“I saw a tweet talking about the extent of the problem, and the numbers were so enormous I thought it couldn’t be true – that there was so much sewage being dumped,” he says now.
“I thought, ‘It’s social media, someone must be exaggerating.’ So I thought I’d look into it, because if it was true it’d be a scandal.”
His research tallied with the tweet: raw sewage was being pumped into England’s rivers and onto beaches at a truly astonishing rate. So-called “storm overflows” – designed to flush overly full drains into rivers, seas and even across beaches – are supposed to be used in exceptional circumstances, as the name suggests. But in 2021, the year Richardson saw the data, they disgorged their contents across the country for a total of 2.7 million hours – equivalent to over 300 years.
Over the past few years, members of the British public have seen beaches closed for swimming on peak summer holiday weekends, dead fish floating in busy rivers, and found themselves surfing effluent-engorged waves.
“First it was the smell,” says Giles Bristow, who once found himself in the middle of a sewage slick when surfing in Staunton, Devon.
“Then we saw toilet paper and sanitary products in the water. That was a real moment of, ‘Oh, god.’”
Over the past few years, the UK’s “poopy beaches” problem has been sparking increasing anger from citizens around the country.
The cancelation of an annual swimming race in the Thames right before the current bank holiday weekend has also caused concern. The race, which has been held since the 1890s, was due to be held in July, but was called off because of fears of sewage in the water.
2022’s August Bank Holiday – a weekend when Brits flock to the beach – saw the closure of a beach in Brighton and Hove, a popular seaside escape for Londoners. “Brighton and Hove seem to be deluged over and over again,” Hugo Tagholm, the ex-CEO of campaign group Surfers Against Sewage (who has now been replaced by Bristow), told CNN at the time.
This weekend is another bank holiday. But while Brighton and Hove beaches are safe to swim at, many others around the UK are not. According to Surfers Against Sewage’s live tracker, 12 out of 14 storm overflows on the Isle of Wight – a popular retreat off the southern coast – are currently emitting sewage. There’s a slew of currently operating overflows in popular vacation spot Devon, too – from ones near towns like Salcomb and Dawlish, to one on Sandy Bay, a beach that has in the past won Blue Flag status for its pristine waters.
Despite widespread public outcry, the situation has been worsening. Graphs on Richardson’s website, the aptly named Top of the Poops – which focuses on England – showed a slight downward trend from 2020 to 2022, before rising sharply in 2023.
Sewage spills increased by 54% last year, according to data released in March by the Environment Agency – a UK government-founded public body established to “protect and improve” the environment.
Back in 2021, Richardson, a software developer, was so horrified by what he saw that he launched his website to share the data in an accessible way – right down to the name, echoing a TV program from everyone’s childhood, “Top of the Pops.”
Anyone wanting to see the spills in their area can search the data by water company, beach, river, shellfish-cultivation area, and – in bad news for politicians – constituency.
“People can see what’s happening in their local area, and it really shows what a terrible problem we have,” says Richardson. “The numbers are too hard to keep in your mind – and it’s not getting any better.
‘Simply not good enough’
After outrage in 2022 – which included the UK’s chief medical officer labelling it a “growing public health problem” and the Environment Agency chair calling for CEOs of the offending water companies to be jailed – things have worsened.
The annual “Event Duration Monitoring” (EDM) of storm overflows in England, released in March, said sewage spills had increased in 2023 by 54%. The average number of yearly spills per overflow had increased from 23 in 2022 to 33 – equivalent to more than one per fortnight. The total spills went from 301,091 to 464,056.
Worse still, sewage spilled into UK waters for double the amount of time in 2023 that it did in 2022: a whopping 3.6 million hours, or the equivalent of over 400 years.
There were fewer “well behaved” overflows, as well. Those that spilled fewer than 10 times in a year were down from 48% in 2022 to 40% in 2023. And those that didn’t spill at all went from 18% to 13.9%. Those overflows for “exceptional” circumstances have become all to common.