The British rivers being made officially clean enough for wild swimming

2020 saw a disturbing rise in sewage being dumped in British rivers, but new schemes are popping up to clean up our waterways — and some are even on their way to receiving Environment Agency clean-water standards. Annunciata Elwes reports.

Familes swimming and playing in the River Teme, Shropshire.
Familes swimming and playing in the River Teme, Shropshire.
(Image credit: Alan Keith Beastall / Alamy)
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The Teme, near Ludlow in Shropshire, and the Leam, near Leamington Spa in Warwickshire, are about to benefit from a £78 million plan that will make them among the first British rivers to meet official clean-water standards for swimming.

They follow the course set by the River Wharfe in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, which became the first to be declared an official bathing site in Britain last year after the Environment Agency pledged to test the waters weekly during the May 15 to September 30 swimming season.

A raft of water companies across the country have clean-up projects in the pipeline — and not before time. Last year, water companies dumped raw sewage into rivers 37% more often than in 2019.

Three wild swimming spots to try in Britain

Granchester Meadows, Grantchester, Cambridgeshire A popular spot with day-trippers ever since Rupert Brooke wrote his famous poem, but not as busy as you might fear.

River Barle, Exmoor National Park, Somerset Crystal clear and cool, the Barle’s secluded pools are heaven on a sunny day. Picnic at Sherdon Water, then plunge into its deep, shady waters. If you’re lucky, you might spot a kingfisher.

Glen Fyne, Argyll The river that runs down Glen Fyne into Loch Fyne in Argyll has one particularly good, secret waterfall that could have been made for wild swimming a few miles up the glen. It can be accessed by a track that runs from near the Loch Fyne Oyster Bar at the head of Loch Fyne itself: it’s well worth the walk.

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Annunciata Elwes
Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

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