Wandle Vs The Wet Wipes

South London’s River Wandle: an ecological success story threatened by waste water and wet wipes. Artist Elly Platt brings the spirit of the Wandle alive in this work of wearable art made from upcycled plastics.

Creating a costume for Britain’s water pollution crisis 

Distraught and disgusted by the discovery that her beloved local river, the Wandle, was being routinely polluted by discharges of untreated sewage by Thames Water, textile artist and costume maker Elly Platt started crafting a response to this ongoing problem, based on her observations of the Wandle. 

Delicately marbled polyester satin pebbles in a rainbow of hues adorn the bodice of the outfit, suggesting the carefully constructed cocoon of the caddis fly larva. Water crowfoot, cut from polycotton and plastic garden netting, drapes from the hat and shoulder like nature’s very own feather boa. The skirt, a tangle of individually dyed and hemmed plastic “wet wipes” encroaches onto the carefully sculpted shape, distorting the silhouette and leaving a tide line of silt-covered bottle caps in its wake.

“I knew I wanted to make Wandle Vs The Wet Wipes from secondhand materials; upcycling and refashioning is a key part of my artistic practice. I considered the key elements I wanted to portray: the gravel bed of the river itself and the trailing water crowfoot, key indicators of a healthy chalk stream habitat, and the ropes of wet wipes and brown sludge indicative of a polluted and dying river. I also knew I wanted to make as much of the garment as possible from plastics; single use plastic pollution is one of the greatest threats to the Wandle’s ecosystem, but I wanted to show the potential in existing unwanted plastics rather than using virgin materials.”

Where and what is the Wandle?

A short history

Twelve miles of rare chalk stream habitat, the River Wandle flows from its source on the outskirts of South London to join the Thames in the centre of the city. Its fast-flowing clear water made it ideal as a source of power: during the Industrial Revolution, the hard-working Wandle turned the wheels of more than ninety mills. Pollution from factories alongside the river destroyed the rural idyll that wealthy landowners had cherished, and by the 1960s the Wandle was declared a “dead” river. A campaign to restore the Wandle was set in motion by local residents, requiring the cooperation of councils, businesses and water companies. It was a great success, especially the creation of the Wandle Trail; a riverside path connecting parks and recreation grounds to form a green corridor through South London, allowing everyone access to the river. 

From ecological success to uncertain future

The clear, fast-flowing water keeps the stony river bed clean, allowing water crowfoot to flourish. This trailing underwater foliage is a vital habitat for small invertebrates that feed the larger denizens of the Wandle, from stickleback and trout to egrets and herons. But this river restoration success story is under threat. Thames Water regularly discharges untreated wastewater into the Wandle, polluting this delicate habitat with biohazards including vast amounts of wet wipes. These pieces of single-use plastic pollution form thick ropes and clumps, trapping other detritus and impeding the river’s flow. Slower water increases the build-up of silt, choking the water weed and covering everything with a layer of dark brown sludge. Can the Wandle be saved once again? Or will history repeat itself?

The Wandle as artist’s muse: Elly Platt’s ongoing interest in the Wandle

“I have lived near the River Wandle in South London for fourteen years, and it has always fascinated and delighted me. The unkempt, exuberant plant growth along the Wandle Trail, so different from manicured parks and gardens, and the wealth of wildlife that dwells along its banks, the magic of seeing a kingfisher dive in to catch a fish.

I was especially interested to discover that the Wandle has a long history as a site of textile production; from calico bleaching and dyestuff milling to leatherworks and printworks. Researching the history of the river, I was struck by the ways in which the Wandle’s industrial past was a microcosm of aspects of the global fashion industry today: the pollution and exploitation of a rapidly growing industry, juxtaposed with the artisans who seek a less extractive relationship with their surroundings. William Morris, the “slow fashion” pioneer of his time, used only natural dyes at his printing works on the Wandle.

Unfortunately the wild nature of the Wandle Trail invites fly tipping and single use plastic pollution, and I’ve made several artworks from textile waste collected along the banks. Joining in river cleanups, donning waders and entering the river, gave me a “Wandle’s eye view” of a place I thought I knew so well, and I could really feel a sense of the river as a living thing; the ebb and flow of the current, the pressure of the water against my body.

