5th annual World Rivers Day Panel Event at the OXO Tower Restaurant, Bar and Brasserie

This Monday 23rd September we had the pleasure to explore some aspects of ‘invisible’ water pollution with @John Sage from Tideway London and Emily McLean Lean from Port of London Authority .

?@Dani Jordan from Surfers Against Sewage was there in spirit with us after being stopped by flooding on train tracks on her route to London, which seemed somewhat fitting as we wanted to touch on systems’ wide reasons to work on river restoration and water activism and rethink how to deal with flooding is a big part of that.

The room was packed with supporters from Thames21, Bywaters, PLA, Be Office, Hogarth, First Plan, We are LHI, Waterwise, Pearson, Alix Partners, SRA aka Food Made Good, Washed Up Cards, Bluestate and Salesforce. Some have joined these events now since our very first one in 2018 and our collaboration with Bywaters and Washed-Up Cards on the foreshore at Gabriel’s Wharf means, together, we have carried out around 35 clean-ups on the Southbank foreshore since March this year.

The conversation around invisible water pollution delved into the issues around chemical, breakdown particles of plastic and other materials and sewage. Emily shared the work the PLA is carrying out via the Clean Thames Plan and what they hope the Thames 2050 Vision will achieve. John spoke about the Tideway project which is almost at completion. The Thames Tideway Tunnel is, in simple terms, a giant tunnel under the Thames, which will intercept sewage spilling from London’s older Victorian sewers into the river after rainfall. This is an essential project to reduce sewage pollution since the old sewers imagined and developed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette were designed when London’s population was far smaller than today. Regular overflows during periods of rain were the consequence, which meant in 2016 the works on the tunnel began. John highlighted that the legacy of the Tideway project goes much further, including Tideway’s community work with Thames21 and others, racking up an outstanding 33 268 hrs of staff community volunteering on large initiatives such as the wet wipe count. Equally impressive are their fundraising efforts with events such as the Oarsome Challenge which raised over ￡100k over three years.

Emily also reminded us of the many streams of work which are going into the Thames Vision 2050, organised under three different work streams ‘Trading Thames’, ‘Destination Thames’ and ‘Natural Thames’; all of which are unified under the desire to ensure the Thames is a healthy and clean river.

We also touched on the opportunities research and specifically citizens science brings to influence policy such as the wet wipe ban or understanding the health of our estuaries better, and ensuring people who are living further away from the Thames feel they can make a difference in water security.

The conversation then shifted to collective action, highlighting that not all problems can be resolved by river clean-ups, and citizens' science and echoing what we had discussed with Dani Jordan in our pre-panel call suggesting there is an important opportunity to make the upcoming UK Water Bill legislation a moment of change, that turns around some of the key systematic challenges our waterways face. While Dani was not in the room she would have shared her insights from the perspective of a campaigning organisation that works with volunteers and communities across the UK to raise awareness and tangible action to fight water pollution and invited us to join the March for Clean Water 3rd November 2024.

The audience engaged with the following questions and comments before we went to the foreshore to do some community action ourselves.

Jane from Waterwise e reflected on the breath of the panel which acknowledged that even our food choices have the opportunity to improve waterways and then asked the panel: If you could whip a magic wand to help the rivers which one action would you wish for?

John suggested that he would go back in time to get the original sewer system developed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette to separate sewage and rainwater as this could have prevented many of the sewage-related pollution events and would have been a slightly more robust system for London, though he recognised this solution would have been much more expensive, which is why so many cities have a combined system.

Emily would vouch for better knowledge and education around waterways in the wider public, which would have the potential for better advocacy and campaigning.

I reminded the audience of the consideration of diet and that many foods we eat regularly are very water-hungry or have the potential to drive sewage or fertiliser pollution events across all waterways in the world.

Will Browning from The Sustainable Restaurant Association also commented that he was pleased to hear the acknowledgement that we need local policy, national policy, global policy and corporate engagement to ensure water security is on the agenda of sustainability initiatives of restaurants and other businesses.

37 of us then made it to the Thames foreshore at Gabriel’s Wharf and we cleaned eight heavy bags of litter containing some weird and wonderful items such as wellies, action figures (a floppy Superhero, WWE fighters and Ironman) as well as the usual suspects hundreds of microplastics, many bottles and cups, cable ties and so much more.

This year the total volume of collected items with river clean-ups organised by the OXO Tower Restaurant of 42 litter sacks containing 328 food wrappers, 229 polystyrene/plastic cups, 289 wet wipes, 1784 cable ties, 209 bottle caps, 2032 unidentifiable microplastics, 52 rubber/hairbands, 28 razor blades, 122 plastic lids, 18 very large objects including a rain cover of a boat ?? and lots more. We thank the 99 volunteers and the 28 organisations which joined us on the clean-ups this year.

Leading Thames21 River Action this year has been particularly joyful for me because I saw a long-term volunteer @Julie Tucker graduate herself to become a River Action lead.

I connected to the Ravensbourne River Action Group and Catriona Ross in my home borough Lewisham I saw a very different river habitat being restored and regenerated.

The team at OXO Tower Restaurant, Bar and Brasserie will now have a winter break before returning in March 2025 for more of the same, thank you to the many organisations and individuals who have joined our clean-ups this year.