Tag Archives: South East Rivers Trust

Wandle Cleanup: December 2019

At our December cleanup we were joined on a very windy Sunday by 38 volunteers for some festive fun pulling all sorts of rubbish and unusual items out of the river. This month we were at Ravensbury Terrace in the borough of Wandsworth: this site has changed a lot since we were last here and now has some significant development taking place. Luckily, we were still able to access the river, though some creative wheelbarrowing was required through some of the single file spots!

The in-river team spread out across the channel

Single file access along the edge of the building site

Ravensbury Terrace is one of our shorter cleanup stretches (about 100m) and has no easy access for the public. Nevertheless, we found plenty of rubbish!

A delightful selection of toys were extracted from the river. Parents with young children might even wonder if attending a cleanup in December would be an excellent way to save money on Christmas shopping? (Disclaimer: The Wandle Trust do not endorse the gifting of river rubbish!).

Volunteers found the time to dig this out of its watery grave

The clock was ticking as rain was forecast for the afternoon so volunteers made the most of the dry weather and continued litter picking in the river and on the banks until 1:30pm when we stopped for a late lunch and decided to call it a day.

Volunteers were ready to apprehend anyone caught littering! If you look closely you will see that leeches also seem to be big fans of law enforcement.

So, what did we find?

Five tyres, two metal poles, a selection of pots and pans, a laptop, a sealed steak, a football, some handcuffs, a Robin Hood CD, a clock, a boiler cover, a bed frame, a set of car carpets, some plastic guttering, 4 plastic toys, items of clothing and a whole host of other rubbish.

A special thank you to everyone who helped unload in the morning and pack up the van at the end of the event, Dave for supervising the Event Tent, Wandsworth Council for organising collection of all the rubbish, Big Yellow Wandsworth for providing free storage space for our equipment and to our funder, Thames Water.

Thank you to all our volunteers for coming:

Dave, Katharine, Louis, L, Karen, Rob, Charles, Wally, Eamonn, Bev, Matthew, Mark, Tony, Aaron,
Zead, Suzanne, Anita, J, Kim, Thomas, Margaret, Rob, Tom, Mark, Freddie, William, Sue, Gary, Sheila, Andy, Martin, Nick, Luke, Philip, E, Per, Derek & Caitlin.

Wandle cleanup: November 2016: Merton

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The one with the long, long walk

Ravensbury Park is a lovely green space on the River Wandle, but hard work for a cleanup site! With limited vehicle access, we have to wheel barrow the rubbish all the way through the park to the road which, at the farthest point, is half a mile each way! Nevertheless, we were determined to tackle the park, and so we did.

On a sunny November morning, 48 volunteers gathered in Ravensbury Park for our latest Wandle cleanup, and at 11am we held the two minute silence to mark Remembrance Sunday.

Before we got started, we asked everyone to vote for our Aviva Community Project, to fund cleanups in 2017. Our Wandle cleanups are incredibly popular, and now we need extra support to keep up with the demand! If we are successful with this fund, we will be able to buy much needed equipment, including chest waders, gloves and wheelbarrows, as well as recruit and train volunteer Event Supervisors to help organise and run the events in 2017. You can still vote and help secure us funding for 2017 – just click the link below – and vote before November 18th.

Aviva: https://www.avivacommunityfund.co.uk/voting/project/view/16-2471

With plenty of volunteers from Friends of Ravensbury Park, Richmond International University and our usual keen supporters, we divided into 4 groups: wading, bank support, litter picking and tree maintenance (led by the Friends of the park).

Our waders headed into the park and starting hunting down rubbish. Surprisingly there wasn’t much in the main channel. Could this be evidence that we are making progress at this site?

As the waders got closer to the bridge at the far end of the park, we quickly found a concentrated amount of rubbish, including a trolley!

At lunchtime we were lucky enough to have the students from the Richmond International University bake for us – cupcakes and cookies, as well as a tray bake from Ann. Spoiled for choice! What amused us all were the unique cake boxes the students used, in the absence of Tupperware…

With the main channel completed, we headed to the far end of the park to tackle the back channel after lunch. This hadn’t been tackled for a while, and though it was easy wading, there were a lot of overgrown trees in the way, and blockages in the channel itself.

Progress was slow as the waders worked their way through the undergrowth, filling trugs and sending them up to our bank team who embarked on the voyage back the rubbish pile, a mere half a mile away.

We even found a rescue boat, but it wasn’t large enough to help the volunteers.

By 3 o’clock, we hadn’t quite completed the back channel, but we had made good progress and so we started to pack up the van.