I thought about what a utopian Wandle would look like, as though there is a hidden costume under this one. A cocoon of brightly coloured pebbles protecting the torso, and a sweeping, swaying skirt of waterweed. This garment represents the Wandle under threat; the pollution downstream from the wastewater discharges. Will the situation get better, or worse?”

Could “Wandle Vs The Wet Wipes” help with your campaign?

Wandle Vs The Wet Wipes was created as a response to the pollution crisis facing Britain’s waterways, but also as a tool for attracting attention, initiating discussions and firing the imaginations of viewers. Do you have a current campaign that could make use of photos of the piece, or the garment itself, either on a mannequin or being worn by the artist? Please get in touch if you would like to collaborate with Elly Platt by using Wandle Vs The Wet Wipes. 

Contact details

Elly Platt

email: takeitupwearitout@gmail.com

Instagram: @takeitupwearitout

The photos were a collaboration with other artists:

Model/Performer: Mel Simpson

Photographer: Michael Shilling

About the Artist

Elly is a textile artist whose creations are inspired by our interactions with the natural world. Using fabric waste and other found objects, Elly creates unusual and meaningful pieces. The threads running through her work connect costume history, sustainable fashion and a love of London’s wild places.

Reflecting on our resilient rivers

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. 

Discarded At Kiosk, Salford Quays

 DISCARDED

Discarded is an exploration of the short and uneventful lives led by fast fashion garments from brands with headquarters in the UK, focussing on brands with their headquarters in Manchester. From garments in charity shops that have never been worn, to garments thrown out with household rubbish, this project seeks to highlight the waste of resources, the exploitation of workers and the pollution problems that the overproduction of fast fashion causes, and to create new and exciting realities for these unwanted garments. A mixture of textile art and photography, Discarded will be on display at Kiosk, Quayside Shopping Centre, Salford Quays, from 26th April to 21st May. The opening week coincides with Fashion Revolution Week in 2023, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory collapse, which killed 1134 garment workers who were making clothes for international fashion brands.

Artists Elly Platt and CL Gamble use unwanted clothing to create a series of varied works, from playful polaroids of a capsule wardrobe of street finds, through upcycled and refashioned clothing carrying messages about our current fast fashion industry, to works of wearable art conveying messages about our relationships with our clothes, from the personal and private to the public and global.

THE EVENTS

To launch the exhibition and to coincide with two of Fashion Revolution Week’s ongoing campaigns, Elly Platt and CL Gamble will be running two events at Kiosk.

Loved Clothes Last is a storytelling and stitching performance: Elly and CL will speak about their family textile connections, and practices of sewing or mending as acts of healing and care, as they stitch textiles that hold a special meaning for them. This will be followed by an informal chat with Alison Carlin, creator of Kiosk, focusing on how to build more meaningful relationships with our clothes.

Wednesday 26th April, 4-6pm.

The Clothing Love Story workshop is a chance for anyone to share their thoughts about their favourite clothes by writing a short love letter to a beloved garment on upcycled fabric patches. These patches will be used to create a textile installation that will remain at Kiosk after the exhibition finishes, a reminder that a genuine love of clothing is at the heart of the sustainable fashion movement.

Saturday 29th April, 1-4pm.

THE ARTISTS

Discarded is a collaboration between Elly Platt and CL Gamble.

Elly Platt (she/her) is a costume maker and textile artist, also known as Take It Up Wear It Out. Her love of telling stories through clothing has taken many forms, from visible mending to stitching or painting protest textile art in response to injustice against garment workers. 

The pandemic led her to create site-specific work over the course of two years. The Wandle Wardrobe project drew its raw materials from a series of walks along the Wandle Trail in South London where Elly collected lost or discarded textiles, which she then transformed into precious objects or wearable works of art.The River Wandle has a rich history as a site of textile production and is also an ecological success story. The Wandle Wardrobe explores how our relationship with the river has changed, how our lost clothes might suggest the ways we interact with the natural world, and how we view the clothes we own and wear today. In an era where clothes are so cheap and plentiful, have we lost our emotional attachment to them?

