Mucking Marshes Landfill

About

Mucking Marshes landfill was a major landfill site servicing London, close to the hamlet of Mucking, in Thurrock, Essex. Covering hundreds of acres of former gravel quarry, it was one of the largest landfills in Western Europe and had been filled for decades with municipal and commercial waste floated thirty miles down the River Thames in barges to Mucking Wharf. The barges, each carrying dozens of distinctive yellow containers, were a familiar, though rarely commented-upon, sight along the Thames through Central London. Once the barges had travelled 30 miles (48 km) downstream from Walbrook Wharf (or further upstream at Wandsworth), mechanical cranes at Mucking Wharf unloaded the containers onto trucks. The trucks made their way up the artificial mound created by decades of garbage compaction that still towers over the surrounding flat landscape. Flocks of seagulls and other scavenging estuarine birds were a familiar sight as the trucks disgorged their contents.

The former landfill site itself, although it dominates the village of Mucking, is guarded and surrounded by a perimeter fence more than four miles (6 km) long. Cory Environmental, the operators of the site, gated off Mucking Wharf Road so that views of the Thames meeting the North Sea could only be accessed via a circuitous footpath through the neighbouring village of East Tilbury.