London and a council give the go-ahead for a £1.5bn redevelopment of Heathrow Airport.

A Taplow band's latest song has been billed as this summer's anthem by London Music Press.

Cambridge Network - The East of England Development Agency (EEDA) has welcomed an announcement by the government to approve the London Gateway development on the River Thames at Essex. The scheme will see the regeneration of a 1,500 acre, former oil refinery site at …

A CONCERT to raise money for the Cutty Sark is due to be held in the next two months. More than £500,000 has been raised in the last week, including £10,000 donated by Marks and Spencer on Tuesday. Fundraisers now

A reprieve for  Marlow United means football will go ahead next
season after their reserve team pitch was condemned as dangerous
earlier this year.

North Kent's new bus rapid transit system Fastrack has been praised in a key report published by government spending watchdog the National Audit Office.

The Thames Gateway: Laying the Foundations examines how the government is managing development in the Thames Gateway area. Fastrack and extensions to the Docklands Light Railway are cited as examples of publicly funded transport projects that are enabling regeneration and development of the Thames Gateway.

However, the NAO study team reports “local partners told us that they still saw transport infrastructure as the main constraint to development in the Thames Gateway”. While the Department for Transport estimates that it has committed £1.8bn of investment to the Thames Gateway since 2000 through schemes including the Channel Tunnel Rail Link and extensions to the Docklands Light Railway, the NAO report flags up a series of problems hindering development of the transport infrastructure needed to support further development of the Thames Gateway.

It says the cost of many transport schemes is too high to be affordable by a single developer out of Section 106 planning gain agreements while lead times of 10 years or more for transport projects are delaying development.

The report cites the example of Barking Riverside: “The local authority of Barking and Dagenham believes that the Barking Riverside development is contingent upon an extension of the Docklands Light Railway, which in principle all parties are committed to pursuing. But the detailed planning and funding arrangements are not yet in place, with the risk of delaying development at Barking Riverside.”

THE glassy Thames framed by Brunel's Sounding Arch provides a spectacular backdrop for one of Maidenhead's most historic and successful sporting clubs.

Maidenhead Rowing club was established in 1887 and while it is right to be immensely proud of a fantastic past, it is a club that is spearheading British rowing's development into the 21st century.

It is a place many people view from afar; indeed thousands of people spend hundreds of hours every year stuck in traffic jams on Maidenhead Bridge, and many of them gaze longingly at the freedom of the serene Thames below.
But from a distance people may not know just how impressive a sporting club this really is.

The junior section led by Billy Brooks has produced some wonderful results in recent years and is now firmly established at the very top of British junior rowing.

Success on the river coupled with a friendly atmosphere is helping to make this a club that the town can be hugely proud of both on and off the river.

Transport Minister Gillian Merron has given final approval to the proposed London Gateway Port at Shellhaven,  Thurrock, in the Thames estuary.

This follows agreement between the Port promoters, P&O (part of Dubai Ports World) and local planning and highway authorities to ensure that the impact of the full development on the local area highway network is adequately catered for.

The Department for Communities and Local Government is, in addition, today granting planning permission for the adjacent London Gateway logistics and commercial centre and Business Park on the Shellhaven site.

Commenting on the decision Gillian Merron said: “London Gateway will be able to provide much needed capacity for handling the UK's growing international trade in containers.

“This substantial development has the potential to provide many new jobs in the Thames Gateway Growth Area - already one of the Government's priority growth areas in England - including a possible 1,900 jobs which the promoters forecast for the port alone.

“It has taken time to finalise this decision, but it was right to consider carefully, and make appropriate provision for, the significant impacts that this major development will have in the growth area.

“This outcome reflects the hard work by the promoters, the local authorities, transport bodies, environmental organisations and others to reach agreement on ways to mitigate the impacts of the development.”

Thames Coastguard has coordinated the cliff rescue of a lady who had thrown herself down a cliff near Reculver Towers, Herne Bay and tried for several hours through the early hours this morning to get a signal on her mobile phone, finally getting a call to the emergency services to call for help at 3am.

Coastguard Cliff Rescue Teams from Herne Bay and Margate attended the scene along with paramedics and police where the lady had been located at the base of the cliffs.

