‘Tiny bit of rain and the sewage comes’: Brighton swimmers vent fury at sea air pollution | Water

“I’m furious,” says Jo Armstrong, 75, sitting on Brighton seashore together with her daughter and granddaughter.

Armstrong lives in Lewes, a city 8 miles from Brighton, and often goes swimming in close by Seaford in East Sussex daily. But over the previous week the water there was too polluted to swim. “Brighton beach was the only place that stayed clean,” she says.

In the week Friends of the Earth ranked the UK’s water firms for his or her environmental injury, and information of additional sewage leaks emerged, the Guardian headed to Brighton seashore to speak to swimmers. According to public data, a sewage alert was issued twice on the seashore in August, and 158 alerts recorded general in 2025.

“There’s a tiny bit of rain and then the sewage comes, I just don’t understand it. It’s extraordinary that we can’t have clean beaches,” says Armstrong.

This summer season England has endured record-breaking heatwaves throughout which scores of individuals have hung out on seashores and rivers. In Brighton, the state of the nation’s water is a matter on many individuals’s minds.

Hildi Mitchell, 55, runs a programme referred to as Pool to Pier, the place she teaches pool swimmers to swim safely in open waters. Increasingly, she is discovering that air pollution is stopping folks from taking the leap to the ocean.

“There are swimmers who have swum with us in the pool all year round but won’t come out in the sea in the summer because they’re worried about becoming ill,” she says.

When it involves the protection of the water, checking for sewage spills has turn into as necessary as checking the climate and tidal patterns. “I would love to be able to swim anywhere, rather than thinking about trying to avoid pollution,” Mitchell says.

Through Pool to Pier, Mitchell presents free workshops to kids from households on low incomes. “These families already have limited things they can do in the summer to keep their children active, healthy and entertained. Swimming should be something that’s free and available to local families, but it’s not and that’s really sad.”

Greg Veros, 59, has lived in Brighton for 22 years and swum all his life, however after falling unwell attributable to what he believes was sewage air pollution a number of years in the past, he now spends extra time at Brighton’s out of doors swimming pool than he does within the sea.

“I’m an enthusiastic swimmer, I can’t get enough of it,” Veros says. He used to need to skip his every day swim if there was a rainstorm or a sewage scare, however now the pool has given him an alternate. “It’s the best thing to have happened to Brighton,” he says.

But for Mitchell, there’s nothing that may change swimming within the sea.

“It’s about freedom. You’re not constrained by the black line on the pool. Nobody’s in your lane, you’re not worried about getting in anyone’s way. It’s a place where you can just swim in the way you want to swim,” Mitchell says.

Anna Field, 54, moved to Brighton so she may swim frequently, however, like Mitchell, she says checking for sewage spills is as necessary as checking the climate. There have been a number of instances when she has come all the way down to the seashore and will scent the sewage, though this has been much less frequent this summer season amid the dry climate. When air pollution stops her from swimming, it’s a bit like not with the ability to stroll within the park as a result of it’s raining, “except with this, you feel people [are] to blame”.

She is extra indignant than unhappy. “I absolutely love being in the ocean. It’s got its own personality, you look out of the window in the morning and it’s a different colour from yesterday or on some days it will tell you, no, you’re not coming in today,” Field says.

“Swimming is such a nice thing for people to be able to do and it’s public, anyone can go in – it would be a real shame if that was less accessible.”