The Thames lifeboat crew who spent nearly 25 years working out of borrowed rooms at Chiswick Pier are now operating from the new station at Wandsworth Riverside, a short way downstream of Putney.
The RNLI crew launched from the new base at Point Pleasant for the first time on Tuesday after outgrowing the building they had shared with the Chiswick Pier Trust since 2002. Earlier this month the crew were expected to move before the end of September, and the RNLI says the new site is closer to most of the emergencies it answers, so call-out times should fall. The crew still cover the same stretch of river, from Battersea to Richmond.
The new station has more than ten times the floor space of the leased rooms at Chiswick. There is a proper kit room, where the old one was, in the RNLI’s own words, “just a small cupboard,” bunk rooms for every crew member on duty, and a public space with a riverside terrace for water safety sessions. At Chiswick, the 60 volunteers had to take their kit home after every shift.
“We’d outgrown Chiswick Station – we needed to find somewhere else. Wandsworth Riverside has opened up a whole new world,” operations manager Andy Mayo said. The crew launched 212 times from Chiswick so far this year before the move, and have answered more than 5,600 call-outs and helped rescue more than 2,500 people since the station started on the Thames in 2002.
Four incidents have already been answered from the new base which the RNLI says is the second-busiest lifeboat station in the UK and Ireland.
The fit-out began in the summer to give them a proper home at last. The move was first announced in 2024, when the RNLI completed the purchase of what had been the sales suite for the Riverside Quarter development. The public space is expected to open for water safety sessions once the station is fully up and running, and anyone who wants to support the crew can do so through the RNLI’s website.
