Bevan’s agency provides some reassurance – as long as you only want to swim in one of the country’s approximately 417 designated swimming pools, most of which are on the coast. In fact, there are only about a dozen inland swimming pools in the whole country. and, for now, only one river – in Ilkley, West Yorkshire – rated “poor” in the bathing agency’s latest rating, so you may want to avoid it anyway. Better to cross the Channel, where France can offer around 1,300 glorious lakes and rivers intended for safe swimming among the 3,300 bathing areas. The main reason why EA’s Defra, which is negative for swimming in the river, is that pollution of sewage, farms, urban and industrial cities is so widespread that not all rivers in England complied with the law. standard for overall health last evaluated. However, it is not EA’s fault, according to the agency. She has cited poverty for the abysmal state of our watercourses, saying “you get the environment you pay for” and asking for more government funding so she can refine polluters and do her job properly. So where does this leave wild swimmers, boatmen, fishermen and almost anyone who would rather walk along a glowing stream than in an open sewer? Feeling abandoned by the agency – coupled with its recent moves to stop monitoring “low impact” pollution and the low morale of staff who say they are no longer able to deter polluters – communities have begun to take situation in their hands. It seems, at first glance, to work. It started last year when the people of the Ilkley Clean River group in West Yorkshire managed to get a section of the Wharfe River, already popular with swimmers, to be designated as an official swimming pool. Downstream of a sewage treatment plant, the team knew the water would not be safe and concluded that the bathing name was the only way to force the Environment Service to set up a water quality control and identify the level of pollution there. . After a bizarre scrap to persuade the service to locate the sewer downstream screen rather than in the cleanest upstream water, this Wharfe section officially became the first river water in England, albeit with poor water quality. A year later and now we have a large set of two river bathing sites: thanks to the efforts of the charity Thames21, a section of the River Thames in Oxford will also receive bathing water status next month. We are not France, but could these two sites signal the first green shoots of a wider social movement to clean up our rivers? The Rivers Trust and Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) campaign teams hope so. Together they have drawn up a map showing 273 popular recreational areas on the river, including some where there is already community interest in creating a bathing water name, such as the Warleigh Weir on the Avon River and Sheep’s Green on the River Cam. SAS has also launched a report calling on Defra to create 200 new bathing areas by 2030. According to Thames21, setting up a swimming pool is relatively simple. For anyone starting the process, it is recommended to summon the users of the river, to choose a popular place with access and facilities, to investigate the risks of pollution, to record the number of people who use the river during the May-September swimming season, to receive permission of the landowner, to raise public awareness and then submit a formal application to Defra. It sounds simple, but Professor Becky Malby from the Ilkley Clean River team points out that there is no transparency in Defra’s decisions and that it takes about two years to complete the whole process – time that, in their case, would be better spent to correct sewage leaks from pipes of a nearby water company. So we are in (at best) muddy waters. Clearly, the increasing movement of bathing water is positive and the relative awareness of the public is crucial to improve things, but it goes nowhere in tackling the problem of chronic and widespread river pollution. Some Environmental Service tests for two types of bacteria taken at a location during the bath season do not even begin to scratch the surface of the amount of pollutants flowing through our beauty spots or the consequent dangers to humans and wildlife. Life. What we need are major improvements in entire catchments due to stricter regulations for the biggest polluters: the water industry and agriculture. A few names of swimming in a river in a catchment area flooded by sewage pollution or drowning from farm manure will not be enough to make swimming safe.