So what did we find? ½ a garden pond, 1 bicycle wheel, 1 bicycle, 1 child scooter, 1 ironing board, 1 road sign, 1 push chair, 1 toy electric boat, 1 puppy teddy, 1 PC keyboard, 1 wicker baskets, 2 mobile phones, 2 shopping trolleys, 2 tyres, 2 licence plates, 3 coconuts, 6 metal poles, lots of wood and bags and bags of other junk.

Huge thanks to the Living Wandle Landscape Partnership for funding the event as part of the River Guardians projects, everyone who helped unpack and pack up the van during the event, Rosie for supervising the Event Tent, Wally & Helen for helping supervise the cleanup, Ann and the students for baking, and the Waste Team at Merton Council for organising collection of all the rubbish the next day.

Thank you to all our volunteers for coming: Alex, Andy B, Andy T, Ann, Bethel, Charles, Charlotte, Chris, Dave, Derek, Dyu-Sayaor, Ed, Gemma, Guy, Hailey, Hamai, Hannah, Ian, Isabella, James, Jamie, Jane Plant, Jane Porter, Joanne, Joe, Kayla, Kirk, Leah, Lesley, Lillian, Luisa, Lyn, Michael A, Michael S, Nick, Paniz, Per, Phil, Rose, Sara, Steve B, Steve M, Stewart, Theo, Tom, Wally and Wayne.

So what did I learn from this month’s cleanup? That our cleanup efforts are making a difference!

Award Winning Wandle Restoration

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Our rehabilitation work on the Carshalton Arm of the River Wandle recently won the Urban Category of the 2016 UK River Prize – an incredible achievement for all of those involved.

To express our thanks to everyone who has helped us along the way over the last 10 years, we have created a short film. So make yourself a cup of tea and enjoy…

The Wandle’s a Winner!

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We’re delighted to announce that we are a category winner in the 2016 UK River Prize. The Carshalton arm of the Wandle has won the ‘Urban Project’ category and is one of four category winners who will now go forward as finalists for the overall river prize.

The overall UK River Prize will be announced at an awards dinner at the River Restoration Centre’s Annual Conference in Blackpool on the 26^th April.

You can read the River Restoration Centre’s press release here (UK_River_Prize_Finalists) to see the other category winners and finalists who we’re up against. Each finalist will make a short video about their project which will be shown at the awards dinner.

Keep your fingers crossed!!

Dam, where’s all the water gone?

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We’ve started work on the Trewint Street Fish Passage!

Fish passage on the River Wandle is impeded by over 30 in stream structures, the majority of which are weirs left from the milling era. These weirs and structures are a barrier to the movement of fish both up and downstream and also fragments and isolates habitats.

Trewint Street is one of the significant barriers to fish passage, with two weirs either side of a large concrete island. With funding from the Environment Agency, Thames Water and Defra’s Catchment Partnership Action Fund (CPAF), we have started our project to install baffles and a fish pass to the right hand side weir, allowing the movement of fish once more!

The pass will also benefit European Eel populations which have declined by over 98% in the last 15 years, with barriers to movement being a contributory factor.

So what are we doing?

On the right side channel, a series of baffles will be installed to the upper section of the concrete weir. These baffles are made from recycled plastic and fixed to the weirs in rows. They slow the flow down on the weir, deepening the water and allow fish to swim up the weir through notches cut into the baffles (Image, Fishtek).

In the lower part of the right hand channel, three notched barrages will be created to reduce the drop in water level between the channel and baffles. This will allow fish to easily swim up through the notches and through the baffles to new habitats beyond (Image, EA).

What will you see?

You will see a lot of building work on site over the next month as our contractors (Amenity Water Management (AWM) get started. You’ll also notice that the right hand channel is a lot drier than normal…

Amenity Water Management have created a sandbag dam to keep the channel dry allowing them to work on installing the structures. All will return to normal once work is complete.

We’ll keep you posted with updates as always, but for now Tim is just happy to have wet feet again!

Misconnected Madness

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We’ve got some good news for the River Wandle!

At the start of our Pollution Monitoring scheme with the Environment Agency an outfall in Morden Hall Park was identified to be a chronic source of pollution – a likely misconnection problem.

Working closely with our local Environment Agency team, our volunteers helped to monitor this outfall gathering evidence of when pollution was spotted with photographic evidence. This extra information enabled the Environment Agency and Thames Water to investigate 412 homes in the area and discover 17 misconnected properties with 40 appliances discharging directly into the River Wandle.

This is a huge success for our Pollution Patrol project so thank you to our dedicated volunteers. We hope to have many more similar success stories in the future!