As a person who makes clothing, Elly seeks to spotlight the disrespect fast fashion brands show to the skills and expertise of garment workers when they sell their clothes as disposable. 

CL Gamble is a queer, disabled artist whose work delves into politics, protest and collective action. Their current body of work “Above The Law” is an intermedia work set in a world they describe as “The Paris Commune meets No Deal Brexit in a Handmaid’s Tale-style speculative fiction future”.

Examining ideas around commodification, market forces and socioeconomic deprivation, the use of hobbycraft subverts the idea that refined skills create value in some objects and not others. Using a mix of installation, graphic design, performance and world-building, they centre the transactional nature not only of art itself, but our everyday survival needs.

The use of salvaged materials and locally foraged gemstones asks us to examine our consumption habits while describing a group of rebels consciously objecting to a society ravaged by austerity and psychogeographical borders. ‘Artistic Anarchy’ aims to destroy those borders, bringing approachable, affordable jewellery from a provocative conceptual world into the white cubes of traditional gallery spaces.

As we face a climate crisis, cost of living increases and the impact of more than a decade of funding cuts to vital services, you are invited to add your voice to the call of the many, not the few: Bread for all, but roses too.

WHAT IS THE BACKGROUND TO FASHION REVOLUTION WEEK AND THE RANA PLAZA DISASTER ANNIVERSARY?

On the 24th April 2013, the Rana Plaza factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed. 1134 garment workers died, and more than 2500 were injured, many of them severely. They had been making clothes for fast fashion brands and other western retailers whose labels were found in the wreckage. Workers had noticed cracks appearing in the building the previous day, and were reluctant to return to work. The threats of docked wages for people who have barely enough money to survive sealed their fate. The factory collapse made global news, and led activists to campaign for change in the industry on many fronts. Better transparency from fashion brands, so consumers would know where their clothes really came from. Better pay, conditions and the right to unionise for garment workers. And more knowledge of what really goes on behind the scenes of popular fashion brands. 

 

The hope was to slow the fast fashion juggernaut, leading to better choices being made by more conscious and ethically-minded consumers, and better lives for the people who make our clothes. In reality, the pace of fast fashion has only increased, with new brands producing clothes that are considered almost disposable. The exploitation of garment workers in the Global South continues to be a huge problem, but it’s happening here in the UK too, where we assume minimum wage legislation, working time directive rules and other checks and balances would prevent this mistreatment of the people who make our clothes.

WHY MANCHESTER SPECIFICALLY?

Historically, Manchester has a place at the centre of the UK textile industry as the site of hundreds of cotton mills and other textile factories. Today, Manchester is home to the headquarters of some of the UK’s worst offenders when it comes to creating fast fashion from exploited labour. Activists have protested outside the Manchester headquarters of BooHoo when the company attempted to prevent unionisation by workers. The 10th anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster will see creatives and activists come together in Manchester to commemorate this tragedy, spotlight the ongoing problems with the fast fashion industry and highlight the need for better regulation and legislation to control the industry’s exploitation of people and the planet.

 

WHY ARE ELLY AND CL DOING THIS?

We both love clothes! We love the theatrics and the creativity of expressing ourselves through our personal style. We both keep clothes for decades, adding to our wardrobes by hunting through thrift stores, charity shops and even finding things by the side of the road!  We love the freedom of feeling truly yourself in an outfit that’s perfect for a certain moment, and then remixing those clothes into a totally different style for the next month, or year, or decade. 

 

We don’t love the conformity that underpins so much of the fast fashion industry, where hundreds of thousands of styles are available every day but somehow everyone looks the same. We want all garment workers, wherever they might live, to be paid a living wage, to have a safe work environment and to be respected for their skills and expertise. We want clothes to be worn again and again, to hold memories, to be considered precious. We don’t want clothes to be unworn, unloved, discarded.

