Campaigners ‘marry’ River Avon as battle against water sewage pollution continues
Photos: David Griffiths
The mid-morning light pierces through the trees, trickling down over the River Avon to flood the summer meadow at Eastwood Farm nature reserve.
In the distance obscured by the foliage, the pounding of a drum sounds out. A chorus picks up among the crowd in the meadow, who clutch cardboard fish and crane their necks, as the steady drum draws closer and closer.
“From the mountain, to the sea! I am the river, and the river is me!”
From the woods emerges the River Goddess (also known as Megan Ruth-Trump), an aquatic green and white dress flowing behind her. Flanked by her mother and father and tailed by the drummer, she takes the stage and the crowd halts their chant.
Ruth Sidgwick, 61 – normally a celebrant at funerals – holds the River Goddess’s hand and begins addressing the crowd: “Welcome to everyone who has travelled today to honour this very special event, Meg’s marriage to the River Avon.”
You could be forgiven for thinking that Meg’s ‘marriage’ to the Avon, which takes place just before the solstice, is some kind of pagan ritual. In fact it’s a serious, albeit colourful, event organised by campaigners Save Our Avon to raise awareness about the quality of the river water, with the end goal of granting ‘legal personhood’ status to the Avon.
All that’s missing is the council’s support’
As the Cable reported last year, the Whanganui River in New Zealand was given this status in 2017, granting it the rights, duties and liabilities that come with personhood.
The Whanganui can now be represented as a whole entity in court proceedings, such as that of a family trust, a company or an incorporated society. It has inspired similar rulings elsewhere – in 2019, Bangladesh granted legal personhood status to all of its rivers.
Here, the Avon has been carved up into many separate geographical ownerships and jurisdictions. But what happens in one area can affect the entire ecosystem.
In 2021 the Cable revealed that utility company Wessex Water spilled untreated sewage into the Avon for more than 100,000 hours in 2021 alone.
Within a couple of hours of Saturday’s ceremony, waste entered nearby stretches at Hanham and Keynsham, according to data published by local campaign group Conham Bathing. The spills occur after heavy rainfall, when the mostly Victorian infrastructure is unable to cope with high quantities of water.
Becca Blease, Eva Perrin, and Emma Nicol, are founders of Conham Bathing. The group of wild-swimmers and volunteers are campaigning for designated bathing water status (DBWS) to be granted to the stretch of the Avon by Conham River Park and Eastwood Farm – which also led them to look more broadly at river rights.
If approved, DBWS status would place a legal duty on the government to monitor the river quality in this area and publish information to the public about how safe it is for wild swimming. In the meantime, Conham Bathing regularly tests the water quality of the river.
“Even at its lowest levels, the Avon still has a lot of E. coli in it – beyond what would be considered the levels in a natural river,” says Perrin.”
Conham Bathing are now entering their third summer of testing, and manage an online database tracking sewage spills into the Avon between Bristol and Bath.
“We need the council’s support for our campaign,” Blease continues, “We have the [DBWS] application ready to go, but the only piece missing is the landowner’s support. And the council owns the land.”
Last autumn, things were looking promising. A petition organised by Conham Bathing garnered over 5,000 votes, and the council unanimously voted to amend a bylaw that prohibits swimming between the Floating Harbour and Hanham Lock.
But the mayor, Marvin Rees overruled the decision, claiming that removing a bylaw “cannot be done in isolation”.
Since the mayor’s decision in November 2022, there have been more than 50,000 recorded minutes of sewage spills into the River Avon – equivalent to about 35 days.
There are often predictably grim consequences for wild swimmers, especially during the summer months when a dip in the Avon offers welcome respite from the hot weather.
“I used this spot all throughout lockdown, it was such a lifeline to get out and about,” says Patty Hanson, 27, who is at the river wedding. “Unfortunately, my friends and I got sick going into it.”
Patty’s companion Miles Bell, 33, says they are there to highlight the plight of eels in Britain’s “rapidly declining” river ecosystems.
“Since 1980, the European eel population has declined by 95%,” Patty adds. “They used to make up more than half the number of fish biomass in British rivers. But now they are critically endangered.”
Back on the stage, River Goddess Megan addresses the crowd. “The grass, the trees, the bugs and the birds, they don’t really need us to exist, yet here we all are,” she says. “In fact, we might have to admit they might do better without us at all. But we do need them.”
“All living things are drawn to the water’s edge,” she adds. “We need our leaders to recognise our right to access clean water, to get in it as well as to drink it.”
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My concerns with the Conham stretch of the River Avon relate to the former use of the land both sides of the river; to the North was the Butler’s Tar Works on Crews Hole Road and the St. Anne’s Board Mill Company on the South side.
Butler’s, later being taken over by British Steel, produced other things apart from Tar. During the War they produced Benzene which was stored in massive tanks in the nearby hillside. Another bi-product from Tar Distillation is Phenol – Not very nice and it was regularly dumped in the river.
The homes that were built by the Bull Pub are on contaminated land and I don’t believe the resident’s can grow anything in their gardens due to the ground contamination?
If you walk along the riverbank you can still see the oily film on the water with it’s tell-tale “rainbow patterns” on the surface. This seeps out of the ground and into the river.
But before you say, “that’s further downstream to Conham” you need to remember the River Avon is Tidal right up to Hanham Lock by the Chequers Pub. Contamination travels in both directions here, not just the sewage from further upstream, including the “treated” sewage from City of Bath eleven miles away!