a high-speed tour of the Thames

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To run a speedboat operation on the Thames, it pays to have hair like Charlie Matheson’s. By the time we hit top speed on the stretch between Canary Wharf and Greenwich, his floppy mop is swept back just so. With wide eyes and an impish grin, he looks like a cross between Pierce Brosnan in the boat chase scene in The World Is Not Enough and a spaniel sticking its head out of a car window.

“Wonderful, wonderful, yes, yes!” Matheson shouts above the roar of the twin engines that power Rocket Rebel, the newest and biggest addition to his fleet at Thames Rockets. For almost 20 years, the company’s red speedboats have turned heads and ruffled hair in central London, making waves in a sedate scene of ferries and cruisers.

“I think you can always tell how well a city is doing by going to the waterway,” adds the former investment manager from Guernsey, as Charlene Peck, Rebel’s skipper, throws the 26-seater boat around like a holiday jet ski. “If you’ve got a buzz and excitement down on the river, it’s a really good sign.”

It has taken seven years for Matheson, who’s 48, to realise his dream of a purpose-built thrill ride in the heart of London, where he already operates five 12-seater rigid-inflatable boats (RIBs). I’m the first passenger to board the £1.6mn newcomer, which will have its public launch on April 10 from the pier under the London Eye in Westminster. As we set off downstream, bystanders stare at the red dart cutting through the murky water.

“It’s so thrilling after thinking about her for so long to finally see her here,” Matheson says, as we slam down over another boat’s wake. With the new vessel, Thames Rockets, which had a turnover of £3mn last year, has boosted daily capacity for its hour-long trips east of Westminster from about 500 to 700 passengers. Matheson says the market is growing as London increasingly embraces its waterway.

The Thames suffered an identity crisis in the half century or more since the advent of the shipping container shifted the capital’s cargo trade out to the deep-water port at Tilbury in Essex. Redeveloped docks, wharves and power stations have since helped turn an industrial artery into a meandering leisure opportunity.

Entrepreneurial watermen have been instrumental in making that transition. The Woods family started modest river tours in the 1950s before building its Silver Fleet of sightseeing cruisers and co-founding the Thames Clippers passenger service in 1999. Gary Beckwith, a former fuel barge operator, started tourist trips in the 1980s, launching City Cruises in 1996.

The companies are also riding high, with record sales and new boats of their own. Thames Clippers, which partnered with Uber in 2020, carried more than 5mn passengers on its large catamarans last year, a growing number of them tourists. At its newest pier beside the reborn Battersea Power Station, visitors get off at roughly the spot where coal used to be offloaded.

Matheson says the Thames was ready for an injection of energy when he arrived in London in 2005, aged just 28. After tiring of finance in Guernsey, where he grew up fishing and waterskiing, he had started taking tourists to a seal colony using a fast RIB. When his father, an estate agent, suggested he give London a shot, Matheson and his sister tried out all the boats, from dinner cruises to tours with cringey commentary. “She fell asleep on one of them,” he recalls. “There was nothing exciting about any of it.”

After mocking up leaflets showing one of his Guernsey boats storming under Tower Bridge, Matheson charmed the owners of the London Eye into letting him rent the end of their pier, a deal he still has. He started tours in 2006. “There wasn’t even a speed limit then,” he says. “We’d do 40 knots [46mph] straight through central London.” 

There is now a 12-knot (14mph) limit in the city centre. So for the first 20 minutes or so, Thames Rockets employs comic actors as tour guides before the boats can hit 30 knots (35mph) on the stretch between Wapping and Greenwich to the east. Straining against my seatbelt, I feel as if I’m travelling twice as fast. 

Matheson still looks good on a speedboat, although he no longer has a licence to thrill passengers himself, spending most of his time in his office above a bar near the pier. At times he has fought to stay afloat, as copycats, downturns and a pandemic have come and gone. But he says a passion for London — and for speed — propels the business. “I’ve always been completely intoxicated by that feeling of skimming over water,” he says before I return to dry land, my legs a little wobbly. “In a strange way, I find it therapeutic.”

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