Walking and Stitching workshops

On 17th September 2022 I ran my first Walking and Stitching Workshop as part of Wandle Fortnight. I took participants for a gentle stroll along the Wandle Trail from Hackbridge Community Gardens to Honeywood Museum, with four half-hour stops along the way to try out some experimental embroidery to capture the beauty and character of the river. Embroidery is often seen as a precise and time-consuming art form, and I longed to combine my love of embroidery with my love of the outdoors. I tried out a series of alfresco embroidery “sketches”; the equivalent of a short pose in a life drawing class, using basic stitches and fabric scraps. I advertised the workshop for anyone who knew vaguely how to thread a needle, because this workshop wasn’t going to be about perfect stitching, it was going to be about capturing an impression, a moment in time in a constantly changing landscape.

The structure of the Stitching the Wandle workshop consisted of four prompts, one for each of the locations we’d stop at for 30 minutes to create an embroidered “sketch”. I shared all four prompts at the start of the workshop, giving everyone the opportunity to work on four separate sketches, to keep adding to the same one, or to use any of the elements they felt particularly drawn to.

The first prompt was the river itself - the quality of the water, the flow, reflections, different perspectives of river dwellers, the river bed, the geology that has created a chalk stream in South London. In the calm surroundings of the Hackbridge Community Garden, it’s easy to tune out the traffic and tune in to the presence of the river. How do you convey the flow of a clear chalk stream through fabric and stitch? What techniques do you use when you only have thirty minutes? So close to the source, the Wandle is beautifully clear, shallow, the stony river bed visible but distorted by the current, the reflections on the surface.

 
My second prompt for a 30 minute “sketch” on the Stitching the Wandle walk was the natural environment, and I think the corner of Wilderness Island provided the perfect location. The overhanging willow trees, the banks of rushes and irises, the far bank with its thick overgrown vegetation. We passed a dead tree covered in bracket fungus, so there was a wealth of inspiration from an individual leaf to the mycelial network underpinning the whole ecosystem. Half an hour is far too short a time to carefully stitch such a lush landscape, so I used scraps of fabric to suggest the thick vegetation. 

I also managed to snap a photo during my workshop of all the participants engrossed in their stitching. It was a joy to have such a lovely group of people testing out my new workshop idea, and I’m so glad everyone enjoyed it! 

The third prompt on my “Stitching the Wandle” walk was the path - the act of walking, your relationship to the path, the path’s surface, proximity to the river, elevation. My walks along the Wandle Trail are usually very intentional - I rarely wear headphones, and if I’m travelling somewhere I factor in extra time so I can enjoy my surroundings on the way without feeling rushed. So this piece looks the most like a sampler as I considered the act of walking, placing one foot in front of the other, and the textures of the path I was walking on. The smoothness of manmade tarmac, the crunch of gravel, the way mud pulls at each footstep and holds on to an impression of you. The Wandle Trail isn’t always my most direct route to a nearby destination, but it’s always the most enjoyable, so I’m happy to take those meanders, spend that extra fifteen minutes. 

The fourth prompt for my “Stitching the Wandle” workshop was the built landscape - the buildings that surround the river, materials and structure, manmade green landscapes, the tensions or cohesion between the build environment and the river. Near one of the sources of the Wandle in Carshalton, the built landscape has celebrated the river as a feature. Carshalton Ponds force traffic along narrow roads, past historic buildings. Grove Park is neatly landscaped around the Wandle, newer housing estates have been built with room for a cycle track and a footpath beside the river. The river is contained and managed by this landscape, but it’s also very visible. As the area between Carshalton and Hackbridge has been steadily built up over the last hundred years, the river has been a key feature of the area - it hasn’t been forced underground like other London rivers (or even other downstream sections of the Wandle). I attempted to capture this idea of suburban sprawl with the river at its heart in my embroidered sketch.


With spring on its way, and the promise of longer, warmer days, I’m looking forward to running more Stitching the Wandle workshops this year! Keep an eye on my Instagram for updates.

