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The Thames has become a ‘national disgrace’ – so we tested the water to see how bad it really is
This weekend’s Boat Race will see the crews faced with a river full of sewage – and some alarming health risks
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It’s strange, really, that one of our most beloved, lyrical books about English rivers should have been written in the dying embers of the Victorian era. When Kenneth Grahame was writing about a rat and a mole passing their days “simply messing about in boats” – inspired by the walks he took with his son by the River Thames and its tributaries in Berkshire – the waters that flowed past his house and on to London were a cesspool often blamed for the diseases that ripped through the city, characterising that age as one of filth and sickness.
Microbiologist Arthur Hassall perhaps put it best when writing about life on the banks of the Thames in 1850: “A portion of the inhabitants of the metropolis are made to consume, in some form or another, a portion of their own excrement, and moreover, to pay for the privilege.” You feel Mr Hassall would be disappointed to know that 174 years later, very little has changed.
Some 30 miles downstream from where Grahame wrote Wind in the Willows, four boats will carve a path through those same waters on Saturday, fighting to be the first to reach the finish line by Chiswick Bridge. The 18 men and 18 women cutting through the water will of course have their eyes on that coveted Boat Race trophy. But they’ll also be trying their damndest not to fall in. Why? Because the water is filled with sewage.
It has been a very bad week for Thames Water. The beleaguered company faces a standoff with its regulator and finds itself in a race to secure funding after its investors pulled out of a planned £500 million lifeline, all amid claims the water quality in London and the South East is worse than ever thanks to sewage overflows from its outlets. That this has coincided with one of the highlights of the British sporting calendar, which just happens to take place very much in Thames Water’s manor, has only added insult to injury.
Sean Bowden, coach of the Oxford University Boat Club declared the water quality in British rivers “a national disgrace” as E.coli levels detected in the Thames reached alarming levels. The Environment Agency (EA) revealed 3.6 million hours of sewage discharges had been made into British rivers last year, constituting a record high.
In the Thames, surveys found an average of 2,869 E.coli colony forming units per 100ml of water (almost three times the recommended limit) in samples taken around Hammersmith Bridge, where Saturday’s boat race will be staged. The Telegraph did its own test on Thursday and found levels of E.coli at 20 times the threshold merely for “sufficient” quality bathing water, and almost eight times that for intestinal enterococci, suggesting a strong presence of human effluent in the river at Putney at that time.
“It’s a concern,” Bowden told Telegraph Sport this week. “And I’m really glad the papers are pursuing the water companies on it. I am right with them. It’s a national disgrace, isn’t it?”
He added: “Why would you want to put your kids out in that?”
Well quite, or indeed your cox. The traditional cox-dunking ceremony at the end of the race is likely to be off. The organisers have put new guidelines in place highlighting the “risks of entering the water”, advising rowers to cover up “open wounds”, wash their hands regularly and pay a visit to the cleansing station in the finish area.
It’s worth noting that the health of the Thames doesn’t just hang on the sewage spills. Fertiliser, pesticide and faecal matter run-off from the land – “diffuse agricultural pollution” as it is known – is also culpable. According to local supply company South East Water, pesticide concentration in the Lower Thames area has breached Drinking Water Standards (DWS) recently, with high concentrations of herbicides flufenacet and propyzamide being found in the water. These readings were likely to have been exacerbated by heavy rainfall.
It is sewage, however, which is drawing the nation’s ire at present. EA data shows the number of hours of Thames Water spilled sewage increased by more than 160 per cent between 2022 and 2023, with 196,414 hours of spills recorded last year.
Figures obtained by the Liberal Democrats in November 2023 showed Thames Water had spilled an equivalent of 29,000 Olympic swimming pools since 2020. Companies like Thames Water say overflows are essential in extreme circumstances (such as during periods of exceptionally heavy rainfall) for managing the flow of effluent through our ageing sewage systems. The argument being, wouldn’t you rather have sewage released in a controlled way into our waterways than backing up into your house? Campaigners say in reality they use overflow discharges much more frequently.
Thames Water was fined £35.7 million between 2017 and 2023 for pollution incidents. In 2023, it was fined £3.3 million for killing more than 1,400 fish by discharging untreated sewage into rivers.
In Britain, water companies have a shameful record when it comes to tackling spills, but Thames Water has come under particular scrutiny in the past month. It faced backlash over its commitment (or lack thereof) to tackling sewage issues, declining to join an industry-wide push to reduce pollution in our rivers. The Government announced £180 million would be spent by six water companies over a year to prevent more than 8,000 spills; Thames Water won’t be among those participating.
An examination of Thames Water’s own live sewage map is alarming. As we entered this Easter weekend, it was a sea of red exclamation points, each one alerting you to a storm overflow that is currently discharging, while the amber ones tell you where there has recently been a spill. Click on Thame, for example, a market town to the east of Oxford. “Our monitor indicated this storm overflow is currently discharging. This means there could be sewage in this section of the watercourse.” What does it feed into? Lashlake Stream. Any wild swimmers might want to avoid that particular spot over the bank holiday weekend.
Or what about Greenwich, in the epicentre of the capital? At 14:52 on Friday, the storm outlet there has been discharging for 44 hours 22 minutes and counting. It’s slightly better news for the Boat Race – the closest spill to the route is downriver at Wandsworth, and that was a brief five-hour job. Though it’s worth noting there was also a rather large spill upriver at Mogden this week. That one went on for 15 hours, well into the early hours of Friday morning. Here’s hoping the current has whipped any nasties out to Essex by Saturday afternoon.
Mogden is something of a key player in the great Thames Water debacle. The sewage treatment works there in west London collapsed in 2021, flooding nearby homes and gardens with foul-smelling water. “The river came up incredibly quickly. It engulfed the bottom of our garden and rushed up into the kitchen. It smelled strongly of sewage,” said local resident, Anna King.
It’s one of the biggest works in the UK, treating wastewater from over 2 million people. The year before, during a period of heavy rainfall, around 2 billion litres of raw sewage were released in just 48 hours. The company now has plans to use the plant as a so-called recycling scheme, which would lead to 100 million litres of water being taken from the river every day and 100 million litres of treated sewage put back.
A Thames Water spokesperson said: “Taking action to improve the health of rivers is a key focus for us and we want to lead the way with our transparent approach to data. We remain the only company to provide live alerts for all untreated discharges and this ‘near real-time’ data is available to customers as a map on our website.”
They added that they had experienced “higher than average long-term rainfall across London and the Thames Valley with groundwater levels exceptionally high for the time of the year”.
“We are working hard to make these discharges unnecessary and have published plans to upgrade over 250 of our sites.”
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The Tideway Tunnel, a 24ft-wide tunnel running from Acton to Stratford, which is almost complete, is meant to take some of the pressure off. When open, its purpose is to prevent overspill into the river from more than 30 of 50 outlets. “London has forgotten the Thames,” Tideway Tunnel chief executive Andy Mitchell told The Telegraph in 2018. “Personally, I think it is unacceptable for our capital city river to be treated as an open sewer and that needs to change.”
Dubbed the Super Sewer, it’s to be a kind of second Thames – a new system to support the Victorian pipes designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette. In the 1860s, those pipes were meant to service a city of two million. Nine million now live in the capital. That’s over four times the volume of effluent. When it rains and the sewers flood, the excess is flushed into the river via a network of overflows.
The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race teams may want to pray for fair weather on Saturday morning, then, if for no other reason than the winning cox may not appreciate a celebratory dunk in a pool of sewage overspill.