The waters of the River Cam are an unsettling lurid green on a dull day. The river that flows through Cambridge and has been enjoyed by swimmers including Lord Byron, Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf and Roger Deakin is increasingly polluted from sewage discharges and phosphates and nitrates from farmland.
Now swimmers hope that the government designating a short stretch of the river at Sheep’s Green as “bathing waters” will provide the impetus to clean it up.
The government will next month decide whether to approve up to 27 bathing water sites in England including four spots on the River Dart in Devon, two on Lake Coniston in the Lake District and popular riverine swimming places on the Severn, Stour, Ribble, Thames, Tone and Wharfe.
As well as encouraging increasingly popular wild swimming, supporters of the bathing waters designation say that the weekly water quality monitoring it necessitates would provide the evidence to legally require water companies to tackle pollution.
Opponents argue that the water companies are already legally obliged to tackle pollution and designating polluted rivers for swimming endangers people’s health and puts the onus on citizen action to correct regulatory shortcomings.
At Sheep’s Green, conservationists and some residents are vehemently opposed to the designation because of the impact extra visitors would have on a trio of adjacent nature reserves.
According to opponents of the designation, Sheep’s Green already throngs with summer visitors including Cambridge punts, paddleboarders, picnickers and canoe club members. They fear the bathing water designation would attract even more visitors, who erode the banks where water voles live and picnic on the ecologically sensitive nature reserves, which are also already filled with decomposing toilet tissue from wild toiletting.
“It’s crazy,” said Pamela Gatrell, the chair of Friends of Paradise, one of the three nature reserves surrounding the proposed bathing area. “The facilities needed for a bathing waters site just aren’t here. The small car park is already full in the summer and there is one set of toilets in the playground, and they are frequently out of use.
“The designation will make Sheep’s Green a honeypot destination with everybody concentrated in one area instead of spreading swimming along the river. It encourages people to think a little section of the river can be cleaned up, rather than cleaning up the whole river.”
The designation for Sheep’s Green is supported by Cambridge city council, Anglian Water and the Cam Valley Forum charity, which proposed the idea. Its consultation of more than 500 people found 93% in favour.
According to the charity, designation is a pragmatic and useful step to cleaning up the…
2024-03-09 03:00:28
Post from www.theguardian.com