More than 7.5 million individuals immerse themselves in lakes, rivers, seas and lidos yearly within the UK.
But getting in the water means getting in air pollution too for many outside swimmers. Raw sewage was discharged into UK waters for 4.7 million hours throughout 2024. But sewage is simply a part of the water pollution problem. Rain washing into rivers and streams incorporates fertilisers, pesticides and animal waste from farmlands, ceaselessly chemical substances from automobile tyres, plus medicine from our personal our bodies. Industry deregulation and privatisation have produced a water disaster.
Dirty Business, a brand new Channel 4 docudrama highlighting this disaster, is a welcome name for motion, although not a stunning one for anybody who swims outdoor commonly.
Through our analysis, and in our personal swimming, we now have explored how outside swimming just isn’t merely a leisure hazard to be averted. Within outside swimming communities, negotiating threat, accountability and vulnerability has all the time been central to this exercise.
As one swimmer shared with us: “I have followed [the environmental charity] Surfers Against Sewage for many years. My first glimpse of a condom was as a child, swimming near a sewage outlet.” Through these experiences, swimmers study to learn the water round them, growing expertise and information that assist them to maintain swimming by way of all of it.
Read extra:
Why wild swimming is best to your psychological wellbeing than open-air swimming pools
Feminist thinker and social theorist Donna Haraway writes about “staying with the trouble”: sitting with issue slightly than trying away from it. For the swimmers we spoke to and swam with, that is precisely what getting within the water means. The swimmer’s physique turns into a website the place ecological disaster is felt instantly.
One swimmer described how his understanding shifted: “My awareness of pollution massively increased as I started to swim. You realise [Lake] Windermere is polluted, Grasmere is polluted. Your eyes open to it. Your nose opens to it.”
Writing about browsing within the UK, cultural theorist Clifton Evers and health and wellbeing professor Cassandra Phoenix describe the game as “polluted leisure”. Swimmers encounter this contradiction instantly. They really feel air pollution within the water towards their pores and skin, within the smells of their swim spots and within the residues left on their our bodies, equipment and reminiscences.
Read extra:
England’s sewage scandal hinges on lack of water business regulation – new docudrama reveals how revenue drives air pollution
To swim with the difficulty of polluted waters is to not settle for their degradation. Our analysis has constantly proven that outside swimmers refuse to look away. To proceed swimming alongside air pollution, swimmers draw on located, embodied information of their swim spots. They monitor sewage outflow maps, hold their heads above water or determine to remain on shore if the water smells improper.
Through navigating air pollution, outside swimmers are reminded that the well being and wellbeing of our our bodies is certain to the standard of our waters and is folded into wider relations of trigger and consequence. Swimmers, like everybody in fashionable society, are implicated within the agricultural techniques, shopper habits and infrastructural calls for that contribute to polluted waters.
When we swim alongside microbial life, fish, algae, our waste and agricultural runoff, we expertise what Haraway calls “response-ability”: not simply the capability to reply, however the obligation to take action. Indeed, as feminist cultural research researcher Rebecca Olive has argued, taking good care of our waters should transfer past aspiration: it should be about motion.
Safia Bailey, Author offered (no reuse)
Swimming with the difficulty
Across the UK, outside swimmers are enacting that response capacity: through collective action and protest, authorized challenges and awareness-raising swims. Some become involved with citizen science and water testing or construct progressive alliances that construct communities of change, experience and motion.
As a end result, bathing water designations are growing. These are places protected in regulation for swimming, and the one websites the place funding in water high quality has traditionally been accredited and monitored. There are at the moment round 600 designated websites within the UK. Thirteen new websites had been proposed in February 2026.
We typically see the processes that result in these adjustments led by outside swimming communities and others with a deep love for the water. For one swimmer we spoke to, London’s first potential bathing water designation was a “legacy”, a chance to look after a river that has given her pleasure, solace and rejuvenation.
Dirty Business is a requirement for systemic change within the water business, change that swimmers are preventing for. As author and outside swimmer Ella Foote has defined, this disaster should not drive us to take a seat on the shore. To settle for that’s to simply accept that shared waters are a sacrifice zone that has been degraded by personal pursuits, deserted by regulators and made inaccessible to the general public.
To swim with the difficulty of air pollution is to immerse your self within the relationship between human and ecological well being – to really feel it in your pores and skin, to hold it house with you and to refuse to look away.
Swimming, crusing, even simply constructing a sandcastle – the ocean advantages our bodily and psychological wellbeing. Curious about how a robust coastal connection helps drive marine conservation, scientists are diving in to research the ability of blue well being.
This article is a part of a collection, Vitamin Sea, exploring how the ocean may be enhanced by our interplay with it.