It has become a grim but necessary part of the routine for sea swimmers who splash out into Falmouth Bay from Gyllyngvase and Swanpool beaches, two sandy stretches of Cornish coast separated by a brambly headland at high tide and sparkling rock pools at low. They pack costumes, goggles, towels, perhaps a flask of tea – and then pause to check the Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) app, to establish whether it is clear to swim or whether they might find something nasty in the water.
“Sad that we have to do that, isn’t it?” says Gail Muller, 44, a writer, teacher and adventurer who loves to swim in the ocean all year round, as she sits with her puppy, Bill, gearing up for a dip.
“We’re in one of the most beautiful parts of the country. The beaches are glorious, the water – usually – is glorious. Ninety per cent of everyone makes an effort to keep it pristine and protect people and the wildlife. Then you realise the water companies and the government are not treating it with the same respect while charging us lots of money. It rankles.”
She tries not to feel bitter. “We are small people in a small town. Being angry would only cause pain and frustration. We realise there’s very little we can do, so I think the mood turns to sadness and disappointment.”
Muller is Cornish through and through and grew up not having to worry too much before plunging into the sea. “You had to think, is the wind safe, is the tide safe? You’d know your area, get in, swim, then go home to get on with your busy life.
“Now, you add in the complexity of having to analyse apps and work out: are we going to get sick? Am I going to miss a couple of days’ work because I tried to help my mental and physical health by swimming? Well, that is frustrating. You’re out there and see some scum on the water and don’t know if it’s something like seaweed innocently decomposing, or whether it’s something more sinister.”
The issue of sewage being discharged into bathing waters made headlines late this summer, just as holidaymakers and fair-weather swimmers tried to get in their last salt-water fix before the autumn chills arrived.
Beachgoers across England and Wales were warned to stay out of the water after storm overflow pipes containing a mixture of sewage, rain and surface water were discharged into the sea. The Guardian revealed that the incoming prime minister, Liz Truss, was responsible for cutting millions of pounds of funding earmarked for tackling water pollution during her time as environment secretary.
SAS says that, so far this bathing season, it has received 654 combined sewer overflow (CSO) notifications from 171 different locations. The worst-hit spots were Longrock in Cornwall and Scarborough in North Yorkshire (19 each), Cowes on the Isle of Wight (16), and Spittal in Northumberland and Biggar Bank on Walney Island, Cumbria (both 14). The week of 15 August saw the most CSO alerts (100).
“We track thousands of sewage spills at official bathing waters and Blue Flag beaches every summer,” says Hugo Tagholm, the CEO of SAS. “The water industry seems to consider even our most prized beaches as a place they can dump their sewage pollution. We alerted the great British beach-loving public to almost 3,500 separate sewage pollution incidents at popular beaches last summer. People should be able to swim between the red and yellow flags without the spectre of sewage pollution hanging over them.
“The privatised water industry sees the public as a cash cow to line the pockets of their shareholders while abusing our coastline and rivers with effluent they should have treated. It’s high time water industry profits were severely restricted until the necessary investment has been rolled out at pace. Not in 2035, not 2050.”
Despite the blue flag currently fluttering over Gyllyngvase (signalling the beach is clean, safe and well managed), it has had its fair share of problems this year – as has Swanpool. According to the SAS app, there have been nine “sewage pollution alerts” at Gyllyngvase in 2022 – known to most as Gylly – and three at Swanpool. On Monday, there were 10 SAS pollution alerts in force, at beaches including Gylly, Sennen Cove near Land’s End and two beaches in the UK’s surfing capital, Newquay.
I visit Gylly and Swanpool at the end of August and find Glyn Winchester, 60, a charity worker, sipping on ginger tea from her flask after an early-morning swim. She moved to Cornwall from south Texas in 1990 and was appalled when she found sewage was routinely released into the waters here. “That put me off swimming for years,” she says. “Then it seemed to get better and I started to get out there.”
Winchester is a member of a group called the Swanny Swimmers, who meet at the beaches. Like many, she has experienced a dodgy tummy after swimming. “I had a sickness bug. I can’t prove it came from here but nobody else I was close to had it. It just doesn’t seem anyone in power is doing anything about it.”
A second Swanny Swimmer, Lyn Pollard, 64, says she loves being out in the elements. “I’m a bit of a nature girl. I try not to worry too much about the state of the water, but I have noticed, in the last month, that my hair and skin are much more greasy when I get out. I used to love the feel of the salt in my hair, the way it made it wavy; now I dash home to wash it.”
Hero Selwood, 62, another of the Swanny gang, who works for a recumbent tricycle company, says she felt SAS was winning the fight five or six years ago. “But I’m not so sure now. It’s really sad. When you go on litter picks on the beach, you find cotton buds, which is a sign of sewage. When you walk down to the beach close to the stream, you sometimes smell sewage.”
Joining the Swannies for their morning swim is Jem Wallis, 49, a Cornish open-water coach who runs a wild swimming company. People who struggle with their mental health are prescribed sessions with him. But he says his phone is pinging all too often with SAS alerts. “You know that after rain there’s going to be an alert somewhere. It’s happening again and again. I’ve surfed for years and years; I can’t think of any of my friends who have not had some sort of ear infection or sickness bug.
