For our May cleanup we headed to Plough Lane in Merton.

We started off the day with the usual Welcome Talk and Health & Safety briefing. For the first time this year we were lucky to have lovely sunny weather, so everyone was very eager to crack on with wading and litter picking around the banks.

We had another amazing turnout this month, with 49 volunteers getting stuck in cleaning the river. Initially the site seemed fairly clean, but once we got in the river it was shocking to see how much was embedded into the river bed.

The riverbanks were very clean, so the morning mainly consisted of removing rubbish from the river itself. This site was particularly bad for wet wipes and cloth trapped in the riverbed and surrounding vegetation. We had to work as a team to get the rubbish up from the river (we channelled our inner superman/ninja turtle).

We stopped for lunch around 1 o’clock and were all hurrying to get a piece of the lovely lemon drizzle cake made by Jackie – huge thank you for this, it was delicious!

After lunch we did a second sweep of the river and found even more cloth tangled in the riverbed. There was still so much rubbish to find, so we went all the way through until 3 o’clock when we finally decided to call it a day.

Here is the final rubbish pile.

So what did we find? 12 tyres, a trolley, a scooter, a bed frame, some socks, a traffic cone, a skateboard, various parts of a car, two large bones, a carpet, two barriers, superman, ninja turtle, various toys, a bike, huge amounts of wet wipes and other cloth, and as always lots of bottles, cans and plastic bags. 

Finally, we would like to say a massive thank you to the Robins & Day Vauxhall show room, for letting us use their toilet and also offering teas and coffees!

Lucy and Jo

Huge thanks to everyone who helped pack up the van at the end of the event, Dave for supervising the Event Tent, Big Yellow Wandsworth for providing free storage space for our equipment,Merton Council for organising collection of all the rubbish and of course to our funders, The National Lottery Community Fund!

Thank you to all our volunteers for coming: Mike, Suzanne, Charles, Sheila, Bev, Sally, Derek, Aaron, Claire, David, Caroline, Ian, Joe, Neil, Simon, Dave, Luke, Lynda, Steve, Joanne, Elizabeth, Chris, William, Guy, Paul, Alfie, Beau, Steve, David, Per, Nick, Andy, Margaret, Rob, Suzanne, Steve, Martin, Indi, Linda, Davina, Aria, Phil, Kate, Estelle, Will and Jamie.