I have swum through sewage and had empty crisp packets stuck to my face. Why can’t we take better care of our rivers?
There are certain phrases that deserve a nod of recognition when they prove to be literally true: anyone who’s ever dug such a big hole that they hit the rock bottom will know what I’m talking about. Or if you’ve ever stood at a ferry terminal realising that you have, in fact, missed the boat. Perhaps this Easter you will unpack your shopping, covered in a slimy, clear film, and understand the error of putting all your eggs in one basket. Personally, I have found myself swimming through actual shit.
Not just once, either. Not by a long chalk. Over the past 37 years, I have probably swum through enough sewage to fill a river. Because, you see, it does fill our rivers. And seas. And lakes. And the little streams that snake behind housing estates, and the pools that have the audacity to sit beside poorly maintained pipes. Such is the problem that you would be hard pressed to find any body of water in Britain that a privatised water company hasn’t flushed with turds now and again in the quest for ever-greater profits.
All this, of course, is made possible by the particular shrug-it-off brand of Conservativism we are living under that makes everything from environmental damage to tax avoidance just another thing for those in power to turn a blind eye to, as they cut their mates some slack, feather their own nests and sit dreaming of the statues and headed notepaper that are all they really went into politics for in the first place.
On 23 April, Surfers Against Sewage is joining forces with campaign groups all over the country for a day of action, demanding an end to sewage pollution. According to Surfers Against Sewage, in 2020 alone, sewage was released into the environment more than 400,000 times, equating to 3.1m hours of discharge. There really is something particularly unpleasant about the phrase “3.1 million hours of discharge”, isn’t there? Only 14% of UK rivers meet “good ecological status” under the EU’s water framework directive, and the UK is ranked last in Europe for bathing water quality. And yet, bathe we do. At least I do. And thousands of other dimple-skinned women I see with swimming costumes, dry robes, flasks and chattering teeth every week, scattered along the riverbank or edge of a lake or pebble beach.
I once swam in the Thames. The actual big daddy in London. Joining a group of swimmers and the artist Amy Sharrocks, I slapped bare feet down a stone cutaway and into the river at Hammersmith. It felt particularly bizarre to be doing something as bucolic as swimming while passing bin lorries, City of London parking meters and saddle cranes. Most Londoners consider the Thames a kind of wet motorway full of rusty chains that runs through the city. We don’t think of it as a river at all. But it is a river. And, as illicit and counterintuitive as it feels, you can swim in it (in certain places and with the right permission). It is also, I should say, pretty filthy.
During my short swim, I caught a plant pot on one hand, was smacked in the neck by a plank of wood and got an empty crisp packet stuck to my face. But it’s not often litter that will make you ill. It’s the slurry. The raw, untreated litres of liquid poo that water companies frequently pump out into our rivers under the guise of flood drainage. You may remember the 2bn litres of raw sewage dumped in the Thames over just two days back in October 2020. Or more likely you don’t, because the companies that sweep the crap and condoms and wet wipes into our rivers don’t tend to advertise the fact that they have just turned your local waterway into an open sewer. But it happens. It happens all the time.
You may not be a swimmer; you may not see the sea from one year to the next; you might find your pleasure in leisure centres rather than lakes. But when faced with corporate negligence, political villainy, environmental destruction and personal illness, we, as a nation, do not have to go with the flow.
• Nell Frizzell is the author of The Panic Years, out now through Bantam Press. Arwa Mahdawi is away