Why we hold swimming in polluted waters

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 outdoor 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, eternally chemical substances from automobile tyres, plus medication from our personal our bodies. Industry deregulation and privatisation have produced a water disaster.

Dirty Business, a brand new Channel 4 docudrama highlighting this crisis, is a welcome name for motion, although not a stunning one for anybody who swims outdoor recurrently.

Through our analysis, and in our personal swimming, we’ve explored how outside swimming shouldn’t be merely a leisure hazard to be prevented. Within outside swimming communities, negotiating danger, duty and vulnerability has at all times 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 be taught to learn the water round them, growing abilities and data that assist them to maintain swimming by all of it.

Feminist thinker and social theorist Donna Haraway writes about “staying with the trouble”: sitting with problem reasonably than wanting 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 straight.

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 straight. 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, package and reminiscences.

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 data of their swim spots. They monitor sewage outflow maps, hold their heads above water or determine to remain on shore if the water smells mistaken.

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 programs, client 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 have to be about motion.

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 outcome, bathing water designations are rising. 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 have been proposed in February 2026.

We usually 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 possibility to take care of a river that has given her pleasure, solace and rejuvenation.

Dirty Business is a requirement for systemic change within the water industry, change that swimmers are preventing for. As author and outside swimmer Ella Foote has defined, this disaster should not pressure us to sit down on the shore. To settle for that’s to simply accept that shared waters are a sacrifice zone that has been degraded by non-public 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.

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Kate Moles, Reader in Sociology, Cardiff University and Safia Bailey, PhD Candidate, Sociology, Cardiff University

This article is republished from The Conversation underneath a Creative Commons license.