Read the full press article here

Our Pollution Patrol is still running today with 50 volunteers trained on our three rivers – Wandle, Hogsmill and Beverley Brook. Our local Wandle Environment Agency Officer Kate for the Wandle has kindly put together an update on pollution in the last few months and what we need to start focusing on now!

Wandle Pollution Update

Why not join us?

We are always keen to have more volunteers join our scheme. If you think you might be interested in joining the Wandle team (or Hogsmill or Beverley Brook team), please get in touch with us at pollution@wandletrust.org

Check your house: Make sure your house is connected correctly with the Connect Right website.

Wandle cleanup: June 2015: Sutton

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The one with our new Invasive Species Officer

I had been very excited about this cleanup for a while as it was being held in the newly opened Watermeads Nature Reserve near Poulter Park – a truly beautiful site for a Wandle Trust event!

The event was funded through the National Lottery’s Heritage Lottery Fund as part of the Living Wandle Landscape Partnership. To start the event off, we introduced our new Invasive Species Officer – Alan Martin. Alan is working to coordinate the control of invasive species along the entire Wandle corridor with the help of other organisations, local landowners and volunteers.

After the Health & Safety briefing, all 41 of us divided up into 5 teams…

Team 1: The litter pickers!

Since Watermeads was so newly opened to the public, the litter pickers weren’t sure how much general rubbish they would find, but as always they tracked some down! Using our newly purchased litter pickers and our new bag hoops provided by the Capital Cleanup fund, they dispersed into Watermeads and returned with bags of litter!

Teams 2 & 3: Wandle waders and bank support

Again armed with new litter pickers, our wading team headed to the far end of the reserve to hop in the Wandle and start hunting down rubbish. Although shallow in the reserve, the river bed was very silty so the waders made slow progress as they moved upstream. With such high levels of silt, finding rubbish was a challenge – but that didn’t stop them! Using their feet they discovered two trolleys, rolls of carpet and several traffic cones and tyres, all before coffee time.

Team 4: Balsam bashers

The Watermeads Nature Reserve was full of Himalayan balsam so Theo led a team to track down each plant and pull it out, roots and all. They first tackled balsam along the edge of the river and paths – to ensure these plants wouldn’t seed and spread further downstream. After this, the team bravely ventured into the undergrowth of nettles and brambles to find forests of balsam standing well above their heads.

Team 5: Floating pennywort

Alan was keen to tackle the backwater pond in Watermeads which was full of floating pennywort – a highly invasive aquatic plant which can smother a water body and impede water flow. However, the site was challenging as the water was too deep for our waders. Some creative thinking was called for…

Volunteers used grappling hooks and rakes to pull in pennywort from the banks. It was a strange sight to see – volunteers lassoing hooks across the pond in the hope of snagging a large raft of pennywort. They quickly cleared one side of the bank and were in need of support to reach the other side.

Two lucky volunteers stepped up and got into a boat. Using very, very small paddles, they freed pennywort from the other side and used grappling hooks to tow the rafts back to the bank. A true example of team work.

Meanwhile, Alan wanted to be sure the pennywort wasn’t spreading any further downstream. With the help of Dave, they created a barrier at the end of the pond to catch any straying bits of pennywort, containing the invasive in one place.

It was a very busy day but we achieved so much in just four hours! So a BIG thank you to all our volunteers who came and we look forward to seeing you at the next one on July 12^thin Hackbridge – details to follow soon!

So what did we find? 1 baseball bat, 1 old hairdryer, 1 fire extinguisher, 1 Hindu statue, 1 shovel head, 2 carpets, 4 footballs (including 1 Finding Nemo football, so glad we found him), 3 traffic cones, 3 trolleys, 5 plastic guttering poles, 11 tyres, piles of wood and metal sheets, many bags of other miscellaneous rubbish, piles and piles of Himalayan balsam and even larger piles of floating pennywort!

Huge thanks to everyone who helped pack up van after the event, Sally and Ann for catering for our volunteers (carrot cake and cheese scones were delicious!), Jackie for supervising the Event Tent, Theo, Sally and Alan for helping supervise everyone on the day, National Trust for letting us loose in Watermeads Nature Reserve and the Waste Management Team at Sutton Council for organising collection of all the rubbish the next day.

Thank you to all our volunteers for coming: Aaron, AJ, Amarapuspa, Ann, Barry, Carol, Charles, Daniel B, Dave J, Dave W, David, Dennis, Derek, Ed, Felix, Harrison, Henry, Ian, Jackie, James W, Jane, Joe, John L, John N, Kas, Keith S, Marta, Marion, Mark, Nicholas, Nick H, Nick W, Per, Richard, Rose, Sally, Sue, Tara, Theo and Thomas C.