 

Discarded

Welcome to Discarded, a multimedia art project by Elly Platt and CL Gamble. Discarded is an exploration of the short and uneventful lives led by fast fashion garments from brands with headquarters in the UK, focussing on brands with their headquarters in Manchester. From garments in charity shops that have never been worn, to garments thrown out with household rubbish, this project seeks to highlight the waste of resources, the exploitation of workers and the pollution problems that the overproduction of fast fashion causes, and to create new and exciting realities for these unwanted garments. The project will culminate in an exhibition during Fashion Revolution Week in April 2023, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Rana Plaza factory collapse.


This is a quick FAQ about the artists and the project, with more information to come as the project develops.


Who are we?

Discarded is a collaboration between Elly Platt and CL Gamble.


Elly Platt (she/her) is a costume maker and textile artist, also known as Take It Up Wear It Out. Her love of telling stories through clothing has taken many forms, from visible mending to the Wandle Wardrobe project, showcasing lost and discarded clothing and textiles from the River Wandle in south London as precious objects or wearable works of art. As a person who makes clothing, Elly seeks to spotlight the disrespect fast fashion brands show to the skills and expertise of garment workers when they sell their clothes as disposable.


CL Gamble (they/she) is disabled, queer and non-binary.
I WANT:
Art that’s Lo-Fi, that makes you think “I could do that” in a way that encourages you to follow through.
Art that’s conceptual, but that you don’t need to have done homework to understand.
Art that doesn’t follow rules, which crosses boundaries between media and ignores tradition.
Art about what we have in common, entering the spaces we share. Be it on your mobile phone, or picking up a printed zine…
I want art that moves us & brings us together.


What is “Discarded” going to be?

Right now, it’s an Instagram and Twitter account, a pile of cheap clothes and a maelstrom of ideas! You can follow our progress on social media as we collect and document the unloved clothes we find. These clothes will eventually become the raw materials for an exhibition with a work of wearable art at its centre. You can expect restyling, upcycling, storytelling and ranting as part of the online process, as well as physical artefacts like a zine.



Why are you doing this?

On the 24th April 2013, the Rana Plaza factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, collapsed. 1134 garment workers died, and more than 2500 were injured, many of them severely. They had been making clothes for fast fashion brands and other western retailers whose labels were found in the wreckage. Workers had noticed cracks appearing in the building the previous day, and were reluctant to return to work. The threats of docked wages for people who have barely enough money to survive sealed their fate. The factory collapse made global news, and led activists to campaign for change in the industry on many fronts. Better transparency from fashion brands, so consumers would know where their clothes really came from. Better pay, conditions and the right to unionise for garment workers. And more knowledge of what really goes on behind the scenes of popular fashion brands.



The hope was to slow the fast fashion juggernaut, leading to better choices being made by more conscious and ethically-minded consumers, and better lives for the people who make our clothes. In reality, the pace of fast fashion has only increased, with new brands producing clothes that are considered almost disposable. The exploitation of garment workers in the Global South continues to be a huge problem, but it’s happening here in the UK too, where we assume minimum wage legislation, working time directive rules and other checks and balances would prevent this mistreatment of the people who make our clothes.



Why Manchester specifically?

Historically, Manchester has a place at the centre of the UK textile industry as the site of hundreds of cotton mills and other textile factories. Today, Manchester is home to the headquarters of some of the UK’s worst offenders when it comes to creating fast fashion from exploited labour. Activists have protested outside the Manchester headquarters of BooHoo when the company attempted to prevent unionisation by workers. The 10th anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster will see creatives and activists come together in Manchester to commemorate this tragedy, spotlight the ongoing problems with the fast fashion industry and highlight the need for better regulation and legislation to control the industry’s exploitation of people and the planet.



What is happening, and where?

That’s still to be confirmed! As soon as we have details, we’ll let you know.



Why are you doing this?

We both love clothes! We love the theatrics and the creativity of expressing ourselves through our personal style. We both keep clothes for years, adding to our wardrobes by hunting through thrift stores, charity shops and even finding things by the side of the road! We love the freedom of feeling truly yourself in an outfit that’s perfect for a certain moment, and then remixing those clothes into a totally different style for the next month, or year, or decade.



