The Wandle Wardrobe - a tale of textile waste from my local river

It started over socially-distanced Saturday morning coffee on the communal field. One of my neighbours mentioned that the Residents Association had been given a small grant by the Wandle Forum (a community network for our local river) to put on an event to celebrate Wandle Fortnight. To abide by changing Covid restrictions we decided on an outdoor art trail that residents would be able to view in a safe way. Another neighbour started talking about the photos she had taken of enigmatic rubbish in our local area, and that got me thinking about a possible textile waste project.

The Wandle is a river with a textile-rich heritage: it is fast-flowing and drops surprisingly steeply on its course from Croydon to the Thames. This made it unsuitable for river transport but ideal for mills, and the Wandle turned hundreds of water wheels and created power for dozens of textile mills during the Industrial Revolution. Both William Morris and Liberty used the print shops that are now part of Merton Abbey Mills, and fields all along the banks of the river were used for calico bleaching and drying.

The river has been nursed back to health from its designation as a “dead” river in the 1960s by a community-wide effort, including borough councils, local businesses and volunteer groups. It’s a popular spot for birdwatching, angling, walking and cycling. During lockdown, the parks along the Wandle have been vital resources - a green space where people could exercise and socialise safely. Unfortunately this also means that a lot of litter gets dumped in and around the Wandle, and although regular clean-ups have been organised in pre-Covid times, the Wandle Trail footpath can end up looking really messy.

I decided to walk the length of the Wandle over several days, cataloguing and collecting all the textile waste I found. As well as being inspired by my neighbour Janine’s photography project, I also took inspiration from one of my favourite art installations - Tate Thames Dig by Mark Dion. Before the opening of the Tate Modern in 1999, a team of volunteers conducted a dig along the Thames foreshore in front of the Tate Modern and Tate Britain sites. Volunteers were encouraged to pick up anything that caught their eye, and the finds were displayed in a Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities. Everything from the dig has been included, from historically important archaeological finds, to things most of us would consider rubbish, like bottle tops and plastic scraps.

By showing photos of textile waste in situ alongside well-cleaned finds displayed as though they were treasures, I wanted to make people reconsider any ideas they might have about clothes or textiles being disposable, and I wanted to start a dialogue about how we coexist with nature, and how we can balance our desire to be out in it and interact with it, with our apparent inability to control the mess we make, on a personal and industrial scale.

The first leg of my walk took in an offshoot of the Wandle, from Carshalton Ponds to Culvers Island, taking in the Wilderness Island nature reserve. I found accessories and fabric scraps, even pulling a piece of brightly printed silk from the river in a spot where I was able to scramble down the bank. A rubber flip-flop, turning over and over in an eddy of water seemed a beguiling prize, but I ignored the siren song of a surprisingly deep section of the river as I wasn’t even wearing waterproof shoes, let alone appropriate gear like fishing waders. 

My second walk took me through Beddington Park and all the way down to the source of the river in Wandle Park, Croydon. There are long sections where the river is quite accessible from one or both banks, and I found a large number of socks and a couple of children’s shoes, as well as being able to fish sunglasses and a cat collar out of the river. The Wandle is wide and shallow where it flows through Beddington Park, and is a favourite spot for paddling for children of all ages, especially during hot weather. I was delighted to see kingfishers darting up and down the river as I followed the Wandle Trail through a suburban area - the telltale flash of azure suggests the river is in good health and contains enough fish to sustain a variety of bird species.

I had decided to walk from Watercress Park to Colliers Wood for the third section, but my plan was derailed by the sheer amount of rubbish I found near Watermeads Nature Reserve. The reserve itself was fairly litter-free, but the path that runs along its edge next to Mitcham Football Club was an absolute mess. I picked up mouldy old clothing and textile scraps, and was pretty horrified to see what appeared to be an entire building fly-tipped in the car park of the football ground.

