River Thames Trivia
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50 free River Thames trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Thames is only 215 miles long and carries less water than the Severn or the Tay, but no river in Britain has been written about, painted, fought over, frozen, poisoned and cleaned up quite so thoroughly. This quiz starts with the geography a beginner can manage (where it rises, where it meets the sea, what the Oxford stretch is called, where the tide stops) and works up to the Anglian ice sheet that pushed the river onto its London course, the Nore lightship, the 45 locks and 80-plus islands, and the seals, seahorses and stray whales that turn up in it today. It then follows the river through history: Caesar's crossing, Londinium's founding, Magna Carta at Runnymede, the frost fairs and the elephant on the ice, the open sewer of the 1300s, the Great Stink of 1858 and Joseph Bazalgette's cure, the Princess Alice disaster, Marc Brunel's tunnel, Tower Bridge, the 1928 flood and the Thames Barrier, and the £5 billion super-sewer finished in 2025. Rowing, swimming and the arts get their turn too: the Boat Race, Doggett's Coat and Badge, Handel's Water Music, Three Men in a Boat, The Wind in the Willows and Waterloo Sunset. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the River Thames and its landmarks, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our London, England and rivers quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01About how long is the River Thames?
200 miles
About 200 miles: the usual figure is 215, but the start moves, and in the 2022 drought the first springs dried up and the river began more than five miles downstream.
Q 02What is the Thames called as it passes through the city with the university boat clubs and Folly Bridge?
The Isis
The Isis is thought to be a scholars' mistake: they read the river's Latin name, Tamesis, as Thame plus Isis, so the stretch above the Thame's mouth kept the second half.
Q 03The usually quoted source of the Thames, Thames Head, is in which county?
Gloucestershire
Gloucestershire: a stone in a field near Kemble marks Thames Head, yet the spring is dry for much of the year, and in dry spells the river begins farther downstream.
Q 04The rival source at Seven Springs would add 14 miles to the Thames, letting it overtake which river as Britain's longest?
Severn
Severn: measured from Seven Springs the Thames would beat it by nine miles, and Thames Head is often dry, but maps name that stream the Churn.
Q 05Into which sea does the Thames flow?
North Sea
North Sea tides run deep into London: twice a day they lift the river at London Bridge, by as much as 7 metres on the biggest spring tides.
Q 06London's new super sewer shares its name with which term for the Thames through the capital and out to sea?
The Tideway
The Tideway is the tidal Thames, where the sea pushes in twice a day; the tunnel beneath it slopes steadily downhill from Acton in the west to Abbey Mills in the east, so its load runs the way the river does.
Q 07Which lock marks the normal tidal limit of the Thames?
Teddington
Teddington's weir is the usual limit, not an absolute one: the highest spring tides can top it and push the river back upstream.
Q 08The navigable Thames steps down towards London through roughly how many locks?
45
About 45 locks, each beside a weir, step the river down from Lechlade to the tidal reach; keepers work them by day, and after hours boaters may operate the gates themselves.
Q 09The small river islands of the Thames are traditionally known by which name?
Aits
Aits, also spelled eyots, dot the river, and Westminster Abbey and Parliament stand on a former one, Thorney, long since joined to the bank.
Q 10The London Bridge that spanned the Thames from 1831 was sold in 1968 and rebuilt in which US state?
Arizona
Arizona: each facing stone was numbered, shipped through the Panama Canal and trucked to Lake Havasu City, where the bridge reopened in 1971 over a channel dug for it in the desert.
Q 11The Brittonic root 'Tam' in the river's name is thought to have meant what?
Dark
Dark is the usual reading, perhaps 'the dark one', and the same root is thought to lie behind the Tamar and the Tame, though some scholars think the name is older than the Celtic languages.
Q 12John Burns's "liquid history" retort for the Thames dismissed which American river as "muddy water"?
The Mississippi
The Mississippi: the old Battersea MP is said to have granted the St Lawrence its water and the Mississippi its muddy water, but called the Thames liquid history.
Q 13What pushed the Thames south onto its present course through London about 450,000 years ago?
An ice sheet
Q 21Which king, the victor of Crécy, complained in 1357 that the Thames was full of 'dung and other filth'?
Edward III
Edward III had been out on the river, and wrote to the mayor that he had 'beheld dung, and laystalls, and other filth' heaped on the banks and smelt the stench, and wanted the lot cleared.