We don’t love the conformity that underpins so much of the fast fashion industry, where hundreds of thousands of styles are available every day but somehow everyone looks the same. We want all garment workers, wherever they might live, to be paid a living wage, to have a safe work environment and to be respected for their skills and expertise. We want clothes to be worn again and again, to hold memories, to be considered precious. We don’t want clothes to be unworn, unloved, discarded.

The Wandle Wardrobe Magpie Top, and a deep dive into rubbish with Trash Free Trails!

 It might seem obvious why I’ve named a garment encrusted with shiny things the ‘Magpie Top’, but I need to start with some mythbusting - magpies won’t steal your valuables! Recent research has suggested that magpies are indifferent to or even alarmed by shiny objects, and as vanishingly few nests have been found containing jewellery or metallic objects, these few isolated incidents have created a myth about magpies that isn’t borne out by facts. Magpies are curious, intelligent creatures, so you might see them investigating a shiny object. But instead of working out its resale value on the corvid black market, magpies are assessing the risk of this object. Is it associated with food? Or could it be poisonous? Or a trap? Clever birds like magpies will avoid items they perceive as a threat, and other corvids will copy this behaviour. 

Unfortunately not all wildlife has the street smarts of a magpie when it comes to interacting with the man-made rubbish that ends up in their environments. It’s documented in famous photos like Justin Hoffman’s iconic picture Sewage Surfer, of a seahorse holding on to a cotton bud, but it’s not just happening at sea. Rubbish left in green spaces can affect all the animals that rely on that area for food and shelter. Finding a half-decomposed slug in a beer can left in the bushes is not just a uniquely disgusting experience, it’s also a problem for other animals. It might be hard to feel sorry for a slug, but that slug could have been a meal for a blackbird or thrush, or for a hedgehog. 

Finding rubbish along the banks of the Wandle has been a source of unexpected artistic inspiration and fabrics galore, but it’s also been a source of frustration and distress, particularly when I’ve seen fly-tipping sites building up over months. So when the good folk at Trash Free Trails announced they were planning a Halloween Trail Clean Tour, I invited them to come and have a go at cleaning up (at least a small part of) the Wandle Trail. Their trash-busting outings usually take them to rural hiking and biking locations, so I wondered what they’d make of the Wandle Trail, and what we’d find. No one wants the dubious accolade of having the most rubbish in their local area. 

We set up a base at Merton Abbey Mills, and our volunteer cohort set off along a small section of the trail to collect as much rubbish as we could. Returning with buckets full, we started the rather fascinating and occasionally revolting process of conducting a trash audit, categorising the rubbish and counting each piece. Our inventory seemed to consist overwhelmingly of beer cans, which I’d half-expected based on previous litter-picking in the area, but a chat about what wasn’t there felt quite revealing and positive. Comparing the Wandle to other trails on the tour, Dom from Trash Free Trails said he’d expected to find a lot more disposable coffee cups and fast food containers (there are a number of coffee shops and takeaways nearby), and more sandwich wrappers or food packaging (there is also a very large supermarket close by).

Litter-picking can feel like a lonely and thankless task, and it’s easy to get in your head about how selfish and careless everyone else must be. But given the amount of people using the Wandle Trail on a daily basis, this unfair assumption simply isn’t borne out by what we found. A lot of the cans we found were off the trail itself, piled up in what were obviously favourite drinking spots. I’m not going to criticise anyone for drinking in the bushes - pubs were closed for the best part of a year, and the thought of enjoying a bevvy in a secluded spot on the banks of the river sounds delightful. Enjoying a bevvy in a secluded spot surrounded by dozens of old cans, some of which contain the malodorous remains of decomposing slugs, however, sounds intensely unpleasant, and it’s preyed on my mind that this is a leisure activity in my community. 

As someone prone to creating stories out of other people’s rubbish, it says something to me about the downside of city living: the overcrowded, overpriced housing that leaves people without a space to relax in after work, badly-paid jobs with long hours that leave little time or money for socialising. In other spots along the Wandle that have become ad-hoc community hubs, plenty of riverside drinking might take place, but there’s little evidence of it in the bushes the next day. Our rubbish says a lot about the state of our society, and not just through the fact that it exists at all.

