Water, water everywhere...

The addition of 27 new wild swimming areas should be great news – but if there’s no promise they won’t be as gross as our sewage-filled seas, Helen Coffey sees little cause to celebrate

- Helen Coffey

As a middle-class woman in her thirties, I’ve had no choice but to fully embrace one cliché in particular: I bloody love wild swimming. It started with a simple appreciation for taking a dip in the ocean, but things escalated so fast that I no longer recognise myself. I’m that person I used to roll my eyes at, doing the weekly shop in a dry robe; I have wetsuit boots and sea shoes on seasonal rotation; I bought a waterproof bag that doubles as a luminous swimming float. And, most crucially, I have an app that tells me whether or not the sea where I live will be heaving with human excrement.

This last bit of essential kit is why I am not as overjoyed as I should be at the news that England is to have 27 new monitored bathing spots – the largest expansion of wild swimming areas ever. On the face of it, this is a brilliant thing. The new sites are mainly rivers, and their “designated” status means there will be pollution testing throughout the summer.

But sadly, measuring the cleanliness of places doesn’t actually make them clean. It just lets you know how clean (or not) they are. Environment Agency ratings range from “poor” to “excellent”, with “sufficient” and “good” along the way. Of the current 423 designated spots, 405 met the minimum standard (“sufficient”) for swimming last year. The number of places rated “excellent” has fallen by nearly 6 per cent year-on-year, while the number of “poor” quality spots for 2023 is four times what it was in 2021, hitting a total of 18 last year – the highest level since the four-tier classification system was introduced in 2015.