Q 22London's frost fairs on the frozen Thames belong to which climate period?
The Little Ice Age
The Little Ice Age set the scene, and old London Bridge helped: its many piers slowed the river, but after a new bridge in 1831 and the Victorian embankments no frost fair was held again.
Q 23What was led across the frozen Thames below Blackfriars during the last frost fair of 1814?
An elephant
An ice sheet of the Anglian glaciation blocked the old valley near St Albans; until then the Thames had run north of London, through Essex and Suffolk.
Q 14What is the sandbank at the mouth of the Thames Estuary that got the world's first lightship in 1732?
The Nore
It marked the seaward limit of the Port of London until 1964 and is now marked by Sea Reach No. 1 Buoy.
Q 15The annual tradition of counting the Thames's swans is called what?
Swan Upping
Swan Upping is a five-day July row upriver in traditional skiffs: the crews circle each brood, lift the birds from the water, check their health and ring the cygnets.
Q 16A 2024 survey by London Zoo's scientists counted thousands of which animals living in the Thames Estuary?
Seals
Seals: the count, made from boats and RAF training flights, found almost 600 harbour seals and about 3,000 greys, where the first full survey in 2013 had found 708.
Q 17In January 2006 a northern bottle-nosed whale swam past the Houses of Parliament and up the Thames as far as which district?
Chelsea
Chelsea: crowds lined the banks to watch the deep-sea whale, which died the next evening on the barge that was carrying it back towards the estuary.
Q 18Which Roman leader's account of his 54 BC expedition contains some of the earliest references to the Thames?
Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar wrote that the Thames could be forded at one place only, and that with difficulty, and that the Britons had lined the far bank with sharpened stakes.
Q 19Who razed the young Roman settlement of Londinium beside the Thames in AD 60 or 61?
Boudica
Boudica's rebels burned the trading town that had spread across the Walbrook valley, and the traces of their fires still lie under the City; once she was beaten, the Romans rebuilt it.
Q 20King John was forced to grant Magna Carta in 1215 at which spot beside the Thames?
Runnymede
Runnymede's riverside meadows, now National Trust land, saw the charter sealed, and its text reached into the river itself, ordering every fish weir on the Thames and the Medway pulled down.
An elephant was marched over the ice beside Blackfriars Bridge in February 1814, at a four-day fair where oxen were roasted and printing presses turned out souvenirs.
Q 24Doggett's Coat and Badge, one of the oldest sporting events in the world, is a rowing race for whom?
Apprentice watermen
Apprentice watermen fresh from their training have raced upriver from London Bridge since 1715, when the comic actor Thomas Doggett put up the prize: a red coat with a silver arm badge.
Q 25Stone from which hills was floated down the Thames from Radcot to rebuild St Paul's Cathedral after 1666?
Cotswolds
Cotswolds quarries at Taynton and Burford carted their stone to the wharf at Radcot, and barges took it on down the river to London.
Q 26In Georgian and Victorian London, the poor who scavenged the Thames foreshore at low tide for things to sell were called what?
Mudlarks
Mudlarks picked over the mud as the tide dropped for anything they could sell; their modern namesakes need a licence to search the same foreshore, and hunt history rather than a living.
Q 27When the Great Stink of 1858 rose from the Thames, how did most doctors believe cholera was spread?
Through foul air
Through foul air, or miasma, so the stench itself seemed deadly; the sewers MPs then rushed to fund were meant to clear the smell, yet they also kept sewage out of the drinking water, the real carrier.
Q 28Which engineer built the massive embankment sewers that cleaned up the Victorian Thames?
Joseph Bazalgette
Joseph Bazalgette hid his low-level sewer behind the new Victoria Embankment, which turned a tidal shore into a riverside road and gardens and made room for an underground railway as well.
Q 29The Princess Alice, lost on the Thames in 1878 with about 650 lives, was what kind of vessel?
A pleasure steamer
A pleasure steamer bringing day-trippers home from the Kent seaside: a coal ship cut her in two near Woolwich and she sank within minutes, into water polluted by the city's sewage.
Q 30Marc Brunel's Thames crossing of 1843 was the world's first of what kind?
Underwater tunnel
Underwater tunnel: it opened to walkers only and became a tourist attraction, lined with shops under the river, until it was converted for trains in the 1860s.