From waterscapes with sharks, sea dragons and turtles to Gentoo penguins on the ice, Sea Life London Aquarium takes you on an incredible journey around the earth.
But what you don’t expect is something amazing originating much closer to home. The newly opened Thames Walk exhibit is a chance to stroll along the length of our city’s riverbed in just 100 steps. Walk through a secret portal and discover a hidden natural world just a few metres from the aquarium’s South Bank location.
The striped perch, the copper-coloured rudd and the grayling with its proud Mohican-style dorsal fin are among the aquatic wonders swimming past us every day. See them for yourselves here and find out more about the Thames’s history, including the notorious Great Stink in the summer heat of 1858, when the polluted waters were so foul-smelling that debates at the Houses of Parliament had to be abandoned.
Happily, those days are long gone. In recent years, seahorses have been sighted in the Thames, and as part of this new area you can walk along a digitally-interactive riverbed of the clean Thames of the future.