Nearly 170 years ago, the scorching summer of 1858 plunged London into a crisis now known as The Great Stink. It was widely assumed that the River Thames, flowing into the sea, would carry the sewage in the same manner. Some unrelenting heat had instead turned the sewer of London into a festering stream of malignant stench, exterminating nearly all life from the river and teeming with disease. This prompted the construction of more advanced sewer systems and embankments along the Thames. Lessons had been learnt from this complication, and one might assume that something of this magnitude would stick in collective memory.
Fast forward to the current day and history seems to be repeating itself. 2023 saw an average of 1,271 sewage spills per day across the UK; 2024 saw the Thames’ E.Coli levels reach over 27-times the amount deemed ‘poor’ by the environment agency in the lead up to the Henley Royal Regatta; and we fast approach 2025 with UK water companies burdened by over £60 billion in debt.
As major stakeholders of our nation’s rivers, the rowing community faces water pollution as a glaring reality. If the periodical disappearances of crew members with mysterious bouts of vomiting were not telling enough, the grim task of cleaning down boats, which will have taken on a stained livery after a session on freshly polluted waters, surely can be.
Naturalist and TV Broadcaster Steve Backshall, renowned for his series Deadly 60 and various other expeditions, described the Thames as a “very dangerous place” due to sewer outages. If a new episode were to be aired, Thames Water may have to make a feature.
A collective campaign speaks even louder. Many members of the rowing community (with British Rowing notably as members of the Clean Water Sports Alliance) were present at the March for Clean Water in London earlier this month. Around 15,000 people were present, with speeches from the likes of Chris Packham, Carol Vorderman, and Olympic champion Imogen Grant. The march made its way to Parliament Square, hoping to send a message to the people that had heard, or smelt, a similar precept 170 years prior.
Today’s situation traces from the back end of Thatcher’s 1989 Water Act and the privatisation of water companies, an attempt to derive profits and boost quality of service. Water providers have been acquired by international equity firms, (the sovereign funds of Abu Dhabi and China included in the list for Thames Water), and figuratively sucked dry.
Can protecting shareholder dividends ever be compatible with maintaining a now decaying natural resource? And what can be done to clean up the UK’s waterways? Whatever the solution, the rowing community needs to be leading the charge for change.
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