Murky waters

The musician and fisherman on what’s wrong with rivers and the laws that protect them

- Feargal Sharkey

PARADISE comes at a cost: you must defend it. This is my uppermost thought as I walk along the River Lea, outside the Hertfordshire village of Stanstead Abbotts, with Feargal Sharkey. Trout are rising, water voles are scuttling, a kingfisher is reported. The scene can’t look so different from when Izaak Walton walked to Amwell Hill in The Compleat Angler, but that’s only because this stretch of river is owned by the Amwell Magna Fishery, the UK’s oldest angling club. It pursued the Environment Agency (EA) to the doors of the High Court a couple of years ago to compel it to fulfil its legal obligation to protect water quality.

The fishery employs two men full time to ensure that the river remains this beautiful and biodiverse, laying tree trunks in front of banks to stop invasive signal crayfish burrowing into them. Yet even they cannot completely guard against the evils of algae, resulting from high phosphate levels and over-abstraction.

Environmental calamity is business as usual for England’s rivers, only 14% of which are considered of good ecological status under the Water Framework Directive. Every body of water fails the test for chemical pollution. In 2020, water companies discharged raw sewage into them some 400,000 times—hardly an encouragement for wild swimming. Mr Sharkey is, however, what economists call a disruptor; happy to be considered, as he was dubbed recently, a stroppy former punk rocker who won’t take no for an answer, he’s a one-man (but growing) campaign for action. Last month, he appeared before the Environment Audit Committee to speak passionately for England’s rivers.