I took part in Thames 21’s London Rivers week last week, running a Walking and Stitching workshop along the river Wandle. The theme for the week was “climate resilient rivers”, so alongside my workshop I created a piece of embroidered art, “Wandle Riverbank”, from litter I picked up along the Wandle Trail.
The Wandle has certainly had to be resilient - over the centuries it has been the power source or vital component of many different industries, and became heavily polluted as a result. The river was culverted into concrete channels and was forced on a subterranean journey under Southside shopping centre.
Efforts to restore the river began in the 1970s, and required the cooperation of the entire river catchment area - local councils, water companies, local industries and residents. The development of the Wandle Trail linked local parks and green spaces to create a green corridor along the river where wildlife thrived, and opened the river up to people for walking, cycling and angling.
Unsurprisingly, a fair amount of litter ends up in or along the banks of the Wandle, but the river has a strong community of people who care for it, and the path keeps it visible - incidents of pollution or fly-tipping are reported and dealt with, often by members of the community themselves.
In my artwork, the sweet wrappers, bread bags and crisp packets are just a symptom of the problems the Wandle faces. In an era where profit is prized above all else, the Wandle is regularly polluted by sewage discharges from Thames Water, but I can’t make art from biohazards like the ropes of wet wipes I’ve found on river clean-ups, floating under the surface like a revolting parody of the weeds they are choking.
All the items I picked up were single-use plastic, made from oil. If we really want our rivers to be climate-resilient, we have to look at global solutions to the problem. Fossil fuels are a major driver of the climate change that will make our rivers more liable to flood or run dry. It certainly isn’t a waste of time to spend our time downstream, looking after our rivers on a local level through clean-ups and habitat management, but we also have to take our fight for our waterways upstream To the water companies who see them as a convenient solution to their lack of investment, and to governments to legislate for better water quality and an end to the single-use plastic that marrs the beauty of our rivers.