So what did I learn from this month’s cleanup? That you have to be very creative when tackling pennywort in a pond too deep to wade!

New job at SERT delivering river restoration!

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A new opportunity has opened up to work with us in physical river restoration and delivery of catchment wide enhancements.

The scope of the position has now been expanded to allow applications at both Project Officer or Senior Project Officer level.

The job description can be found here: JobDescription_ProjectsOfficerSeniorProjectsOfficer_RR

And the application form here:Application_ProjectsOfficerOrSeniorProjectsOfficerRiverRestoration

To apply, please send your completed application form, together with a copy of your CV (2 pages max.) to jobs@southeastriverstrust.org before 9am on Tuesday 30th June 2015. Interviews will be held on Friday 3rd July. Second interviews, if held, will be on Wednesday 8th July 2015.

Could you be our new Catchment Manager?

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This position is now closed.

We’re looking for an enthusiastic, natural leader with a good level of knowledge of river and catchment enhancement techniques. The role will support new and existing partnerships across the South East Rivers Trust area, bringing people and organisations together to identify and discuss catchment issues and develop projects to tackle them.

Further details can be found here: CatchmentManager_JobDescription; and an application form here: CatchmentManagerApplication. If you would like to apply, please submit your CV (2 pages maximum) together with a completed application form by 12 noon on Thursday 4th June 2015.

Wandle cleanup: May 2015: Merton

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The one with 20 oranges…

The sun was shining in all its glory for our May cleanup at North Road in Wimbledon. We had 38 volunteers join us for this month’s cleanup which was supported by the Living Wandle Landscape Partnership funded by the National Lottery’s Heritage Lottery Fund.

I started the cleanup with a quick talk on misconnections on the River Wandle. Most houses are served by two separate sewage systems, one for rainwater and one for waste water which is sent to the sewage treatment works. A misconnection is where an appliance such as the washing machine has been connected to the wrong sewage system, meaning untreated waste water is being discharged into the river instead of going to the sewage treatment works.

It is estimated that 300, 000 properties are currently misconnected in the Thames Catchment – a lot of unwanted pollution entering our rivers. In the summer there tends to be less rainfall meaning that misconnections are easier to spot in the river. We have volunteers hunting these down for us. To find out more about misconnections and to check your property, visit the Connect Right website.

The cleanup got underway after this, dividing into our usual teams with waders and their bank support, and litter pickers. Knowing there were lower rubbish levels (thanks to some of our recent cleanups in this area!) our wading team took a long walk down the bank before getting into the river. Meanwhile our litter pickers dispersed across Wandle Meadow Park and the nearby areas.

We immediately started finding all sorts in the rivers: tyres, traffic cones, beer cans and bottles. We even found an orange which we all found rather amusing. However, only half an hour later our orange count had gone up to 17 – something we didn’t see coming!

It wasn’t long until I received my first present from our waders in the form of a toy car and what we believe to be a snail flower pot.

Our litter pickers were also incredibly busy having discovered the aftermath of a confetti cannon – hundreds of gold bits of foil scattered in the park. A painfully slow job but they managed to pick it all up!

By lunchtime we were all very hot and welcomed a glass of squash and a piece of cake, kindly baked for us by Sally and Ann.

After lunch everyone got back to work and we moved even further up the river, under North Road bridge. Here a trolley was discovered – a classic Wandle find.

We also found an oil drum..

A huge and cumbersome piece of metal

And here is the final rubbish pile…

So a BIG thank you to all our volunteers who came and we look forward to seeing you at the next one on June 14^th!

So what did we find? 1 mattress, 1 toy soldier, 1 snail flowerpot, 1 toy car, 1 shopping basket, 1 bike, 1 iron, 1 carpet, 1 for sale sign, 1 bra, 1 quilt, 1 basketball hoop, 1 hoover head, 1 trolley, 5 traffic cones, 11 tyres, 20 oranges and 35 bags of other rubbish!

Huge thanks to everyone who helped pack up van after the event, Sally and Ann for catering for our volunteers, Wally and Lawrence for helping supervise everyone on the day and the Waste Management Team at Merton Council for organising collection of all the rubbish the next day.

Thank you to all our volunteers for coming: Aaron G, Aaron P, Ann, Bella, Charles Chris, Daniel, Dave, David H, Dennis, Derek, Felix, Gary, Ged, Gemma, Ian, Joe, John, Julia, Keith, Ken, Lawrence, Luke, Margie, Matylda, Oliver, Patrick, Penny, Per, Peter, Richard, Rob, Rose, Sally, Stella, Stewart, Theo and Wally.

So what did I learn from this month’s cleanup? That it is easy to get sunburnt when supervising from the bridge!