Thames national park to be Dickensian idyll

Plans for a Thames Estuary national park returning 50 miles of Kent and Essex wetlands to the state of wilderness immortalised by Charles Dickens were unveiled today.

The blueprint, drawn up by architect Sir Terry Farrell, would create the biggest man-made nature park in Europe, stretching from the site of the 2012 Olympics in Stratford to Faversham in Kent and Southend in Essex.

The plans would knit together existing protected wildernesses and bird sanctuaries with former industrialised areas that would be returned to nature. Much of the area is still pock-marked by industrial waste sites, abandoned industrial plants and firing ranges.

Its foggy pre-industrial remoteness was most evocatively described by Dickens in the opening chapters of Great Expectations when hero Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Magwitch in a graveyard meant to be at the church in the village of Cooling, north Kent.

The parklands projects was unveiled by housing minister Margaret Beckett at the Thames Gateway forum. She pledged £35 million of public funds for the first stage of the park. Sir Terry said: "It is about returning nature to what it does naturally. Quite a lot of it is wilderness already - it's a very substantial area of bird sanctuaries and wetlands."

The new national park will include a coastal path stretching for 100 miles on either side of the estuary, 22 new parklands, each about three times the size of Richmond Park, and a network of ferries and landing points. There would also be visitor centres, cycle paths, bird sanctuaries and woodlands.

Mrs Beckett also launched the £52million Thames Gateway Institute for Sustainability.

The institute's backers include University College London and Imperial College and it will be built on 60 acres in Dagenham Dock. It will house a campus for UCL, Imperial and the University of East London.

Environmental technologies already generate more than £24billion for the UK economy annually and it is hoped the site could significantly boost this figure, as well as creating 10,000 jobs.

Work on the project has already begun, with the main construction set to begin next year. Ian Short, deputy chief executive of London Thames Gateway Development Corporation, said: "We are just finalising the details."