Local London Guiding Day – and Tower Lifeboat Station
Every year the London Guiding Associations come together to offer free walks, this year five Associations are offering walks within their areas, City of London, Lambeth, Camden, Islington and of course Westminster with the same theme Local Heroes. Book the Westminster walk for Local London Guiding Day on Saturday 5 October 2024 and it is also going to be run on Sunday 6 October for this years Silver Sunday walk.
What a choice we have and where do we start? We have chosen Embankment Gardens exploring statues and memorials. We have several heroes to boast about over the centuries, but one in particular, founded during the lives of our past heroes and is still going strong, actually celebrating its 200th Anniversary this year, and will continue to heroically save lives for decades to come.
The RNLI have provided a lifeboat search and rescue service, since it was founded in 1824 by Sir William Hillary, saving over 146,000 lives.
Going back just a few decades before, the first ‘unsinkable boat’ had been patented in 1785, this was used as a lifeboat. The first purpose built lifeboat came a few years later, made out of wood, copper and cork, the designer Henry Greathead went on to build 31 of these over the next 2 decades. The RNLI now operate more than 400 lifeboats, materials include some wood, but mainly glass reinforced plastic and aluminium, no more cork or copper.
In 2023 it cost £191 million to run the 238 lifeboat stations around the UK and Ireland, though 97% of operational crew are volunteers, to provide essential training and equipment for one crew member costs almost £5,000.
2023 saw 9,192 launches helped 10,734 people and saved the lives of 269.
On our Local Heroes walk we will see, and hear, a bit more about the first inland waterway lifeboat station, which was a request following the Marchioness disaster in 1989. It opened in 2002 with 3 further lifeboat stations along the Thames, they moved to Victoria Embankment in April 2023, 2 months later they reached a record milestone of 10,000 lifeboat launches, in just 21 years.
Something to look out for …
Daniel Craig, who grew up near Hoylake Lifeboat Station has just donated the two 007 Triumph bikes from No Time to Die to be sold at auction (12th and 13th October) to raise money for RNLI.
Just one of our stops on the Local London Guiding Day and Silver Sunday walk.