“There’s a massive boom in sea swimming. God knows, with all the bad news we have, we need this sort of release more than ever. The water companies are making huge profits but there seems to be no comeback. Where’s the infrastructure to deal with this? What are they up to?”
The answer is hard to come by. South West Water (SWW) said it did not have anyone available to be interviewed about Gylly and Swanpool, but insisted the number of discharges here is decreasing, stating: “We are delivering our largest environmental investment programme in 15 years. This will dramatically reduce our use of storm overflows, maintain our region’s excellent bathing water quality standards all year round, and remove our impact on river water quality by 2030.”
Storm overflows are a feature of old combined sewer systems, when sewage, rain and surface water are all collected in the same pipe. During periods of heavy rain, the overflows play what SWW calls “a necessary and very important job”, acting as “legal safety valves” to prevent sewers from becoming overloaded and to avoid sewage backing up and flooding into homes, roads and businesses.
Zoe Young, a Labour town councillor, points out the position of the pipe that spews sewage out into the sea near Gylly and Swanpool. It lies equidistant between the two beaches. “With climate change and sudden storms, it’s going to get worse,” she says. “Another problem is the amount of development going on here and elsewhere in Cornwall. New places are being built – many of them aimed at second-homeowners – and that puts more pressure on the creaking system.” Someone with an aerosol and stencil has spotted the connection and sprayed: “No more second homes” on the concrete near the pipe.
Local politicians see that sewage will be a vote winner or loser in the coming years. “It’s really high on the political agenda,” says Laurie Magowan, another Labour councillor for Falmouth. “The community is disappointed in the lack of action being taken.”
The Tory-controlled Cornwall council also shut Falmouth’s only public swimming pool earlier this year. “So people have no pool to swim in and are worried about going in the sea,” said Magowan. “There are plenty of private pools but not everyone can afford them. It increases inequality.”
The Lib Dem councillor Colin Martin complains that, under the Tories, housebuilding has become easier at a time when the sewers are clearly struggling to cope. “Huge amounts of money have been spent by housebuilders lobbying the Tories. A result is we end up with more sewage on our beaches.”
He criticised water companies for scare stories about the multibillion-pound cost of replacing the old system. “There are other ways to reduce the amount of water getting into the system, by managing our fields, gardens and parks differently.”
Martin said people had been told to be patient after water privatisation in 1989. “They said it would take time. Things would improve. But we’ve had time and where are the results? The companies make multimillion-pound profits, their shareholders get their dividends, the managers get their bonuses.” And, still, the apps ping.
Cherilyn Mackrory, the Conservative MP for Truro and Falmouth, was unavailable for interview, but issued a statement saying: “The issue of water quality has been a top priority for me since my election, and I share the passion and drive of the people of Cornwall regarding the stopping of dumping sewage into our waterways.”
She also highlighted the government’s announcement in the wake of the bleak headlines that water companies would have to invest £56bn over 25 years in a long-term programme to tackle storm sewage discharges by 2050. Critics say these payments will end up on customers’ bills and are frustrated at the timescale.
There is little comfort in all this for parents watching their children splashing on Gylly and Swanpool beaches. Two mums, both called Sarah, say they worry about their little ones. “We brought bucket and spades as a back-up plan in case the water looked too murky,” says the first Sarah. “But it’s the sea! It’s hard to keep them out.”
As the tide goes out, there are three distinct layers of colour – brown close to the beach, then turquoise and, finally, deep blue. The brown is probably not due to discharges but rather the seabed being churned up by a strong easterly wind. Still, it makes people think.
Many complain about the lack of detail over the alerts from SWW. After a Gylly alert on 22 August, the Cornish actor Stacey Guthrie drew attention to the discharge with a tweet asking SWW about the water quality. SWW replied, stating that it was not “raw sewage” and added a smiley face emoji. Guthrie suggested the use of the emoji “isn’t really reading the room”, and asked: “Is there any sewage in it at all? Treated or otherwise?” The exchange ended.
Some of the businesses on the beaches are reluctant to talk about sewage, seeing it as a turnoff for their potential customers. Dany Duncan, the MD of the watersports centre Elemental UK, accused SAS’s alerts of being “hysterical”. “We haven’t, to my knowledge, had one client come back and say they’ve been sick,” he says.
But so many people do have a sickness story. Paul, 24, who kayaks, swims and surfs here, recalls coming straight out of the water one day and “throwing up everywhere”. He is from Mauritius. “It’s a big deal for us to keep the water really clean,” he said. “There seems a lack of motivation here.”
Visitors have come to these two beaches since the railway arrived in 1863. And for local people, they are so precious. The sand is their village green, their community hub, a space to exercise, retreat and to meet.
Jaye Brighton, 72, a retired teacher, bodyboarder and supporter of Ocean Rebellion, the aquatic arm of Extinction Rebellion, has lived close to Gylly for 40 years. “We’ve seen the degradation of the place. I remember what used to be in the sea in terms of wildlife, the abundance of fish swimming around my feet and the crabs in the rock pools. They’re still there in pockets but nothing like they were even 20 years ago.
“All of us have had bouts of being unwell – ear infections, stomach upsets.” She says the latest Gylly alerts were “the pits, so shocking”. “We’ve had hardly any rainfall, so what’s going on? The system is failing. We feel the grief, the loss. It’s hard to bear.”
• The headline of this article was amended on 6 September 2022 to refer to Cornwall rather than Britain.