While the rubbish we found might have told a rather sad tale of isolation in the big city, the litter pick told a very different story. Local business owners got involved (and donated some much-needed refreshments!), passers-by stopped to find out what was going on, to chat to the organisers and find out if this was something they could get involved with in the future. And I hope it will be! There are plenty of people who care deeply about the Wandle and its non-human inhabitants; I hope people might be inspired to pick up a picker themselves (one guy I chatted to was walking with his son, and bought his own litter picker online then and there!), contact their local council about recycling, or contact the brands who are making and selling the packaging that ends up as litter.

Unsurprisingly, I took on the task of assessing the discarded clothes and textiles we found (rotten Ralph Lauren hoodie, anyone?) and a Trash Free Trails mini-quilt might be in the works, so watch this space!

Wandle Wardrobe: Goldfinch two-piece playsuit

 Scrubby open spaces near the Wandle are full of Goldfinches this year, balancing on seed-heads with the acrobatic prowess and grace of Cirque du Soleil performers. They are handsome-looking birds - crimson faces, a flash of gold on their wings. So delightful, in fact, that the collective noun for goldfinches is a “charm”. But behind the goldfinch’s smart exterior lies a dirty secret - their nests. Most small birds carefully dispose of their chicks’ fecal sacs to avoid alerting predators to the location of the nest, but goldfinches take a more laissez-faire approach, giving their nests a ‘portaloo on the third day of a festival’ appearance. 

Why am I talking about bird poo on a sustainable fashion/art project blog? During the last eighteen months, we’ve probably all had times where we’ve needed to resemble a goldfinch, while various aspects of our lives might have more closely resembled a goldfinch nest. Online, surrounded by retouched, carefully selected images of perfection, it’s easy to forget that everyone else’s fecal sacs are just out of shot*, or are being dealt with by other people. 

*not literally, I hope. That would be gross.

Even though I’m not social media’s target market for apps where you can edit your own face, I’ve still felt the pressure of perfectionism, even creeping into things like hobbies. Should my walks be achieving a more impressive step count? Should I be attempting a Serious Walking Challenge? Should I share photos of that embroidery/knitting project that isn’t quite up to my exacting professional standards? When I was furloughed in March 2020, a couple of hobbies became my coping mechanisms, and they helped enormously with my sometimes overwhelming emotions, mostly because I was doing them in small, imperfect ways. 

Walking couldn’t be about covering great distances, or visiting magnificent landscapes, so it became about which nearby trees were unfurling their new leaves, which wildflowers were growing by the path, whether I would see mallard ducklings or moorhen chicks. 

Sewing while I was furloughed from my job as a costume maker helped to remind me just what a brilliant and varied skill it is, and how effective it can be when you use the simplest techniques. I was able to reupholster furniture, make PPE for NHS workers, upcycle clothes and protest, all from my living room or garden. My embroidery practice helped me process my emotions about the pandemic in contrasting ways; although I spent time gently embroidering birds or flowers to calm my roiling thoughts, I also angrily embroidered sarcastic things about Dominic Cummings, the government’s lack of support for the theatre industry, and the relaxation of covid restrictions solely for people who wanted to go hunting. And it felt very satisfying, although these pieces won’t be winning any Royal College of Needlework awards. 

After a year back at work, with pandemic exhaustion making my pre-pandemic busyness impossible, I’m embracing the quick, scrappy project again. 

The Goldfinch two-piece playsuit was made from one and a half metres of crinkle viscose, from my Wandle Wardrobe fabric haul. I made the whole outfit in two hours, using a pre-existing pattern for the shorts and a simple rectangle shape for the top. It’s far from perfect; the hems on both garments are just overlocked, the gathering on the waistband isn’t very even, the topstitching isn’t very precise. But I’ll just be wearing it to chill out on a nice day, no famous fashion designers are going to leap out from behind a tree and give it a mark out of ten. 

So while I don’t think we should adopt the Goldfinch’s bathroom etiquette, I think we can admit that a picture-perfect life during a pandemic is a bit unrealistic. I’m going to embrace imperfection, put my feet up and watch the birds for a bit. I bet I’ll feel better for it.