There is a road bridge dividing Watermeads from Ravensbury Park, but it has been closed to traffic while maintenance work is carried out. In a conveniently created corner between fences, someone had dumped a huge pile of textiles. I approached with caution and poked at the pile with my litter picker, and to my surprise I discovered the pile mainly consisted of lengths of fabric, so clean and dry that they could only have been dumped an hour or so before I found them. I bagged up as much as I could and carried it home, then returned with more bags for the rest! I found clothes in the pile, and bagged those up too, and deposited some ripped plastic bags in the nearest bin. My walk home was quite a workout as it now involved four large bags of textiles, but it felt worth it when I sorted through everything at home and realised that the clothes would make decent charity shop donations (I gave them a good wash, just to be safe), and that the fabric consisted of good quality wools, corduroys, cottons and viscoses. I immediately earmarked some of them for future sewing projects.

My final walk was a long one - from Watercress Park all the way to the point where the Wandle meets the Thames in Wandsworth. Thankfully there was no new textile rubbish in and around Watermeads, and the section through Morden Hall Park was fairly clean as they have their own team of volunteers who litter pick in the park. I was still finding socks, as well as some unwelcome surprises, such as a mouldy bra in a secluded spot in Wandle Meadow Nature Park!

As the Wandle flows north from Colliers Wood it becomes increasingly inaccessible - the river is contained by steep concrete banks, and although the river is visible from the path it wouldn’t be sensible to scramble up and down the banks. I caught frustrating glimpses of rubbish - a suitcase had been thrown from the opposite bank and had flown open before folding itself over a low-hanging branch, scattering its contents over neighbouring branches as though it was a load of washing hung out to dry. There were also piles of rubbish that were impossible for me to access - I wasn’t keen to scale an 8-foot tall spiky fence to retrieve a partially unravelled jumper with a load of meat dumped on top of it - or items that would have been impossible for me to shift without a team of people and a van to take the rubbish straight to the tip.

The footpath doesn’t always follow the banks of the river as the Wandle makes its way through Wandsworth town centre, and I kept having to find my way back to it, navigating round numerous building sites. I was rewarded by the sight of nature continuing to thrive on the river - a heron stalking fish only a few metres from the point where the Wandle is channelled beneath the Southside Shopping Centre, and when I finally reached the mouth of the Wandle where it flows out into the Thames, I saw cormorants drying their wings in the sunshine.

I washed all my finds thoroughly in disinfectant, and although I had to throw a couple of things away because I didn’t have the facilities to clean them enough to make them presentable or suitable for storage (I was washing everything in buckets in my tiny conservatory!) most of the textile waste looked perfectly acceptable once it was clean. I mounted all the pieces on recycled parachute panels, and they started to form a sort of decorative quilt, as well as a record of everything I’d found on my walk.

I displayed the Wandle Wardrobe panels alongside a fabric recreation of the Wandle, stretched out over the communal field. I attached photos of all the textiles I had found in their original locations, so the viewer could take a walk down the Wandle Trail in miniature, making the same discoveries I did.

Walking the length of the river gave me plenty of time to think about what I was finding and why: children’s socks weren’t much of a mystery, as babies seem to delight in kicking or pulling off shoes and socks and throwing them out of their pushchairs. The socks along the popular paddling stretch of the river seemed easy to explain too - forgotten amongst the excitement of a day at the park, or used to dry damp feet and then dropped in the long grass. I’d also read a couple of funny news stories about cats and foxes stealing socks and shoes, and I saw plenty of feline and vulpine visitors near the river, going about some secret business, so who knows who (or what) some of the textile waste culprits might be? The brightly coloured children’s accessories I found also suggested that the parks along the Wandle had become destinations for proper days out during lockdown - they were locations for dressing up to socialise as well as places to play in the water.

I love that parks and footpaths have served the local community so well during a difficult time when getting outside for fresh air, exercise and sunshine was so vital. But it seems that we’ve become so accustomed to someone else always clearing up after us that we’ve forgotten how to treat our shared areas with respect. A park isn’t like a pub or a bar; no one is coming along to sweep up the bottles and cans and sort out lost property when we’ve all gone home. Ignoring the rubbish that is building up around us shows not just a lack of respect for our neighbourhood and everyone else who lives in it, but also a lack of respect for ourselves: do we really want to live like this?

I thought I was rounding off the project neatly by taking the pile of decent clothes I found to the charity shop, but on my way back from Carshalton, walking along the bank of the river, I spotted more socks… my Wandle Wardrobe installation is probably far from finished.