Thames Coastguard requested the Rescue Helicopter from Wattisham which came on scene to winch the lady from the cliff base with communications provided to the air crew by the Coastguard Rescue Teams on scene. The injured lady has now been airlifted to Margate Hospital.

It was understood that the lady had thrown herself over the sloping 100 foot cliffs sometime around midnight and had been injured but conscious and tried for hours unsuccessfully to get a signal on her mobile phone to call for help. She finally managed to get a signal just before 3am and got a call through to the 999 call centre and it was passed on to Thames Coastguard.

The lady has sustained leg, back and head injuries but fortunately these are not life threatening.

Urgent repair works need to be carried out to the bridge which crosses Sandford weir (SP530016). This will result in the Path being closed at this section for the whole of July. A diversion will be put in place and more details will be available shortly before the start of the works.

Dolphin House, Smugglers Way, London, SW18 Telephone: 0871 4263841 or book online for FREE by … Blue Thames RSS feed: add to del.icio.us: digg this page: add to Yahoo! My Web

PIRATE wannabes can live out their buccaneering fantasies on the Thames with a full-scale replica of an 18th century East India merchantman which has berthed at London s Isle of Dogs. The Swedish love ship Götheborg sailed upriver with can

By Michael Parker COMMUTERS are furious at having to switch to three bus routes when the East London Line shuts for two years during work to extend it to Dalston and Croydon. Residents living in Wapping and Shadwell have been told they will

By Mike Brooke TOURISTS can now tour to the Isle of Dogs, cameras in hand, to snap the spots where big movie makers often choose their locations. The new release 28 Weeks Later is only the latest in a long line of productions to pick

HSBC, the UK's largest bank, is funding a new $100m initiative to tackle global climate change.

Some people think that we could build enough new homes without bulldozing green fields. They are not skyscraper fanatics or conservationist bores. They are urbanists and architects eyeing the huge tracts of land that runs east from  Canary Wharf to Margate. You could build a city the size of central London between  Dartford and the River Lea, largely on former industrial land, and still have space to spare.

This area, the “Thames Gateway”, is not a blank sheet. To imply as much would outrage the 1.45 million good citizens of places such as Barking and Ebbsfleet. But it does contain some blankish spaces that might be improved, rather than marred, by development. Three thousand of its 100,000 hectares are brownfield, a fifth of all such land in the South East.

Policymakers know this. But they seem paralysed by the immensity of the task. The National Audit Office (NAO) last week issued a scathing report on what it billed as the biggest regeneration project in Western Europe. This “project”, which includes 160,000 houses, has been going for 12 years. But it has no clear overall plan, according to the NAO. There are six inward investment agencies, from “Locate in Kent” to “East of England International”, which compete with each other and confuse the hell out of would-be investors. There are 30 “coordinating bodies”, ranging from the Highways Agency to the Learning and Skills Council. Their very existence seems to have become a barrier to action.

Croydon Guardian - The approval will mean the creation of a London Gateway container port as well as a commercial centre and business park on the former Shell oil refinery site at Shell Haven in the Thames Estuary in  Thurrock, Essex. The final green light follows a long …

Guardian Unlimited - The approval will mean the creation of a London Gateway container port as well as a commercial centre and business park on the former Shell oil refinery site at Shell Haven in the Thames Estuary in  Thurrock, Essex. The final green light follows a long …

Global ports owner and operator DP World has welcomed today's news from the UK Government that it has decided to grant approval for the company's London Gateway development on the River Thames at …   

Global ports owner and operator DP World has welcomed today's news from the UK Government that it has decided to grant approval for the company's London Gateway development on the River Thames at …   

Eight proposals to redevelop a 200-year-old former prison are submitted to council planners.

The Environment Agency will reopen a section of the Thames Path near Folly Bridge, Abingdon Road, Oxford on Wednesday 30 May, which has been closed since February so that a corroding footbridge could be replaced.
   

MSN UK News - Their studies will include the impact of climate change on some of the world's major cities, monitoring the major tropical rainforests and improving management of water supplies from the Yangtze, Amazon, Ganges and Thames rivers. A report last year by …

Forbes - LONDON (Thomson Financial) - Transport Minister Gillian Merron has given final approval to the proposed London Gateway Port at Shellhaven,  Thurrock, in the Thames estuary. The decision was made as port promoters, P&O (part of Dubai Ports World) and …