“The only way for us to monitor water quality is by measuring bacteria ourselves.” 

John, these aren’t the words of a water company engineer. Or the Environment Agency. They’re from Sean – a local wild swimmer in Maidenhead who just wanted to know if it was safe to swim. 

For nearly 20 years, Sean and his wife have swum along their local stretch. Often early, when it’s quiet. They see herons, fish – even deer.

But just upstream, untreated sewage pours into the river. And no-one could tell them when, or how dangerous it was to their health.

"I asked Thames Water if they could just notify us of any untreated spills. Correspondence dragged on for months with promises that they were 'working on it’."

Sean stepped up. When regulators and polluters refused to act, he and a small team of volunteers started collecting and testing water samples themselves, sending them to a lab every week.

Here’s what they found:

💧 After 2 years of consistently testing, they are now able to better predict when the river water quality is safer to swim in, and in which conditions to avoid swimming altogether.

💧 Outside the “official” summer bathing season, unsafe bacteria levels doubled. 

Now, we need to ramp up support. For Sean, and for others gathering vital evidence across the country. They’re gathering the proof so we can apply the pressure. 

Will you donate today to fuel our campaigns to end sewage pollution - turning their data into headlines and pressure that’s IMPOSSIBLE to ignore?  

It costs £25 to analyse one water sample for bacteria in a lab – donate today and have DOUBLE the impact.  

Sean’s story shows us just how vital citizen scientists are. Sean’s group is just one of 20 community water testing teams across the UK funded and supported by Surfers Against Sewage.

Rain or shine, volunteers like him are knee-deep in rivers every week, collecting samples, demanding change, and making our waters safer for everyone.  

Communities shouldn’t have to be testing at all, the Regulator should be adequately funded to do so. By championing their incredible work, we can push for an end to sewage pollution for good. 

Here’s how our citizen scientists uncover the truth, step by step:  

1. Collect the sample – using a pole and a stainless-steel beaker, our volunteers get right down to the waters’ edge to collect a sample before decanting it into a sterile bottle - labelled with the date, time and location - and send it off to a microbiology testing lab.     

2. Nourish the nasties – at the lab, the sample is placed on a petri dish containing agar - a jelly-like substance that encourages only bacteria of interest to grow, and then it’s incubated overnight at 37°C.   

3. Count the colonies – then the revealing bit. The lab scientists count the number of colonies (each colony represents a single bacterial cell) to determine how many bacterial cells are in the sample.   

Will you help fuel our fight to end sewage pollution?

Please, give what you can:

Thank you for keeping up the fight to protect our wild waters. We honestly couldn’t do this without our community of Ocean Activists alongside us.   

Kirsty, Community Water Quality Manager