Exmouth pollution mentioned again in a national newspaper. – Owl

“No family should go through this,” said Alice Clarke after her seven-year daughter, Willow, fell ill after swimming last summer at Carlyon Bay, Cornwall. Willow was ill for 12 days, vomiting, unable to keep food down and losing weight.

Adam Vaughan www.thetimes.com

The parasite cryptosporidium was eventually concluded to be the cause. “It was terrifying. Willow thought she was going to die,” said Clarke, a teaching assistant from Devon.

Willow, who recovered, was not alone in 2025. More than 1,200 people became sick after swimming in designated bathing waters across England last year, despite three quarters of those official swimming spots being rated “good” or “excellent”.

The figures, reported to the charity Surfers Against Sewage (SAS), showed Exmouth in Devon accounted for 192 cases of sickness after people had been in the water. Though the water quality was rated excellent when regulators undertook official tests during the summer, other research has found Exmouth can drop to poor during the winter months.

Hove Lawns in East Sussex and Polzeath in Cornwall also featured highly despite both being classed as excellent, having 103 and 102 sickness reports respectively.

Analysis by SAS of data from water company sewage spill maps suggests they dumped raw sewage into bathing waters across England for almost 125,000 hours last year despite dry conditions.

As the full maps only went online in late 2024, it is impossible to compare with previous years. However, demonstrating how wet it has been recently, sewage has already been spilled for 46,141 hours in 2026, less than two months into the year.

A “fountain of filth”, a temporary art installation featuring figures based on real people with cloudy water pouring from their mouths, has opened next to the Thames. Paid for by Channel 4 to promote its new fact-based water pollution drama Dirty Business, the fountain includes models based on the surfer Lizzie Cresswell and the Save Windermere campaigner Matt Staniek.

The Fountain of Filth JAMES VEYSEY/SHUTTERSTOCK

Cresswell, an SAS activist who said she had become ill several times after surfing, said she had done “lots of poses throwing up” for the 3D scan of her that was turned into the statue. “I’ve had eye infections, ear infections. It is horrific that we’re doing the things that we love doing and I’ve been sick multiple times.”

Staniek, who brought week 120 of his Greta Thunberg-style sewage strike to London on Monday, said: “It’s about bringing England’s largest lake into the fold and demonstrating to people that if it’s happening to Windermere in a Unesco World Heritage Site and a national park, then no river is safe from this.”

Jonathan Kneebone, director of the Glue Society art collective, who designed the fountain, said that the bronze-like statues of people were printed as hollow sections like “bits of macaroni”. The structure, on the Southbank in London, took three months to build but will be taken down in three days. “I love the fact that it feels like public art that should be here all the time,” Kneebone said.

Suzi Finlayson, a 47-year old swimmer from Bognor Regis, had travelled up to see the art installation. Like several other swimmers at the end of 2023, she fell ill at Aldwick beach in Sussex after swimming. She suffered a bacterial infection that reached one of her heart valves, requiring open heart surgery and leaving her reliant on weekly blood tests to this day.

“I’m still living with the consequences of that and something needs to be done about the public impact of what this sewage dumping is doing,” said Finlayson, who has reluctantly given up sea swimming.

Separately on Monday, Yorkshire Water was ordered by Derby crown court to pay a £733,333 fine for polluting a stream three times in less than 12 months. An Environment Agency investigation found several releases of untreated sewage had killed fish and insects along a waterway in Poolsbrook Country Park, near Chesterfield, during 2018 and 2019.

A spokesman for the industry body Water UK said: “Sewage spills are awful and we are working to end them as fast as we physically can. That’s why we are tripling investment over the next five years to halve spills from storm overflows and upgrade the capacity of 1,700 wastewater treatment works.”

The Times Clean it Up campaign is calling for better regulation and investment to safeguard the nation’s rivers and seas.